I have talked about TNX before in what it seemed like a praise of them. Its been six months already since I first tried them out and I have used them extensively all this period and I have drawn some conclusions which I would like to share with you guys.
The system in theory is pretty effective but in practice it has many pitfalls. First of all for those that don't know TNX let me just say its an easy way to get one way backlinks to your site. Of course there is a price to pay for this. You create your ad campaign, you choose what types of sites you want it appearing on and then you can potentially get thousands of backlinks withing days. So far so good.
In my experiments with TNX this my conclusions:
Not clear backlink benefits
I have tried to get links from relevant sites (chose themes/categories specific to my site's theme) in order to get the maximum benefit. After trying it for 6 months its still not clear to me if there were ANY benefits with ANY of the ad campaigns that I did. I am not drawing a definite conclusion here since this was not a controlled experiment and I was actually trying to get cheap links from PR0 pages. Thus, other people might have actually got good results with TNX and high PR links.
Google can probably detect irrelevant links
I have also tried selling links through this system. I tried this with one site on which I had it on for about 2 months. The links that were appearing on the ad spaces were more often than not irrelevant (not same category as my site). Google probably took notice of those links and penalized my site with PR drop from 4 to 0. But that had also a snowball effect on the money that I was getting for each link sold on the site. PR4 links were worth more than the PR0 links. Thus I decided to stop selling links using TNX. Another side effect of this drop was the unwillingness of other webmasters of exchanging links with me (because of the PR0).
If the system would not allow links to irrelevant sites than this probably would have been avoided and maybe this is something that the developers of TNX should take into consideration for their next update.
You could be charged for links dropped
I recently was doing a back check on some of the links that I "gained" 3 months ago and discovered that most of them were reported "by the system" as "NOT FOUND". After a brief discussion with the support of TNX I realized that EVERYONE has to manually visit each campaign and DELETE the links that are reported "NOT FOUND". Here is the part of the relevant discussion.
Why am I being charged for links
This is clearly something that the system ought to be able to do on its own. It would be a full time job otherwise if one had anything more than 1000 links with TNX, and had to continuously check if the links that were acquired automatically HAD to be CHECKED manually for their EXISTENCE.
Those are the major reasons that have convinced me that TNX was no more for me.
Have you guys had any experience with TNX ? What did you think of the system ?? Any successes ?
