I want to start this review by saying that this website mainly makes it’s money through SEO and because I know about the steps necessary to get results with this particular way of online marketing, it was interesting to compare what I know about SEO to what I saw in SERP Shaker.
Ultimately, I won’t recommend the SERP Shaker program because I believe it carries a lot of risks for any site that uses it for SEO and this will be explained shortly.
Quick Report:
Name: SERP Shaker.
Price: $127 (potential up-sells).
Overall Rating: 3 out of 10 stars.
SERP Shaker provides an interesting spin on an SEO approach I don’t really endorse, but see potential in. I want to explain what you can expect from using this program. Basically use caution. I don’t see long term potential in this.
SERP Shaker in a nutshell:
Overall, it’s a WP plugin that helps create posts and mini sites (micro niche pages sort of) with special built in templates to make it look “good”.
You can use those sites to link back to a main site and/or advertise the mini websites themselves to do things such as generate revenue by putting ads on the sites, promote businesses, collect email lists, and other things I’ll get into in detail.
Now that I’ve given the basic explanation, let me go into the possibilities of using this software. where it can be good and where it can also be bad.
The potential pros/cons of using SERP Shaker:
Potential 1:
You can create mini websites and target specific geographical locations like cities and particular business to promote them.
Pros:
- This allows you to make quick websites.
- The keywords targeted with specific geographical areas are usually very low competition phrases meaning they’ll likely rank high.
- You can get organic traffic from using this and promote businesses to earn money.
Cons:
- From what I saw, the sites that are generated are duplicates and this can have detrimental SEO side effects because of duplicate content.
Potential 2:
You can use the websites generated to earn revenue in various ways.
Pros:
- We’re talking advertising on the site (CPA offers, collecting email lists, posting ads on the site itself, Adsense, ect…). Since the sites are targeting low competition keywords, they can rank high, get a lot of visitors (this is an accumulation) and this can lead to profitable campaigns.
Cons:
- I really believe sooner or later sites that use these methods of SEO are going to get penalized by Google, thereby forcing you to start from a fresh new site. I see a lot of what SERP Rank does as being black hat and I never see long term results in this.
Potential 3:
You can “Silo” websites. This is actually a legit way to do SEO (learn about silo sites here).
Pros:
Since this plug in can create mini websites, another feature that is available is linking these sites to another. You can technically use this approach to create “backlinks” to your main site.
Cons:
While using the silo approach can have good SEO benefits, I strongly believe that because this program uses methods I do not find to have long term benefits, that this may having a negative impact on the site. To those who are new to the concept of making a silo website, I’ve written up a whole explanation on how to build a silo website.
Potential 4:
Can automatically spin content to give a unique version to new visitors. Now I did say earlier that the sites you can create are basically duplicates.
But there is a spinning aspect of this program that allows the creator to change the content on the site/s so when someone visits it, they get a new version of it. This is also used to make the spiders from Google who visit your site think that you have unique quality content each time.
Pros:
- In my opinion, there is nothing positive about this.
Cons:
- Spinning content in my opinion is very bad for SEO. You’re basically trying to make Google think you have unique content, but you really don’t. I don’t like any approach to SEO which entails trying to trick Google. It will fail.
Potential 5:
You can sell your sites for big money. One of the things I saw was that once you had websites generating money, you can then sell them to someone and earn a lot for it. Can this really work?
Pros:
- Yes, you can make money selling your site/s, but I’m going to negate this pro because I feel the con overshadows it completely.
Cons:
I believe the websites this program generates are sooner or later going to get penalized by Google and I don’t believe it’s ethically right to sell a website which is doomed to fail because it uses methods I don’t believe in for any amount of money to other people.
A lot of people will buy websites they see are making money, ignoring or perhaps not even understanding how that website got there in the first place. A lot of websites use methods that work short term, but fail in the long run and what SERP Shaker does is something I believe will sooner or later fail, especially with all the updates Google goes through every year.
If you’re going to use this program, I wouldn’t recommend selling the site, not because it won’t make money, but because I feel it’s wrong to do this in general.
There are more things you can do with this program, but these 5 are probably the most important.
Final Rating: SERP Shaker
Yellow Light (Caution)
3 stars out of 10. There are a lot of possibilities with this program, but most if not all of it is dwarfed in my opinion by what will eventually happen and that is the site/s getting Google slapped. I believe in much better approaches to doing SEO and online business and Wealthy Affiliate in my opinion (and actual experience) teaches both these things correctly.
My final thoughts:
Usually I give programs which use spinners and/or any other type of black hat techniques a red flag. The only reason I gave this another star was because there really are a lot of possibilities with using this system.
