This may seem like a really bad deal, at first glance, but the key is that a system like BuildMyRank puts the emphasis on quality rather than quantity: BMR only has blogs with pagerank (ranging from PR1 to PR6) in their network and they make an effort to get every single post indexed.

Is it worth the trouble writing unique posts (or outsourcing the task) or should you stick to more automated link-building solutions? Read on to find out.

BuildMyRank Overview

Once you’ve subscribed to the BuildMyRank service, you can log in and access their online dashboard. Your link-building campaigns can be organized by domains and projects and you can save specific link and anchor-text combinations for each domain you are promoting.

Check out the following video to get a quick look at what the BuildMyRank user interface looks like:

BuildMyRank Video

Results With BuildMyRank

As I think is apparent from the video, BMR has a very nice and user-friendly interface. What’s far more important however, is whether or not this service is actually useful and there’s only one measure of that: the Google rankings of sites being promoted with BMR.

I picked one of the pages I am running an SEO campaign for and paused all link-building to it. I waited for the rankings of that page to settle and it did so in position number 12. Then, over the course of a few days I built 8 BuildMyRank links to this page (no other link-building was done). The page started moving in the ranking results, then disappeared completely for two days, only to re-emerge in position number 2.

After some more movement, it settled down to position number 4.

So, overall, in this test, a page went from position 12 to position 4 with just 8 links built. Pretty impressive, as this is for a keyword with some SEO savvy competition fighting for the top spot.

I invited my subscribers to test BMR (they offer a free test-run of ten links to their system) and got feedback from a few of them. Here are their results:

Of course, I did not ask anyone to reveal their keywords, so I don’t know about competition strength for the examples above. What’s clear, however, is that BMR does move rank, at least in most cases.

I’ve also tested BMR in conjunction with other link-building methods like blog networks, article submissions etc. The results are positive across the board and every single terms I’ve been using BMR to promote is moving upwards in the SERP. On that note: The page I did my initial experiment on is now in position number 1 for it’s target keyword.

PageRank Distribution

Here’s a screenshot so you can take a closer look at the PR distribution I’ve been getting, so far:

Here’s my only small gripe with BMR: Too many PageRank 1′s and 2′s. The fact that the distribution is random, makes it a bit of a crapshoot. Believe me, on the rare occasion that your post goes to a PR6 blog, you’ll notice! A link from a PR6 blog is probably about 100x more valuable than one from a PR1 blog, so it’s always slightly disappointing when your posts go out to the lower-quality blogs.

Having said that, it’s clear from the outset that the range is PR1 to PR6, so it’s not like anything deceptive is going on here. And even the worst BMR link is still far better than the best links you can get out of many other link-building services, so don’t take this little complaint of mine the wrong way. As you may know, I always have something to nag about.

It’s also important to note that the posts go out to domains with PageRank. The posts themselves won’t have PageRank, of course. But they’ll be getting link-juice from the homepage and they will appear among the new posts on the homepage for a while. On that note:

Conclusion

I wouldn’t use it just on it’s own, but BuildMyRank is currently pretty much my favourite link-building tool. Something that never fails for me is building a large mount of low-quality links (think: bookmarks, blog-network submissions, article directories, profile links,…) and then adding a few high-quality links into the mix. BuildMyRank is a great source for those high-quality links. It shows that they make sure to get as many posts as possible indexed and the automatic bookmarking they do must be passing lots of link-juice into the network, because these links tend to be stronger than expected.

If you can either afford to have someone write posts and submit them to BMR for you or you can take even as little as 30 minutes a day to write a few posts yourself, I’ve no doubt you’ll see great results with BMR. Even better: They offer a free trial for 10 links to their system. So you can sign up, build those 10 links and see for yourself, what you can get out of them.

Click Here to Sign Up for Your Free Trial!

The question is: which ones of the many available networks should you join? Which ones are worth the investment and which ones should you avoid? And of course, the most important question: which networks provide the most and best backlinks?

That’s what we’re going to find out in this roundup review.

Blog Networks in this Review

Here are the candidates that I’m going to compare in this review:

Each of these blog networks are basically the same: you submit articles (usually spun articles) and they get posted out to a whole bunch of blogs in the respective network. I will probably create separate posts with reviews/videos showing the different control-panels and looking at things like user-friendliness for each candidate, but in this post, it’s all about the backlinks!

Test Setup

Let me get one thing out of the way: this test will not be a comparison of ranking results. Even though the ultimate goal is to find the networks that are best at increasing the rankings of your web-pages, it’s not possible to compare the candidates objectively by measuring rankings increases – there are simply too many variables involved, as soon as you compare two different URLs, even if they target the same keyword.

Instead, I will attempt to measure how many backlinks you can get from each of the networks and what the overall quality of the sites in each network is like, as objectively as possible. Here’s an illustration of the test setup:

In the graphic, there are only four blog networks, to save space. In the actual test, a total of eight networks are being compared. I submit 20 highly spun articles to each blog network, each article containing one link. I have also assigned one unique URL to each blog network. What this means is that the 20 article submitted to the first network all contain a link to one specific URL. The 20 articles submitted to the second network all link to a different URL and so on.

I am building no other backlinks and doing no other promotions to any of the unique URLs. The articles will be the same articles submitted to each network, choosing the same categories or categories matching each other as closely as possible. The reason for this is that there are probably certain categories with more matching blogs in a network and other categories with fewer matching blogs. By submitting identical articles to each network, I’m eliminating any unfair bias based on article categories.

