Are monthly one-way subscription link building programs worth using?

• Have you any info on Jonathon Leger's One Way Links program? http://1waylinks.net/? Is this an effective system and how exactly does it work? At only $47/mo. I'm inclined to try it just because it's pretty low-cost.

Answer: Personally, we do not currently use the service, nor do we have any feedback from past/current customers. But we have reviewed the program material on the website and kicked the tires a little bit ourselves and in a nutshell...you get what you pay for.

Leger's system works by having users add Wordpress blogs to a network which then publishes posts (containing your links) on all the other blogs in the network. As long as you agree to publish the posts of other users on your blog, you can in turn publish your posts on their blogs.

Unfortunately, the problems with this link building approach are numerous:

• The vast majority of the blogs have no PageRank or accumulated authority. This means that most achieved new links will be low-quality in nature. Some may not get cached by Google, ever.
• Suddenly building in hundreds of links in a month when you previously didn't have many links to begin with is not smart SEO. We always recommend you build in new links monthly at a rate equal to or less than 10% of your current backlink profile.
• Republishing the same post multiple times (all with the same embedded anchor texts) across hundreds of the same blogs is not a link building best practice. You also run into duplicate content issues when Google sees the same content across multiple blogs.
• Using any sort of automated link building system to generate links ad nausea is not a good use of your time. Link building is a marathon, not a sprint.

Of the above, by far the most glaring deficiency with this service is the duplicate content issue which Leger appears to readily embrace and o...