i received a discounted review copy in the last thread, but didn't get a chance to leave my review because i asked for a drip and the thread closed. so here goes. keep in mind that i don't say good things about a service just because i get a freebie or a discount.
communication 5/5: responded to a pm promptly. didn't need any comms beyond that and that's good - we outsource because we're time poor, having to spend time on comms makes outsourcing a less attractive proposition in exponential direct proportion to the time involved.
speed 5/5: i ordered a drip, so that took some time obviously. given the drip period, the tat was perfectly reasonable for this amount of links.
quality 4.5/5: mrjuve lands his tier1 links on jcow and elgg, which i like for a number of reasons - they're not frequently spammed platforms and jcow is paid software, so the sites running it have at least a bit of investment behind them. tier1 was massively overdelivered, which is good because a non-negligible amount of posts ended up removed or behind logins. all in all, a check with sb counted 193 properties with links found. with a random sample manual review, a few turned out to have malformed anchors. those two issues are the only reason it's not a straight 5/5. with that said, 102 properties are already indexed and that is a very impressive indexing rate. what people don't realize is that it doesn't matter how many properties were delivered - how many were crawled is what counts at a minimum and having them indexed is better still. an indexing rate like this is also a very good indication of the juice behind tier1. haven't checked the other tiers in detail because i don't need to - the indexing rate of tier1 is a sufficient indicator.
results N/A: i was throwing a lot of stuff at the site and wasn't tracking the individual impact of specific packages. with that said, i know when the package started and i definitely saw it hit. i'm certain the results would have been impressive had i been tracking it and had i made less emphasis on diversity and generic/brand anchors.
value 5/5: this would be very good value even at full price. if you think otherwise, you either don't know how to value a service or have too much time on your hands.
overall 4.75/5: it's a fact that although i've reviewed a lot of services positively because they meet or exceed industry standards at a decent pricepoint, i don't always (or even often) order them again after reviewing for a variety of reasons. it is the highest of recommendations then that i can confidently say (provided the tier1 props stick after a bit) that i intend to order this service again even for sites that are on a considerably smaller budget than the one i tested it on.
-p