Test Criteria

For this experiment, I will monitor the following criteria:

• Number of Publishes
  I’ll keep track of how many articles are officially published to blogs in each network. This gives us an initial idea of which networks provide the most links.
• Number of Links Picked up by ahrefs
  ahrefs is a backlink analysis service. I will be checking in on all the unique URLs to see how many of the published posts are crawled by ahrefs.
• Number of Links Picked up by Majestic
  Majestic SEO is another backlink analysis service, with a different index than ahrefs. I’ll also be measuring how many links are crawled by Majestic, just to get a “second opinion”, so to speak.
• Number of Pings
  The URLs I’ll be promoting are all from WordPress based websites. As another measure of how many links are being built, I will count the number of pingbacks received for each individual URL.
• PageRank (?) of Blogs in the Networks
  Finally, I’ll gather as many of the sites that articles were published to as possible and analyze their link-value. I’ll probably jut check the PageRank of the homepages for each site. Maybe I’ll come up with something else. The point is just to get an idea of how valuable all those links from a network actually are.

This was a long-term test, so below you’ll find data gathered during 90 days after the initial submissions. Some networks do a number of submissions all at once and then stop, others drip out the articles slowly, over time. By keeping track of the links created over a longer period of time, we don’t only see which networks provide the best short-term article “blasts”, but also which networks have the best long-term distribution rates.

Article Directories vs. Blogs

Some of the networks submit articles to both article directories and blogs. There are two major differences between these two types of sites:

1. Resource Boxes
   Article directories generally allow you to post an article without any links, followed by a “resource box” or “author box”, which is where you can add your backlinks. This is a technical detail and I doubt it makes a significant difference whether your links appear in the middle of the content or towards the end.
2. Broad vs. Narrow
   The bigger difference is that article directories usually cover a huge range of topics, while blogs accept articles on a specific topic. Articles are usually sent to all article directories in a network, but only to some blogs in a blog network. This means that you can get more links from one submission, from article directories, but your next article will be posted to the exact same set of sites again. With blogs, each submission might reach different blogs in the network, especially if they are on different topics.

Finally, note that blogs have a better chance to provide quality links than article directories, especially since the Panda update, part of which was a “slap” against article directories. Although, realistically, most sites in a network tend to be very low value. One of the goals of this review is to find out which networks are the best maintained, with the highest quality and highest value sites in them.

Ranking Results (After 30 Days)

First, let me address one simple question, which is: do blog networks work? In other words, are the types of backlinks you get from these networks any good and will they help you get your sites/pages ranked? To answer this question, let’s take a look at the rankings of the eight unique URLs promoted in this roundup. At the beginning of the experiment, none of these pages were ranking within the top 100 spots in Google for their target keywords. Here’s how the rankings progressed over 30 days:

You can see that a few days after the articles were added to each network, each of the pages popped up somewhere in the top 30 for it’s target keyword. Most of the pages maintained an upwards trend ever since, five out of the eight pages in the test reached a top-10 position within 30 days and one page reached the top spot for it’s keyword. Only one page is currently still dancing and was not in the top 100 at the end of 30 days (that’s the pale pink line).

Remember that we can’t make a fair comparison and conclude that the highest ranking pages must have been promoted by the best blog networks, because each page has a different target keyword with a different competition level. But I think these results very clearly show that blog network links do indeed help in increasing the ranking position of a page.

Network Reach (30/90 Days)

Next, let’s look at the most straight-forward piece of data, 30 days and 90 days after the articles were fed into each of the networks, which answers the question: how widely is an article distributed in each of the networks?

The second column shows the number of total article publishes for each network according to the network’s own stats. The first number shows the number of publishes during the first 30 day period, the number after the forward-slash shows how many additional publishes happened in the following 60 day period. The third row gives an indication of how many publishes per submitted article you can expect and the final row indicates within what time-frame the submissions stopped.

At first glance, this is pretty simple: more publishes mean more backlinks and the more backlinks, the better. With this in mind, it seems clear that SpinDistribute, Unique Article Wizard and DistributeYourArticles are the big winners, wile Authority Link Network and SEOLinkVine are lagging behind. It’s also clear that article distribution slows down after an initial “burst” on all of the networks.

However, there are a few factors that change this picture. On the one hand, the three networks with the widest submissions all submit to many directories and not just to blogs. This means, for example, that while an article sent to SpinDistribute gets published on over 800 sites, your next article submitted will go out to over 700 of the same sites that your first article was published on already. So, in terms of getting backlinks from unique websites, it’s not as powerful as it may seem.

On the other hand, backlinks are governed by a very strong “quality over quantity” principle. Sure, getting both quality and a large quantity of backlinks is always preferable but the fact is that a single link from a valuable site can do far more for your rankings than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of “crap-links” (e.g. forum profile spam links).

Network Quality (90 Days)

To find out about the actual value of the backlinks provided by each network, let’s get an idea of how many unique sites are in each network, how “indexable” those sites are and how many of the linking sites have some authority of their own. Since most blog networks don’t publish lists of exactly where your articles are posted (to protect the network), we’re left to our own devices.

The following table gives an indication of the amount of links from unique domains created by each network (after 90 days) as well as the “indexability” of those domains:

The second column (Pings) indicates how many pingbacks from unique domains were picked up by WordPress, for each of the test-pages. The “ahrefs Backlinks” column shows how many total links to each of the pages were picked up by ahrefs, a backlink analysis service. The next column shows how many total links to each of the pages were found by Majestic SEO, also a backlink analysis service. And the final column shows how many unique domains Majestic SEO found, linking back to the respective page.

These numbers are somewhat relevant as indicators of the quality of each network, since both ahrefs and Majestic SEO crawl the web in a similar fashion as a Google-bot would. As an example, you can see that Majestic only picked up links from 27 individual sites, out of the thousands of articles published through SpinDistribute, but it found 144 individual linking sites from only 300 articles published through Authority Link Network. This indicates that the websites in the ALN network are far more visible and more “indexable”. Crawler bots find these pages easily, which means that there are probably some higher-value sites involved. On the other hand, it seems that SpinDistribute is sending massive amounts of articles to “junk-yard-websites” that have no visibility on the web.
Next, I wanted to check for the quality of the linking sites more directly. I did this by looking at two criteria:

1. The number of inbound links to each linking domain, according to Majestic SEO.
2. The homepage PageRank of each of the linking sites.

