In the next few weeks AutomaticBacklinks.com will switch from using Google PageRank as a metric for determining the quality and price of a backlink to using mozRank by SEOmoz.

Why we are abandoning PageRank
For a long time it has been common knowledge that PageRank is not a very good or trustworthy metric for quality even Google agrees.

Additionally PageRank has never been made publicly available by Google except for in browser toolbars, so for us to get the PageRank of a particular page we have to pretend to be a browser toolbar and send a fake request to google. As Automatic Backlinks has grown, we have been sending tens of thousands of these requests on a daily basis and Google quickly detected that we were no ordinary browser toolbar and blocked our servers, even as we added more and more. Lately it appears that Google have started replying to these requests with a 0 instead of the usual ‘#blocked’ message meaning that we incorrectly marked pages as having a PageRank 0.

A final reason for the change is that we do not like to send requests to google with the URL of every page in our system. It gives them an opportunity to detect our network and this is a risk we feel we can no longer take.

Why we have chosen mozRank
mozRank is a metric quite similar to PageRank as it is a score from 0 to 10 on a logarithmic scale. In fact our preliminary tests show that mozRank and PageRank seem to follow each other quite closely. The number is calculated for using the metrics of 9,200,000,000 links on 400,000,000 pages.

Additionally, the clever people over at SEOmoz have made an API available that makes getting the mozRank of a page a very simple task which means we finally have a reliable, accurate and up to date method of determining the quality (and thus price) of a backlink.

What does it mean for our members?
We have decided to go with a rolling launch of this new system which means that we have already started adding pages with a mozRank of 1 or above. We expect that we will start adding links to pages using a price calculated from their mozRank (as opposed to their PageRank) as early as next week. Existing links added using PageRank as the price metric will remain calculated using the “old method” in a transition period of some months. This is to avoid large fluctuations in our members’ Link Credit balance.

Some members will have noticed that they will now have both a www and non www entry (and possibly other subdomains) of their sites in the dashboard. This is because Google does not distinguish between the two versions, however SEOmoz does. We encourage members to create a redirect from the non www to the www version of the site (or vice versa). This is a best practice SEO technique anyway and it will mean that the mozRank will all be on the same subdomain. Members are also welcome to activate the additional site, although we will not place links on it unless it has any mozRank.

We recently decided to remove the 30-day limit for rejecting links hosted on your site’s pages. Previously, to encourage permanency, we imposed a 1 month time limit within which to reject a link after it was placed on your page. We found that this inconvenienced users who did not log in to check their links very frequently. Thus, we are happy to announce that this limit has now been removed and you can now reject links no matter how old they are.

At Automatic Backlinks we are constantly working to make it easier for you to freely exchange links on your web sites and get them ranked faster. This is why we are proud to announce that just a few hours after the release of Joomla 1.6 and less than a week after the release of Drupal 7, we have released officially supported native modules for both of these platforms.

You can download the modules from the Link Display Codes section of your account dashboard and install them just like you would any other module for the CMS of your choice.

Please note that these modules are not compatible with their respective predecessors. Don’t worry if you’re not planning to upgrade any time soon – we will continue to support previous versions of all modules for as long as they continue to be supported and as long as they continue to be used by our users.

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed some slight changes to your campaigns column of the Dashboard recently. We now show you how many pages and sites you have rejected on each campaign. In addition to that, we’ve also added a button that lets you reset the rejection history per campaign. This is great for those who are not finding link partners due to having rejected many pages previously.

To make room for this new information, we have removed the old label that showed the campaign’s budget and integrated it into the main label that shows the amount of Link Credit spent on the campaign. We think this makes more sense, and should be easy to understand.

Here’s a screenshot of the new layout:

As usual, we appreciate and welcome your feedback!

Edit:We’ve disabled this feature temporarily, as power users were sometimes getting slow load times on their dashboard. We are investigating.

We’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently, but that’s because we’re hard at work on some great new features that we’d love to tell you about.

Quality Score

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve added little rollover labels to both site pages and backlinks. For those of you that haven’t, here’s what they look like:

What is it?

Good question. In order to give our users more flexibility when acquiring backlinks, we have developed an algorithm for calculating the overall quality of a page in the system. It’s still in BETA at the moment, but the calculation is made by taking a few factors into account, including the number of outgoing links on the page (not just Automatic Backlinks ones), the number of times the page has been rejected and more.

How will it affect me?

At the moment, we are displaying the score purely for informational purposes. Page owners can get an idea of how their pages rank for quality, and campaign owners can now make better decisions when reviewing their backlinks. Please note that we’re still tweaking the Quality Score, so don’t take the numbers too literally just yet!

What will you use it for?

