The Google Panda update of March 2011 and many of the subsequent updates have shook up the SEO world to a greater degree than any updates before that (at least since I’ve been involved in SEO). As a consequence, there’s quite a bit of conflicting and misleading or simply out-dated information about SEO floating around right now.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at exactly what the new SEO landscape looks like and what you can do to rise to the top, once more.

Webinar Replay

Below is the replay of the webinar we did about the new rules of SEO. You can watch the video and/or read the post for all the details.

A Brief History of Algorithms

A quick glance at search engine history provides a lot of insight into the meaning of recent Google changes. It shows us why SEO is what it is today:

Alta Vista

Before Google, Alta Vista was one of the top dogs among search engines. While it was innovative for its time, compared to today's search engines, Alta Vista was rather simplistic. It took a pretty straight forward approach to evaluating web pages, by checking how closely related a page's content was to a submitted search query. This was soon exploited through the use of keyword stuffing: a website owner could get to the top of the search results by repeating the target keyword over and over again. Often, you'd find pages that had large lists of keywords, repeated several times in white-on-white text, below the content.

Fix: penalties for keyword stuffing and hidden text were introduced, keyword density became an important factor.

Early Google

The quality of a website or a piece of content can't simply be calculated. Robots are not suitable for quality assessments of this kind. And of course, there are simply too many web-pages to evaluate manually. That is, until Google came along. Google's original innovation was that they essentially crowd-sourced web-page evaluation to all webmasters. They counted and evaluated the number of links each web-page in their index had pointing to it. PageRank was born and by using a "links are votes" approach (among other things), Google managed to deliver better and more relevant results than any competing search engines at the time.

This was soon exploited with reciprocal linking schemes, link-farms, link-networks, link-spamming tools and so on.

Fix: Google introduced countless ways to evaluate links in more detail and to discount certain types of spammy links.

Later Google

In a next step, Google started taking the concept of crowdsourcing web-page evaluation further, by monitoring social signals adding them as a ranking factor. This expands the crowd from just webmasters to any Internet user actively participating in social media.

Google Panda and Beyond

The notorious Panda update follows the same pattern of crowdsourcing web-page evaluation to actual humans, rather than relying entirely on algorithmic evaluations. It did so in two ways: the first was that the entire Panda model was based on presenting a sample of different websites to a panel of human users, who were asked to answer a series of questions along the lines of "would you trust this site with your credit card information?" and "would you recommend this website to a close friend?". See this post for some insights into the kind of questions that were asked.

They then compiled all the answers and looked for measurable commonalities among the sites that were rated as good and trustworthy by the human critics and commonalities among the ones that were rated as untrustworthy and low quality.

The goal was to find factors that could be algorithmically detected and that reliably sorted the good from the bad websites. Panda itself is mainly a way for Google to implement this so-called machine-learning process on a large scale.

In addition to all that, it's also clear that user engagement metrics play an important part in Google since the Panda update, although clear data on the topic is still hard to come by.

This is by no means a complete or completely accurate history of Google updates. If you want to get all the details, I recommend this page about Google updates.

The lesson we can take from all the above is that what has always set Google apart is their ability to find ways of using human input for their website evaluation.

SEO Basics, Then and Now

Since you're reading this, I'm assuming you are familiar with the basics of search engine optimization. You know about keyword research, you know about title-tags, header tags, optimized content, backlinks and all that Jazz. I will not explain all of these concepts here, but that doesn't mean they are no longer valid. The basics of SEO are still the same and the stuff you have learned so far still applies, for the most part.

The changes that have happened are not a case of "out with the old, in with the new". What has happened is a shift in priorities and here's an example to illustrate that:

Up until recently, you could apply a "Google recipe" to any keyword imaginable and you'd have a pretty good chance of ending up in the top spot for that keyword. The recipe went something like this:

• Pick a good keyword.
• Write 1000+ words of content, based on that keyword.
• Add the keyword to the title tag, headers and repeat it a couple of times in the text.
• Add an image or two.
• Get backlinks with the keyword as the anchor text, pointing to the new page (the more and higher-quality, the better).

Following this recipe, I'd say you had around a 70% success rate: seven out of ten sites built like that would end up being profitable.

Now, that success rate is probably around 30% or perhaps even lower. All of these SEO basics should still be applied to your sites and pages. The difference is that now, doing the basics alone is no longer always enough, because new factors have entered the scene and caused a shift in priorities.

The three main new factors are:

Factor 1: Sitewide Instead of Page-Specific

Google used to be all about individual web-pages. "Google ranks pages, not websites" was an often-repeated reminder in SEO circles.

This changed with the Google Panda update: now, an entire website can get devalued because it contains pages that are deemed low quality. At first, that might seem very worrying, but it's an update that mainly affects extremely thin sites and content farms.

Before this update, you could have a site with several "target pages" of good, relevant and well-optimized content and then add an auto-blog to the back of that, which would just regularly update with scraped or spun content. The pages generated by the auto-blog would rarely rank for anything or get you any traffic, but the fact that the site was regularly updated and had many pages was a benefit, overall. It would help your target pages rank, since those were well optimized and unique.

Another popular exploit were content farms: sites with a decent looking "front end" and an endless amount of rubbish articles on pages that had more space occupied by ads than by actual content. This model worked because some of the articles were bound to be good and would end up getting some Google traffic. Now, the entire site will be penalized or de-indexed, no matter the few good apples in the mix.

How to Detect and Fix Sitewide Issues

It's most likely not something you have to worry about. You will not get penalized for writing an uninspired blog post. Follow these guidelines and you should be fine:

• Don't create "filler" content, just to hit some long tail keywords.
• Don't use auto-generated, scraped or spun content.
• Don't have any pages with more ads than content.