It will come as no big surprise that these two factors are highly correlated. The more inbound links a site has, the higher it’s PageRank tends to be. Getting backlinks from a website that itself has many backlinks pointing to it is better than getting backlinks from a site with no backlinks of it’s own. That’s the logic behind this analysis.

Results After 30 Days:

Results After 90 Days:

Each bar indicates how many domains with that respective PageRank were found linking to the test pages for each network. Domains with no PageRank are not included in this graph. In this comparison, the clear winners are Traffic Kaboom, with a record number of PR4 and even PR5 domains, Authority Link network with lots of PR sites and ArticleRanks, which also boasts a decent number of PR domains. In the short term (first diagram), Authority Link Network provides the largest number of higher-quality links and in the longer-term (second diagram), Traffic Kaboom completely trounces the competition in terms of network quality.

Note that this test inherently favors those sites that already did well in the previous test, since the analyzed URLs are those picked up by Majestic SEO. So, if a network is not capable of producing links that get noticed by the Majestic SEO crawlers, it’s automatically disadvantaged in this comparison as well.

Conclusions

Here’s my rundown and recommendations for each of the tested networks:

ArticleRanks – Recommended!
ArticleRanks has a good user interface a very reasonable price and produces a decent number of quality backlinks. They keep a close eye on the quality of their network, make sure it’s not over-burdened with spam content and have a credit-system that incentivises users to add sites with PageRank to the network. Overall, a good system that delivers good results.

Authority Link Network – Recommended!
Authority Link Network is free to use (although subsciption plan are also available). By adding domains with PageRank to the network, you earn the right to submit articles of your own. There’s a strict limit to how many articles can be submitted and how often they are published and this is a very good thing, because it keeps the network’s quality in check. ALN rocks and you should use it.

DistributeYourArticles – Not Recommended!
DistributeYourArticles makes it unnecessarily difficult to submit articles. The interface is not great and they reject articles with long paragraphs as well as articles with a double line-space. The problem is that while they seem to care about these irrelevant details, they don’t care about the quality of their network, as indicated by the fact that almost none of the links are to be found.

My Article Network – Not Recommended!
My Article Network is lukewarm in every regard. The user interface is okay but not great, the distribution rate is okay but not great and the quality of the backlinks is below average. It’s not downright bad, but there are better systems to invest in.

SEOLinkVine – Not Recommended!
SEOLinkVine has an extremely slow distribution rate. On average, each article was published only nine times over the course of 30 days. However, they claim that the distributions keep going indefinitely, so we’ll have to see if this network manages to catch up with the others, over time. My worry is that indefinite distribution will deteriorate the quality of the network, as there will be an ever growing number of articles flooding a network that probably isn’t growing that quickly…

Traffic Kaboom – Recommended!
Traffic Kaboom is the clear winner, since it delivers a quality level comparable to Authority Link Network, but has fewer limitation attached (e.g. you can submit up to 10 articles per day without having to add any sites of your own) and it delivers more links in the long-run. It’s user interface is not brilliant, but gets the job done. As an added bonus, Traffic Kaboom also serves as a video distribution platform.

SpinDistribute – Not Recommended!
SpinDistribute allegedly creates massive amounts of backlinks. Unfortunately, it seems that they have pretty much “killed” their network by flooding it with too much content. Neither Majestic SEO nor ahrefs managed to find even one percent of all the links SpinDistribute is supposed to build. The big upside to this network is the “pay as you go” model and since it still managed to increase the rankings of it’s test page, maybe it’s worth using once for each website.

Unique Article Wizard – Not Recommended!
UAW has a terrible user interface. Just wanted to get that out there. Apart from that, I think it has a similar issue as SpinDistribute and DYA: the network consists of too many article directories (a.k.a. content farms) that get flooded with too much content and basically have no visibility on the web. Having said that, it definitely has more punch than either SD or DYA, but it still can’t keep up with the better contestants in this roundup.

Even at the best of times, one of the most grating things about PayPal is their impossibly sluggish website. It can take minutes (and feel like it’s taking hours) to get from the login page to the detailed view of one specific transaction. This is a problem that Putler, a desktop-based PayPal management app, attempts to solve. And it brings a few other perks along with it.

Overview

Putler Video

Here’s a quick video overview over what Putler is and what it does:

Download Video

Summary of the features:

• Easily and quickly find transactions.
• Detailed overview of sales trends.
• Sales trends by product.
• Sales trends by customer.
• Quickly and easily issue refunds.
• Support for multiple PayPal accounts.
• Support for multiple currencies.
• Easy performance comparison between accounts, products and more.

Using Putler

Putler is an Adobe Air based application, which means that it’s compatible with both Mac and PC. In order to use it, you need a PayPal business account, from which you can set up API access. Putler accesses and downloads PayPal data through the API. From a security standpoint, this is safer than remote access by adding username and password to an application, since only a limited number of actions can be done via API (e.g. it’s not possible to make payments or send money through the API).

The first time you run the program, you can tell it how far back it should go, when fetching historical data. Depending on how much data needs to be downloaded, it can take quite a long time, but you’ll only have to wait once. After that, Putler refreshed the data every five minutes (if you leave it running) or every time you start it up and when it fetches new data, this usually only takes a few seconds. Everything else in Putler is pretty much instant, whether you are checking sales-trends, searching for transactions or issuing a refund. This is a huge improvement over the crawlingly slow PayPal online interface.

