I have used SocialAdr for several years now, and for most of that time, it was a reasonably good way to get backlinks that noticeably improved traffic to my various sites — and boosted sales. It is basically a link-sharing service that is organized in a way that is fairly clever. It has several users who trade “bookmarks” in a way that looks reasonably natural to the search engines. The users with free accounts provided most of the effort needed to make the site run, allowing the owners to make money from the paid accounts without putting in a lot of effort themselves. That worked pretty well for everyone involved. Like I said, it was fairly clever.
However, that seems to have changed. BTW, the image at the top left contains an affiliate link, but I no longer recommend SocialAdr.
The performance (speed, mostly) of SocialAdr was never all that great. However, I discovered that I could have multiple (free) accounts, and run them independently if I ran instances in different browsers. I have six different browsers that I can run, but about the best overall efficiency that I got was by using three of them (with an open scratch file to note my progress in my eight accounts).
I never signed up for a paid/premium account, and did not strongly recommend the paid/premium account to anyone. I would occasionally publish an affiliate link, but I didn’t really put much effort into promoting it. I did find the one-time fee to set up several “bookmarking” accounts to be worth the small amount they charged (about $12 when I started out — probably more now). The free accounts gave you a lot more control over what got posted to your “bookmarking” sites, which could include the likes of Twitter and LinkedIn, so that you could avoid posting junk that you did not like for whatever reason.
So, while SocialAdr was a bit of a time-sink except for the time I got my Philippina GVA to do it for me, I felt that it was time reasonably well spent.
Then, about two months ago (roughly the beginning of July 2019), I noticed some changes. The first was that the performance of the SocialAdr.com site was getting worse, and it was taking longer and longer for me to complete my daily maintenance. Another change was the increase in the percentage of very low-quality bookmarks, such as entries for sex toys, porn sites, tobacco products, and other things that I did not want on my bookmarking sites — especially not on my Twitter accounts. Then, I started noticing that I would occasionally not get any Twitter bookmarks at all (I generally prefer Twitter entries because they earn more “credits”).
About three weeks ago, the performance abruptly got much worse, and the percentage of objectionable junk bookmarks went way up. I started seeing the CloudFlare timeout message one almost every account, usually when I would try to access the “quick share” feature.
This was annoying, but I persisted in using the site because I had a lot of links I wanted to promote. I started to have to spend several sessions spread out over the day to get all of the permitted credits on each account. Even so, I would occasionally just run out of my allotted time to work on backlinking.
About a week ago, it got even worse. In addition to the occasional CloudFlare timeout error, I started seeing messages like this:
…several times a session when trying to navigate the site. I sent a support request to the site owner, which was never acknowledged. The thing that made things bad enough to inspire the writing of this article was that there were often too few reasonably good-quality bookmarks available to allow me to get the maximum permitted credits. Sometimes there would be fewer than five total bookmarks available, and all of those would be crap that I did not want to appear on my own bookmarking sites. The quality of the service has simply dropped too low to be worth the time I spend on it — and I’m not interested in getting a paid account, because I would have to give up control over the crap that would get posted to my own bookmarking accounts.
At this point, I have pretty much given up on SocialAdr. My current plan is to simply use up the credits I’ve already accrued, then abandon the service. I’m actively looking for a good replacement.
I’ve even considered offering a similar service myself. However, I strongly suspect that the reason SocialAdr is failing is that the business model is no longer relevant (as evidenced by the dramatic increase in crappy bookmarks) — and if that is the case, I don’t really want to be in that market unless I can come up with something that is substantially better. I can just picture that as a way to lose a lot of money while simultaneously getting all of my available time sucked away.