Once we’ve got the Quality Score algorithm nailed down, we’ll be putting it to use to adjust the actual Link Credit value of pages and backlinks. Up until now, our only metric for valuing the price of a link has been its PageRank score. Quality Score will change this, enabling campaign owners to get the most out of their Link Credit, while at the same time rewarding page owners who add high quality pages with more Link Credit.

This will also serve to increase the overall quality of Automatic Backlinks by giving page owners a great incentive to acheive a higher score for their pages.

We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on Quality Score. Let us know in the comments!

This is just a very brief post, guys! We’d like to take a moment to introduce Helen, the newest member of our team who will be providing tier 1 and 2 support for our growing army of users. Chris will still be on hand to deal with your problems as well.

The idea for Automatic Backlinks was born out of frustration trying to manually find link partners.

At the time we were working for a client trying to get their site ranked for particular keywords. Even though we were outsourcing the work to India it was painfully slow and painfully obvious that the effort put in was nowhere worth the reward: a reciprocal PageRank 0 link inside someone’s link directory.

The problems with manual link exchange are manifold:

• Reciprocal links are largely ignored by Google (which results in some people resorting to complicated 3 way link schemes)
• You need to monitor that your link partner keeps his end of the bargain
• You almost have to resort to spam in order to find link partners
• It is extremely time consuming
• 99% of all links are PageRank 0 and often considered bad link neighbourhoods

These problems sparked the idea for Automatic Backlinks which solves all of these issues and it seems that Web Masters are realising this as well.

A quick comparison on Google trends shows that searches for “link exchange” are in decline and that searches for “backlinks” are increasing. In fact “backlinks” is now searched for more than “link exchange”. I believe the decline for “link exchange” shows that Web Masters and SEO professionals are realising that traditional manual link exchange simply does not work, but people realise that they need to get “backlinks” somehow if they want to rank so they are now searching for that instead.

We of course welcome this change as we provide what we believe to be the best platform for getting relevant, quality backlinks – all 100% free and automatic. We only provide PageRank 1 or above backlinks so you know that there will be no bad link neighbourhoods. Should you lose a backlink because someone shuts down their site – we will provide you with a different link from one of our more than 10,000 websites automatically.

It is no wonder manual link exchange is a dying trend.

The Drupal module has been updated from 2.3 to 2.4. It now relies more on Drupal’s built-in methods to determine which page is being displayed, whereas before it used the same function from our standard PHP 4+ code. If you are using the Drupal module and for any reason were previously having pages with their URL’s reported incorrectly we recommend you update to the latest version.

The phrase “high quality” can seldom be used to describe automated SEO techniques, which is why we put so much time and effort into making sure that Automatic Backlinks is an exception. Before we started with Automatic Backlinks, the options available to us were either spending hours manually finding people to exchange high quality links with or submitting pages to link directories with little impact on SEO and few human visitors, and usually full of low quality or inappropriate links you may not wish to be associated with.

This is why we concentrated on making a solution focused on time saving and high quality and as from today we are opening up the opportunity for all our users — both free and paying members — to earn unlimited Link Credit from their pages with no minimum subscription amount (replacing the previous limit of 100LC for free members with the ability to unlock by purchasing a minimum subscription of 10LC).

This will lead to those users with many or high value pages being able to add all of them to the system, resulting in more possible places for links to be placed and thus you’ll be more likely to find the perfect link for your site, especially if you are operating in a niche topic or need a link in a less commonly used language.

We have also added a new Alias feature, which detects duplicate content on sites (for example if http://www.example.com/ has the same content as http://example.com/). The system now detects if two host names should be treated as the same and does so accordingly, notifying the owner of the site of its findings so that they can redirect the sites appropriately if necessary to avoid duplicate content penalties. This also means that all the links on the main site will also be displayed on the aliases so that if you previously had your link placed on http://www.example.com/index.html as well as on http://alias.example.com/index.html, your link on alias.example.com will be “refunded” to your Link Credit balance so that it can be placed on another site. This feature is currently enabled, but will take a while to detect all the aliased sites so please be patient whilst we update all the pages.

For a long time we’ve been receiving emails from active members who asked when we were going to create an affiliate scheme they could join. Well, we answered the call, and today we are launching the Automatic Backlinks Affiliate Program.

Ease of use was an important factor for us, so we decided to use the excellent Post Affiliate Pro software. As an affiliate, it gives you complete control and is as feature complete as it gets! Anyway, on to the important stuff…

As an affiliate, we’re offering you a whopping 20% recurring commission on every subscription your referred visitors take out. We have a very high conversion rate, and our average subscription is $46/month. Put another way, if you were sending us around 1000 visitors per month, you’d likely be earning more then $400/month after around a year. What’s more, our affiliate links never expire, so you still get commission no matter how long ago the visitor clicked on your link.

More details and info can be found here and for those who are eager to sign up already, here’s the registration page. It’s quick, easy and of course free.