Conclusion

For my current business, Putler is nice to have (and I will continue using it), but it’s not absolutely crucial. It saves me some time and it gives me a much better way of measuring and keeping the overview over my business’ success. And of course, it also makes refund processing a lot easier. In other words: it’s nice, but nothing mind blowing.

A few years ago, I was running an e-commerce store and more than half of all the payments were made using PayPal. For that particular business, I had to manually look up PayPal orders far more often than I do now and because of this, Putler would have been absolutely priceless. It would have literally saved me hours upon hours of time (time spent mostly staring at PayPal’s “loading” spinner) and I wish I had known about it, back then (assuming it already existed).

In conclusion: depending on your business model and on how much time you spend managing PayPal payments, Putler can either be a neat little management and tracking tool or a heaven-sent time saver.

SYNND can perhaps be described as a “collaborative social promotion” tool. It’s purpose is to drive traffic and (allegedly) increase your search engine rankings, but the way it achieves this is quite different from the way many of the well-known automated link building tools go about it.

Does SYNND really help you get more traffic to your site and is it worth the investment? Read the review to find out.

SYNND Overview

Synnd is software combined with a collaborative network of people sharing and upvoting each other’s content. You can set up campaigns to have content of yours distributed, bookmarked, shared and upvoted on social sites. All of the SYNND members participate in this social promotion of your content and in turn, you contribute to the social promotion of other SYNND members’ content. Thanks to the software, this mostly happens automatically, so you don’t have to spend all day sharing other people’s stuff manually to get shares in return.

Another way of describing what SYNND does is to say that it attempts to automate and give you control over what tends to happen with popular pieces of content on the Internet: people tweet about it and those tweets get re-tweeted, people share it on social sites like Digg and it gets upvoted by other Digg members, people click on the facebook “Like” button and so on. These are all potentially powerful, traffic-driving mechanisms and any webmaster would love to get some of that social sharing action. With SYNND, you can theoretically make that kind of thing happen, for your content.

Using SYNND

Synnd comes in two parts: the first one is an online application that you log into, to create and keep track of your promotional campaigns. The second is a small application called the “remote automator”, that you download and install. The remote automator will automatically create accounts and do promotions for other SYNND members, in the background. At the same time, all the other member’s remote automators will be doing promotions for you. At least, in theory.

SYNND’s interface is not the most user-friendly I’ve ever encountered and you’ll find that almost any action requires opening new tabs and generally clicking your way through more windows and prompts than you’d expect. On the plus side, parts of the program really are completely automated, as in: you never have to touch them. SYNND will automatcially create email accounts and accounts on the 15 different social sites it submits to. It will also automatically do the promotions for other members, without you ever having to lift a finger.

For setting up your own campaigns, you’ll have to create an author profile, set up profiles for each website you want to promote and create campaigns and campaign content.

SYNND Campaign Types

You can run different campaigns using SYNND and all of them are social in nature. As you can imagine, not every kind of content will fly in a social environment, even if you help it along with some automated upvoting. The SYNND creators are very aware of this and emphasize the need for promoting the right kind of content in the extensive training provided with the service. You can’t expect the link to a vacuum-cleaner review on a simple affiliate niche-site to go viral, just because you used SYNND. You can, however, stack the odds in your favour and give an interesting/controversial/entertaining piece of content the initial boost on social networks before a real viral effect (hopefully) takes over.

Here’s a list of the types of promotions you can run with SYNND and my thoughts on each of them:

Article Submission Campaigns

These are exactly what you’d expect them to be: campaigns to submit your articles to various article directories. This promotion type is completely uninteresting to me, as there are better, less expensive ways to do mass article submissions.

Blog Commenting Campaigns

This campaign type might just be the opposite of what you expect, because it’s not about automatically submitting comments to blogs, in order to gain backlinks. Instead, it’s about receiving comments to your blog. You can either “invite” other SYNND members to leave their own comments on your blog or you can pre-write comments that you want published on your blog (which is just a little bit sad) and have them submitted automatically. The point of this would be to increase social proof on your site. Many comments = popular site (or deactivated spam filter, as the case may be).

Personally, this campaign type is nothing for me. I’m either truly involved in a website and build a real community, or I turn off comments all together. I really don’t see the point in inflating the comment count, when you can get genuine comments relatively easily.

Social Bookmarking Campaigns

Using this campaign type, you can submit a URL and have it bookmarked through other SYNND members’ accounts, on various social bookmarking sites. I don’t have the same objection to these campaigns that I had to the article submission campaigns, despite there being no shortage of cheap bookmark submitters available. The crucial difference here is that you get your site bookmarked by other people, from different IP addresses all over the world. Plus, you can get multiple submissions on each bookmarking site. This is an important factor as it makes the bookmarking appear like the real thing, rather than just automated spamming.

I still have an objection, though: SocialAdr does the same thing, incorporating more sites, at a lower price and with a nicer user interface.

Facebook Campaigns

Facebook campaigns are used to generate “likes” for your pages. In theory, facebook likes are very valuable in several ways. On the one hand, they generate social proof and if you already have a number of likes, it’s much more likely that you’ll receive additional ones than if you have 0 likes. On the other hand, likes have a viral effect, because whenever a facebook user likes something, this shows up on their activity wall, where their friends might see it and then go check out the thing that was liked.

Unfortunately, there are two problems with Facebook campaigns in SYNND. The first one is that most of the likes you will be getting are probably from “fake” accounts, automatically generated by SYNND. These are accounts with zero friends, so there’s no viral effect. Still leaves the social proof factor, though. The bigger problem is that SYNND automatically creates a facebook account to be used for your promotions and there’s no way to opt out of it. It’s against the facebook TOS to have more than one account and to me, it’s highly problematic that I can’t opt out of SYNND setting up a facebook account for me. I can deactivate that account, but can’t prevent it from being created. I just don’t like that. I like facebook as a marketing platform and don’t want to give them any reason to ban me.

