First, a nice tip: insert the keywords you want to rank for in the title, but do it in a way that doesn’t look spammy. Yes, this has been said millions of times before, but it’s amazing how many forget this simple rule. The title above works for spiders AND for humans: it tells them the URL of the site I’m reviewing, in this case uSocial. What if there was a usocial.com site? I bet the users wouldn’t wanna waste their time reading a review of a totally different site with a similar URL.

Now back to uSocial.net Bookmarking Service:

They don’t do what they promise, they don’t reply to emails and overall the service is not worth $47 per month. I didn’t use their other services, which seem to be done manually, but I can say for sure that their automatic bookmarking service sucks.

Here’s the story: I found out about them on John Chow’s site (who doesn’t seem to use their service) and thought I’d give them a try. First, I sent them 3 emails asking them about how are the title, description and tags selected, but got no reply. But seeing as they were reviewed on a few major sites, I thought they just don’t have enough time to answer all emails, so I just went ahead and signed up.

I sent a test email with 2 links to newly written posts. At the same time I sent another email containing the title/description/tags question (I figured they would at least reply to subscribers). And they finally replied: the title/description are taken from the post (the auto-generated excerpt in Wordpress, for example), nothing said about tags. Well, it seems to work like the WP Auto Social Poster plugin.

In about 30 hours, I got an email saying that my links were SENT (not processed or queued, but sent) and a warning that due to system overload, it may take an additional 24 hours to send any remaining links. Next day, I checked about 30 random social bookmarking sites from the list provided on their site and found my post on only 5 of them, all of which were using PHPDugg and were filled with spammy links like viagra, cialis, quick money, etc.

It really looks as if the guys behind uSocial built them specifically for their subscribers’ links, but that’s just my speculation.

I couldn’t find my links on any worthy sites like Propeller, Reddit or Digg (all of which were in their list).

How did I search for my links? First, I entered my domain name in every site’s search box. Usually, this results in a list of all your submitted articles. If I couldn’t find the submitted link this way, I searched for the title of the post. This always shows the submission you are searching for. So it’s pretty much impossible not to find an article that was submitted.

I tried sending more links. I sent 2 emails with 10 links.

Same result: only a handful of sites had my links (randomly checked). Definitely not 180, as they promise. More like 20-40 maximum, and all are filled with stuff you don’t want your site associated with.

After that, I tried contacting them about canceling my subscription, but no one replied. And the agreement says you have to contact them in order to cancel, and they MAY issue a refund. This was no big deal, as I used my secret weapon: Paypal Plug-In (highly recommended, it helps you avoid scams and headaches). I just closed my card. Now they can’t bill me again, ever.

Conclusion: uSocial Bookmarking Service is not worth it. They send the links to a very few number of sites (which are quite crappy themselves). They say they’ll send any amount of links per day/month. Well, maybe if they limited the number to 500 per month, they would get rid of spammers and have more time to actually send worthy articles to all 180 sites (assuming they really have such software).

I definitely DO NOT RECOMMEND them. I’d better use a manual submission service, like Developer-hut, where at least I can check and be sure all links were submitted, even if I have to wait and pay more.