My beef with Link-Vault

[Allaboutfree]

I joined LV April 25, 2005. Here are my comments/ beefs with them. Firstly I want to say that they are a new kid on the block and deserve credit for attempting to create a coop that includes static linking. They will need time to grow. In time to come they may be a real network force. Right now I'm probably pulling out. Here's why:

1) When you reach level 3 referrers you can see all the links that point to you. Many of them simply don't have my link included on the said page or there are shady webmasters redirecting to other pages. In my case I had PR6 page redirecting to a PR0 page. When I posted this on the forum I was told they' re on 7 day warning. WTF...I've seen Shawn become aware of blantant COOP manipulation (Cloaking)...you're out now PERIOD. Here they get a seven day grace period for blantantly abusing the system.

2) I have posted another message to forum admins stating that LOTS (roughly 1/3 of 4500 links) of pages DON'T have my link. I have said that I would be happy to post a detailed list. My vaultage has been consumed based on having these links. The higher the PR of your linkback the more 'vaultage' it costs you. No response to this post for 1 week now

3) I cannot create enough ads to consume my vaultage. It is very time consuming, which is OK and I don't mind if it pays off. But not all links go up, although your vaultage is debitted accordingly.

4) Server is WAY TO SLOW. I don't have time to wait up to 5 minutes for a reply from their server.

5) If their network (server) goes down your pages hang forever. I beleive this has been fixed now. But this was a pain in the ass when it happened.

6) The way they find pages that bear the LV code is by hand (?). So your vaultage is a VERY slow climb. IT increases as they find more pages. Unlike DP COOP which assigns your weight when you join. In my case I have 1 site with 1300 indexed pages with Google all PR ranked from 1-4. I can hardly find links on any of my pages.

7) I get some nice links once in a while...then they're reppoed (repossessed). I have all this vautage and NO way to use it. If I sit down tonight and create 100's of ads all I get is link backs from crap sites. This hardly consumes any vaultage.

I am not sure if this is coincidence or not but I can find 1 link back in Google's index from LV. I have found a few in MSN and Yahoo, but nothing to write home about. It's because they are constantly changing who links to who. Geez they may as well be rotating.