Twitter Campaigns

With SYNND twitter campaigns, you can have your message, including your URL, automatically retweeted by other twitter accounts plugged into SYNND. This brings three advantages with it. First up, we once again have social proof, provided by an increasing tweet count on your page’s tweet counter (if you have one of those). Second, there’s potential traffic coming in through the tweets directly and third, there’s the proven SEO value of tweets. Google takes the number of tweets a page gets into account and treats them similarly to regular backlinks.

You can plug in an existing twitter account, but I doubt many members do that, since SYNND automatically creates a new twitter account for the promotions. The problem with this is that twitter is fairly good at detecting spam, so the new accounts are bound to get banned. During my membership, SYNND created two accounts and both got banned after a few days. This makes me conclude that most of the twitter promotions you get are going to be from accounts that have no followers and are about to get banned, which negates all of the potential advantages of running twitter campaigns.

Social News Campaigns

This type of promotion is for setting up campaigns that will promote a certain piece of content on various social networks, such as StumbleUpon, Digg or redditt. These social sites are based on voting systems and the more votes a submission gets, the more visibility it gains, which in turn increases the likelihood of it getting more votes. A submission that reaches the top spots of trending submissions in Digg or redditt can get a staggering amount of traffic, so this should be interesting.

As stated before, SYNND won’t help you automatically reach those top spots, but it can give your content some initial momentum. A few dozen votes will get your content seen by a lot of people on these networks and if your content is a good match for social promotion, that can be all it takes to make it go viral in a small or big way. You have to be aware that you still need to do 90% of the work, though. Your content needs to be the right kind of content for a social network. Ideally, it should be funny, cute, shocking (or a combination of those) and very easy to digest. The downside of this is that it’s rather difficult to make this work with your average affiliate/niche site.

Credit Crisis

I’m sure you detected a trend, reading through the list above: the concept is usually interesting, but there are always issues with the actual execution. To add to that, there’s one final issue with this system. SYNND is based on a credit system. You automatically earn credits through the promotions done through your remote automator and you spend those credits on promotions done for you. You can also buy additional credits to speed things up.

The problem is that there’s an imbalance between spending and earning credits. I assume it’s because there are a few members paying for extra credits and paying for the “Enterprise” level SYNND service (which doesn’t require promotions to earn credits) and the result of this is that people subscribed to the Pro account are essentially promotion-mules for the customers paying more. And it costs $97/month for the privilege to be a promotion mule. In the 30 days I was a SYNND member, my most successful campaign was a twitter promotion that got 40 tweets. The slowest one was a StumbleUpon campaign that got 21 promotions. I started with 250 credits and ended with close to 900. Clearly, my remote automator was doing far more work for others than I was getting work done for my sites, in return.

Conclusion

The concept of SYNND is very promising, but I’m sorry to report that the system simply doesn’t deliver. At least not in it’s current state. There are inherent issues with almost all of the campaign types you can run and there’s a far bigger issue with the imbalance in the credit system. For $97/month, I expect a lot more.

Bottom line: your money is better spent on a SocialAdr subscription.

Do you have any questions or want to share your thoughts about this review? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Is SEOLR a serious competitor and will it help you get your sites ranked more easily than ever before? Or is it just “yet another” mediocre link-building tool?

Read on to find out.

SEOLinkRobot Overview

SEO Link Robot is a windows-based program and, like many of it’s kind, it automates backlink building through various submissions, like article-submissions to article directories and free blogging sites, social bookmark submissions etc.

Available Link Targets

As of this review, here’s a breakdown of the sites SEOLinkRobot can submit to:

• 26 Free Blogs
• 9 Article Directories
• 10 Press Release Sites
• 18 Social Bookmarking Sites
• 16 RSS Directories
• Loads of Pinging Sites

Total Link Targets: 79

This is a pretty low number, compared to many competing products. It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but mixing up links from only 79 sources can only get you so far, no matter how fancy your link-building strategies are.

SEOLinkRobot Video

It’s far more effective to show what this software does, rather than just write about it for pages on end, so here’s a quick walkthrough video:

Mini Nets and Limitations

As mentioned in the video, the options to automatically build large or small (open) linkwheels and the "mini-net-builder" are features that make SEOLinkRobot unique. I've seen many backlink building services that offer creating mini-nets and networks consisting of multiple mini-nets for their clients. SEOLinkRobot can automate much of the creation tasks for those kind of link networks.

The problem is the lack of diversity in the available link targets, though. You may be able to build very complex, interlinked networks using SEOLR, but all of those links will be coming from the same 79 total websites...

And while I'm nagging: SEOLinkRobot lacks a scheduling function and it seems that account creations are only possible with one thread at a time (which makes them a very slow process). On the other hand, the submissions work with multiple threads and in general, I've found SEOLR to be overall easy to use and pleasant to work with. While the total number of sites in the system is low, at least the success rates are very good.

Conclusion

All in all, SEOLinkRobot is promising, but too limited to warrant a real recommendation. There's nothing dramatically wrong with it, except that it just doesn't submit to a large number of sites. If it were available at a one-time price, I'd recommend it as a nice little mini-net building software, but as it is, I'm not sure SEOLR is worth the cost, compared to the competing products.

Click Here to Check Out SEOLinkRobot!

Do you have any questions or feedback about the product or this review? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Cheers,

In this review, we’ll take a look at exactly what this software is capable of and test how well it does what it’s supposed to do.

Rank Builder 2.0 Overview

Once you’ve made it past a rather arduous purchasing- and signup-process, it’s a bit of a surprise to see that Rank Builder installs as six separate programs, rather than a single one. The six programs or modules are: an article submitter, a link wheel builder, a press release submitter, a profile link builder a social bookmarking tool and a video submitter.