It does hit upon very important things like targeting micro niches such as small cities and businesses within them from which you can make good money. But instead of using this program, you can also do this on your own while doing important things for SEO such as providing high quality content and helping people.
More proof that I know about SEO and that Wealthy Affiliate taught it to me correctly:
Sure it’s going to take a lot longer see results, not to mention a lot of work, but at least you won’t have to worry about your site falling of the SERPS or worse getting de-indexed.
Overall, I don’t believe what SERP Shaker does to be a good way to do online business and that’s my opinion.
We’re now over 4 years since you’re original review here, Vitaliy, and not only is SERP Shaker still going strong, but there are other mass page builders that many people are using to make money online. Do you still believe that all sites using this type of software will fail ‘soon’? Or would you revise your original opinion? In my own opinion, the problem isn’t the software that is being used, but the way it’s being used and the end product when people take the lazy route and churn out low quality sites.
Hi Earl, I took a look at SERP Shaker’s sales page once more to be sure and I did not see any changes since the last time I checked out this program, and with that, I assume the program is still the same as it was when I first reviewed it.
There’s a few things I want to clarify, which basically all point back to my original opinion of SERP Shaker being risky to use and here they are:
1) SERP Shaker is still around, but it doesn’t mean it’s still good. There’s still plenty of dead programs and outdated, low quality ones which run on auto pilot, but their presence and availability does not indicate that their quality increased. In fact, in my personal experience, rarely do programs in the make money online world ever evolve.
There’s a few exceptions like the Wealthy Affiliate system, but other than that, I don’t see it happen often.
2) There are indeed a number of different page builders, but we have to be more specific here. WordPress is a page builder too if you think about it. My issue is with page builders that “create content” for you. Those are the riskiest ones to use because they are duplicated from somewhere and already bound to fail in Google due to duplicate content. It is always best to create a fresh website and do it yourself.
Sure you can make plenty of different websites, there’s nothing wrong with that, but the content you fill them up with has to be good and made by yourself or via someone you pay for it, that also makes it unique.
So overall, as long as SERP Shaker is still doing the same thing I warned about years ago, my opinion of it has not changed and in regards to Google’s point of view, I think with the 4 years since this program was around, they became even better at spotting any site that uses programs like this and penalizes them. In other words, the risk is even higher for SEO than before in my opinion.
There’s also a new ‘version’ that doesn’t do the spinning, but spinning is easy enough to incorporate into. It’s called Source Flood. It’s one of Beckers products. It just duplicates pages and changes out whichever word you use in brackets for a list of terms.
It is being used in a few different sites that are ranking very well, some affiliate stuff, where the brackets term is put into code for travel arrangements, or searches for real estate through different API. This type of thing is still strong.
It is not strong long term Alan, it only tricks search engines for a short while before they catch on. To me, the people who make these things are just trying to evolve the same black hat stuff that Google will always be against. All of the sites that use this or anything like it will suffer in the SERPS.
A SERP Shaker website built by a lead gen service my client hired has sent over 1.7 million backlinks during the past year to my client’s money website. It destroyed his rankings and traffic. In just the past 8 days, an additional 60,000 backlinks from only 4 domains showed up in his Google Search Console. We’re probably going to get a manual penalty because of this. And I cannot figure out how to stop it because I have no access to the SERP Shaker websites.
Sorry to hear Chad, but this maybe one of those cons I talked about. Mass backlinks coming back to one site or several may absolutely cause a penalty from Google. What you can try doing is disavowing the incoming links to the site you are worried about. You can do this through webmaster tools, but to get ALL of the links, you’d need some sort of program to be able to list them all.
I believe there is a program that can handle this automatically, called Penguin Recovery Jeet, but be careful with it. I have not used it but disavowing would be the place to start. Also make sure to find the source of all incoming links whether it’s some sort of software or person and have them discontinue sending links.
In this review… you don’t really know what Serp Shaker does, how to use it, etc… Just content added to your site to make it sound like an unbiased review. You may find that it is responsible for over $1mil in affiliate/lead gen income in just the past 1.5years alone. That it has been used since 2010. 😉 Also that a large number of people have been making money with it and it’s predecessor since 2011. Doesn’t sound like it is likely to die anytime soon. (Don – One of the creators of Serp Shaker)
If it’s doing all of that good stuff, then congratulations Don and I wish you well, I mean it. But it’s tough for me to believe these things with how SEO has changed in the past few years. You did disagree with my review, that’s cool, but where exactly was I wrong? Let me know and if it turns out I was indeed incorrect, I’ll change things up and even give it a positive rating.