Here are the available link targets in a bit more detail:

• 24 Article Directories
• 43 Web 2.0/Linkwheel sites
• 21 Press Release sites
• 1250 Forum Profiles
• 40 Bookmarking sites
• 7 Video sites
• 10 RSS Directories (part of the Link Wheel Builder)

Total number of link targets: 1385

It’s possible to add your own list of forums to build profile links from as well.

Rank Builder 2.0 Video

Here’s a video showing the software in action. It wouldn’t make much sense to demonstrate all of the modules separately, but you’ll get a good idea of how the software works and what it does from this brief demonstration:

Problems...

Rank Builder 2.0 has a few rough edges that didn't leave a very good impression with me. For one thing, the fact that it's split up into six seperate programs is really just an un-welcome complication from the user's standpoint. You have to log in to each of the modules separately and add your configuration details (email account information, decaptcha/deathbycaptcha login) to each module separately. It also limits the capabilities of the software since there is no component stringing all of the modules together, which means that you can't do a full run where you build all types of links all at once, without manual intervention.

Rank Builder doesn't come with a scheduling feature and it likely never will have such a feature, because it's split up into different software components. The user interface is not particularly complicated, but neither is it appealing or intuitive. The fact that each of the modules has a slightly different UI is an added annoyance.

Finally, I also saw some difficulties when running submissions in multiple threads. For some reason, sometimes some of the browser windows Rank Builder opens fail to initialize, which leads to an extremely low success rate for submissions. The only solution I found was to run only one thread at the time, which slows the submission process to a crawl.

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, I wasn't particularly taken with Rank Builder 2.0. The product isn't terrible and it does build links for you, once you've got it all set up. However, from the purchase/signup process to the unintuitive member's area with minimal documentation (either there aren't many tutorials or I just can't find them) to the small issues with the software itself, the whole thing just seems unfinished and rough around the edges.

With alternatives such as Magic Submitter and SEnuke X available, there's no reason to put up with this kind of mediocrity.

If you have any questions or want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment!

Read on for all the details.

Magic Submitter Overview

Magic Submitter is a desktop software that you download and run from your local machine (compatible with Windows only). In it’s function, it’s an “everything submitter” meaning that it submits various forms of content like articles, videos, bookmarks etc. to a large range of websites. Magic Submitter can open up to 16 instances of Internet Explorer at the same time and simulate the various signup and submission actions for the sites in it’s database.

Magic Submitter Link Targets

Here’s a quick overview of the number of sites that you can theoretically get backlinks from, using this software:

• 50 Article Directories
• 156 Social Bookmarking Sites
• 31 Free Web 2.0 Blogs
• 16 RSS Directories
• 63 Video Sharing Sites
• 878 Expression Engine Profiles
• 18 Press Release Sites
• 255 WordPress Article Directories
• 80 Micro-Blogging Sites (basically twitter clones)
• 8 PDF Sharing Sites

Total link targets: 1555 (as of April 2011)

Note that Magic Submitter also lets you add your own custom lists of sites. If you have ScrapeBox and enough patience in setting up and customizing profiles, there’s almost no limit to how many sites MS can submit to.

Magic Submitter Video

Here’s a video with an overview of how Magic Submitter works and what it’s like to use this software:

Scheduler and Designer

As you saw in the video, Magic Submitter features a scheduler that let's you set up a series of tasks in advance. The scheduler gives you very exact control over what the software will do at what times and this has advantages and disadvantages alike. I personally found it "easier" to just have the software run in the background and manually select the next task, whenever a run is finished, instead of setting up a schedule.

A potentially even more powerful feature is the "Designer", which allows you to add your own sites to Magic Submitter. You can add your own article directories, bookmarking sites and so on to Magic Submitter, which means you can set up the software to build even more links for you. The designer is pretty intuitive to use and I could set up some custom sites without consulting the manual. There's almost no limit to what you could train Magic Submitter to post content to, except for the work involved in adding new sites and making sure the submission processes work.

Working With Magic Submitter

In practice, I found Magic Submitter to be mostly pleasant and intuitive. At first glance, the user interface might seem a bit overloaded with buttons and options and menus, but as soon as you understand the simple principles of how this tool functions, it becomes very easy to use.

The hands-off factor is pretty decent as well. You can easily have MS running in the background while you are doing something else. At least, as long as you don't run too many threads in parallel. You can have it do anything between 1 and 16 submissions at a time and if you choose the maximum setting, you will notice some slow-down as MS eats at your system resources.

I particularly like that Magic Submitter has a large collection of video sites it submits to, along with press-release sites and PDF sharing sites. Every auto-submitter submits to bookmarking sites and article directories, but press releases, videos and PDF docs are not  such common targets. This can potentially give you an edge over your competition.

Conclusion

Overall, Magic Submitter does what it's supposed to do and does it quite well.

I am currently working on testing all of the major automated link-building tools and before I'm finished with all of them, I won't write more in conclusion of this review. Magic Submitter works, but the question is not "ist it any good?", the question is "is it better then the competing products?". That's what I will answer in an upcoming roundup review.

Until then, stay tuned!

And if you want to try Magic Submitter yourself, you can click the button below to get a trial for only $5.

Click Here to Get a Magic Submitter Trial!

Without further ado, here’s my SENuke X review.

SENuke X Overview

In a nutshell, SENuke X creates backlinks automatically by submitting articles to article directories, creating social bookmarks, submitting press releases, uploading videos to video-sharing sites and creating profiles on forums and web 2.0 sites. This, in itself, is nothing groundbreaking, as there are quite a few programs that do something along those lines. The critical factors to whether it’s all it’s hyped up to be are:

• What are the success rates like? (i.e. if the software attempts to build 100 links, how many actual links will I end up with?)
• How many backlink sources can it submit to?
• How automatic is it really?

In case you are wondering about the last question: All autmation software still needs some degree of “baby sitting”. Ideally, you can do all the work once, then have the software take care of the rest. In many cases, however, you need to frequently intervene to activate a next step or do some other manual task. One of the most promising features of SENuke X is that it’s supposed to be almost completely hands-off.

Some Numbers

First, let’s take a look at how many target URLs or backlink sources SENuke X comes with. SENuke X can automatically create and verify email accounts on Y! Mail, Hotmail and AOL Mail. These email accounts can then be used to create the various accounts that you’ll submit content and backlinks to. These are:

• 39 Web 2.0/Free Blog Sites
• 86 Article Directories
• 25 Social Bookmarking Sites
• 29 Video Sites
• 5 RSS Directories
• 21 Press Release Sites
• 131 Non-Forum Profiles
• 430 Forum Profiles

This makes for a total of 766 different sites to potentially get backlinks from. In addition, it’s also possible to add your own custom lists of forum profile targets. While many submitters have larger target lists, what’s worth noting is that all of the sites SENuke X submits to have at least a PageRank of 1 on their homepage.

Using SENuke X

SENuke X comes with a very good wizard, that makes setting up a backlinks campaign a real breeze. Since a video says more than a million words (that’s a saying, right?), here’s what I made for you:

(Video is expandable to full-screen mode)

Success Rates

An important factor with any kind of automatic submissions is the success rate (or failure rate, depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty type of person). In short: How many of the submissions actually work?

I've done a few hundred submissions and account creations with SENuke, so far and here are the numbers:

On the account creation, I saw an overall success rate of 86%. That is impressive.

On the submissions across several campaigns I've done, the success rate has been between 70% and 80%. This is a good success rate and it has a lot to do with the fact that SENuke X gets updated several times, most weeks. Sites where submissions fail consistently tend to get weeded out and new sites are added on a regular basis.

Complaints

Overall, SENuke X has been working really well and I've been impressed with most of it. But of course, I also found some stuff to complain about during my testing.

During my initial test, the scheduler did not work the way it should. It seemed like it would just get stuck and manually starting certain task projects didn't help, either. This issue was fixed only a few weeks after my review was published and ever since, I have not had any new problems with the scheduler. It now works the way it should: you simply set up your campaign, tell the software over how many days it should spread the submissions and leave it running. So that's one complaint off the list.

One thing that's a real pity is that you can't go back to the diagram, where you draw out a "link-map" for your campaign, and add new parts to it. As far as I can tell, you can only start a new sub-campaign from scratch, including new profiles and accounts created for everything, if you want to use the diagram mode for building more links to the same site again. You can add new submission projects to an existing campaign, but not using the diagram.

Finally, something that struck me as strange (but isn't a huge problem) is that only .wmv, .avi and .mpg are supported for video uploads. Just seems weird that probably the most universal format for online video, .mp4, isn't included and neither are flash formats.

Out of all the above, the only really fatal flaw is the problem with the scheduler. SENuke X is significantly less useful as long as that isn't fixed.

Conclusion

SENuke delivers on it's initial promise and it manages to be the most automatic link-building tool I've seen since SERPAssist. The latter failed to impress me mainly for two reasons: 1) it didn't produce significant ranking results for the sites I tested it with and 2) it had a very limited amount of backlink targets, a problem that it doesn't share with SENuke X.

With a recent update, SENuke X 2.0 no longer needs to rely on a browser to create accounts and do submissions. Before this update, the software did most of the tasks by running several instances of Internet Explorer and automating the form-filling and clicking necessary for the submissions (which is the way almost all of these link building softwares work). Now, it does the submissions utilizing so-called "sockets". The practical effect of this is that it's a lot faster, uses fewer resources and is a lot more stable.

Overall, this is a huge improvement to the software and it's a feature that can justify the additional cost of SENuke X over some competing products.

Get Your 14 Day Free Trial of SENuke X

Bonus Video: How to Use SEnuke X

Overview

So let’s cut right to the chase: wpMassUpdater is a Windows-based automation software that automatically updates multiple WordPress installations. It updates the plugins as well as the WP version itself and all you need to do is create one simple file with a list of all your WordPress sites.

The basic updating process is exactly the same as if you went and logged in to each of your sites and clicked the “update” buttons yourself. The software simply opens the pages in a browser, logs in and simulates the button clicks for you. This means that you can feed wpMassUpdater with one simple file and then leave it running in the background until all your blogs are up to date.

Why Update WordPress?

Most affiliate marketers have anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred websites they call their own. And with WordPress being as popular as it is, chances are that you’ve got as many WordPress installs as websites. Whenever a new version of WP is released, there are two options: 1) ignore it and leave all or most of your sites un-updated or 2) groan and start updating all of your sites, or at least the most important ones.

Outdated WordPress installations can cause compatibility issues, but that’s not really tragic. As long as you aren’t installing new themes and new plugins, you won’t run into any compatibility issues. The bigger problem is a security risk. Most WordPress updates fix a security loophole or two and the older your WP installation, the more likely it is that it will be exploited somehow.

I personally never took this very seriously (“my sites aren’t big enough to be worth hacking”) until one of my sites got hacked… After hours of reinstating backups and trying to fix the problem myself, I had to resort to rolling back to a server-backup which was several days old, plus paying someon 100 bucks to sweep up the remnants of the malicious code. Casualties: several hours of my time, $100 and one blog post. Very frustrating.

So that’s it, basically. I like to keep my WP stuff up to date and wpMassUpdater now does that for me.

How is This Different from Fantastico/QuickInstall/SimpleScripts?

Fantastico, QuickInstall, SimpleScripts and probably a few others offer very easy installation and in some cases updating of WordPress. I personally like using Fantastico. For installations, it’s perfect. For updates, not as much as they often seem to lag behind on the updates. More importantly, though, it only updates WordPress itself, not the plugins. If you keep updating via Fantastico, you’ll start getting issues with the plugins, as they become outdated and stop working with the newest WP version.

At the end of the day, wpMassUpdater is a very simple way of dealing with a time-consuming problem I had and it costs next to nothing, so I obviously jumped on it. Only drawback: It’s Windows only. If you’ve had the same problems with keeping WP up to date, take a look as I think you’ll like this.

Cheers,

There are thousands upon thousands of article directories and they can be easily found through common footprints. The problem is that most of them are broken, abandoned, hacked or completely worthless (no PageRank, no backlinks etc.). So if you have a tool that can submit articles to lots of directories, you may find that you get far fewer backlinks then expected and that those backlinks are not very useful at all.

Today, I’m reviewing Article Marketing Robot. Read on to see if it could change my mind about article directory submissions.

Article Marketing Robot Overview

Article Marketing Robot is actually more than just an article submitter. It comes with:

• Article directory account creator
• Automatic e-mail verifier
• Complete article spinning tool
• Decaptcher integration
• Backlink checking and reporting

Link Volume and Link Quality

As mentioned in the intro to this article, my main concern with article directory submissions is that, in my extensive experience, the failure rates tend to be very high and the link quality tends to be very low. So, how does AMR hold up in this regard?

At the time of writing, you start out with a database of 3758(!) directories. The first step is to create accounts for all of these directories. To do this, you set up an e-mail account and give Article Marketing Robot access to this account. You should also sign up with Decaptcher or DeathByCaptcha (recommended) and link the account to AMR, otherwise you’ll be manually solving captchas all day.

The robot then goes out and starts creating accounts. This worked flawlessly on the majority of directories. Next up, you set it to go through your e-mail inbox and confirm all the auto-confirmation messages sent out after registering to most of these directories. In my test, it successfully confirmed 2152 accounts. So, even though there is naturally a certain failure rate in the signup process, we’re left with more than 2000 directories we can submit to. That is still A LOT.

The next step is to add a spun article to Article Marketing Robot. It has a complete, fully functional spinner built in. It seems to be decent enough, but I didn’t spend too much time with it, as I’m a satisfied user of the Best Spinner. When you add your article, you also set tags and categories and, of course, include a resource box with links back to the sites you want to promote.

Once that’s done, you hit “submit” and choose whether you want to submit to all of the directories on one go, or spread it out over a longer period of time (AMR needs to be running in the background for the latter function). Article Marketing Robot is a multi-threaded application and given enough processing power and bandwidth, it can zip through a thousand submissions in just a few minutes.

In my most recent test, 1380 of the submissions were successful. If you look at how many of those submissions go to directories that have any PageRank at all, there are 283 left and if you look for PR3 and higher, you’re left with 77 sites.

This illustrates my point about article directories. Out of a pool of a whopping 3758 directories, you end up with only about 77 submissions where the backlink can be expected to pass a good amount of link-juice. That’s 2.05% out of the original list of directories.

So it’s Rubbish?

No. Not at all, actually. Article Marketing Robot is easily the best article submitter I have ever seen and there are several reasons for that.

It Does Build a Lot of Links

Those links are mostly not very valuable, but there’s merit in volume as well. While the failure rate is significant, it’s not nearly as high as the failure rates of some other submitters and the total number of directories in the system to begin with means that you still end up getting a big old load of backlinks for any run you do with this software.

The one thing to keep in mind is that you’re looking at one single set of directories, here. This means that if you submit two articles with links to the same URL, the second round of submissions will have limited link-value since the links will be coming from the same sources as the ones in the first round. The best way to use it is to do one round of submissions for every new page on your money sites, as well as for every major page linking back to your money site (i.e. use it for link reinforcement)

It Saves Lots of Time

Many automation tools aren’t all that automatic. They require lots of setup and maintenance and you need to constantly be around while they’re working and intervene yourself from time to time. Article Marketing Robot is not like that at all, fortunately. It does require a bit of setup time, but once that’s done, it is as close to a fully automatic solution as anything can get.

Link Reports

A very special feature that AMR boasts is that you can set it go check on all the articles it’s submitted for you and it will return a report of all the live links it finds. This is particularly useful if you want to feed a list of all your linking URLs into a backlink boosting system.

One-Time Price

Article Marketing Robot is available for a one-time fee of 80 bucks. That is a really good deal and it would not have been surprising to see a recurring fee attached to a product like this. That’s a big plus, since you can potentially get a lot of bang for your buck, if you use AMR often.

Stellar Support

I only had slight difficulties with the program once and contacted Vince, the creator of AMR, with a question. I could hardly believe how quickly he replied. He was incredibly helpful and offered absolutely stellar support. I honestly don’t know how he does it, with all the customers he already has. In any case, I think it’s really worth mentioning, as it shows that Vince cares about his customers and goes out of his way to help them. Big thumbs-up for that!

Conclusion

Normally, I’d make a video showing the process of setting up accounts and doing submissions etc. However, you can find videos detailing all these steps on the sales-page for AMR, so it would feel redundant if I made such videos as well.

Article Marketing Robot is without a doubt the best article directory submitter I’ve ever used. It works swiftly and efficiently and is a useful link-building tool, despite the failure rates and the fact that many of the directories provide only limited link value. You can’t expect any SEO miracles from doing a few AMR submissions, but used as a bulk link builder and link-hub builder in conjunction with a few other techniques and tools, it’s very useful. Couple that with the one-time price and you’ve got yourelf a very good deal. In other words: It’s not necessarily the first tool I’d spend my money on, but as a part of my SEO arsenal, I’m very happy to have Article Marketing Robot.

If you buy through my link, you can now get a discount on your purchase of Article Marketing Robot! Simply click the button below or any of the links to AMR in this article and you’ll be taken to the special discount page!

Click Here to Get the AMR Discount