Factor 2: Social Signals

Both Google and Bing have officially stated that they take social signals into account, for their search results. We know for sure that these social signals include tweets (i.e. how many times a link to a page gets shared on twitter) and facebook shares (at least those happening on publicly accessible facebook pages). It's not unlikely that other social sharing sites are also being taken into account.

We also know that apart from the number of social shares a page gets, another important factor is the authority or trustworthiness of the people doing the sharing. As a simple illustration: if you get a tweet from a twitter user with thousands of followers, that will help your rankings more than if you get a tweet from a twitter bot with no followers.

How to Gain More Social Sharing for Your Content

I'm not much of a social media person, so my expertise in this field is limited, to say the least. The few things I do know about getting more social shares, I have distilled into the free WordPress plugin Social Essentials. Here are the steps I follow:

• Make it easy for people to socially share your content.
  It seems like it shouldn't matter, but the fact is that simply adding social sharing buttons increases the amount of social shares you get.
• Encourage people to socially share your content.
  Again, it might seem like a non-factor, but something as simple as an arrow pointing towards your social sharing buttons and a call to action saying "please share this!" or something similar can significantly increase your visitors' social engagement. That's why there's a feature for adding a call to action next to your buttons, in Social Essentials.
• Track and analyze social sharing activity on your site.
  This is the main reason I built Social Essentials: it gives you a simple overview of your most shared posts and pages. Do more of what's most socially popular.

Apart from this, I'm sure it's a good idea to be active in social media and I'm sure there is a whole method and art to all this, that I have no clue about. But following just the simple steps above will already take you in the right direction.

Factor 3: User Engagement

The biggest of the new ranking factors is user engagement. The simplest way for any search engine to detect whether a website is highly engaging or not is to watch user behavior in the search results.

Picture this: someone searches for "blue widget review" and clicks on the number one result. A few seconds later, this same user bounces back to the search results page and clicks the site listed in second place. This time, the user doesn't return to the search results page.

This is a very clear sign that the second listed result provided the answer the user was looking for, while the first one did not. If this same thing happens over and over again, eventually the rankings will switch and the page that sends people bouncing back will drop below the one that makes people stick.

To my knowledge, only Bing have confirmed that they use such user engagement signals as part of their ranking algorithm, but I have no doubt that Google do the same.

In addition to that, Google clearly ask for their users' input, by presenting the choices of the +1 button and, in some cases a "block this site from my results" link, when you click on a Google listing and then hit the back button.

Remember how the history of Google updates shows a trend towards crowdsourcing website evaluation towards more and more people? The final step is to include every Internet user in this crowd and Google is the only company that can realistically do that. Google toolbars, Google Chrome, Google+, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube... there's seemingly no end to the sources that Google can potentially tap into, to figure out what people are talking about, where they are going on the web, how they are interacting with websites, what they are sharing with friends etc.

Just some of the services that are sending user data to Google.

Google even have a pretty good idea of how you're socially connected to people through non-Google services.

We can't be entirely sure about how much user activity Google can track and how exactly this factor fits into the ranking algorithm. But we can be sure that user engagement has become a major ranking factor and a critical piece of the puzzle. If you create and optimized website that appeals to Google in every way possible, but is unappealing to people, then you might get it ranked temporarily, but the negative user engagement signals sent by your visitors will send it plummeting downwards again in no time.

Here's what you can do to get better user engagement and make this ranking factor work in your favor:

Increase User Engagement With Page Speed

Page loading times are a ranking factor in Google, but if you believe what Matt Cutts says in this video, at first glance it would seem like it's a very minor factor. The statement that page speed is a factor that only affects one in 100 search queries is misleading, at best. What we can take from the statement is that very few websites are so critically slow that this will directly affect their ranking position.

To see why page speed matters more than that, here's a sampling of some interesting data:

• Amazon measure a decrease of 1% in revenue for every 1/10th of a second extra page loading time.
• Shopzilla reduced their average page loading time from 7 seconds to 2 second and subsequently saw a 25% increase in pageviews.
• Firefox shaved 2.2 seconds off of their site's average page loading time and saw a 15.4% increase in downloads, as a result.

There's a lot more data like this and it all indicates one thing: page loading speeds have a dramatic effect on user engagement. Attention spans are at an all-time low and people will simply not stick around, waiting for your website to load.

This means that if you have a slow website, you'll be sending those negative user engagement signals and that can cost you dearly, in the search results. Luckily, this is a purely technical issue and it's fairly easy to fix. Check out my guide on how to speed up WordPress sites for (very) detailed instructions.

Increase User Engagement by Understanding Search Queries

The most important factor for engaging visitors coming in from search engines is to understand search queries and create matching content. It's not longer enough to create an 800-word article loosely based on the topic of the keyword. In some cases, people are looking for informational content, but in some cases they are looking for something else entirely.

To illustrate, let's look at two keyword examples:

Example A is a keyword where following the simple "Google recipe" will not get you far. Even the most well-written 2000-word article about every possible detail on US Dollar exchange rates, garnished with great pictures and keyword optimized to perfection will simply not help you get ranked. Why? Because people typing in this keyword are not looking for a long article to read. What they want is a simple table showing the current exchange rates, or a simple calculator widget. Anything else will send them bouncing back to the search page.

If you look at the results for this keyword in Google, simple tables and calculators are exactly what you get, in the top spots. And, as a side note, another thing that all of the top ranking results have in common is that they have thousands of backlinks pointing to them, proving that the "old rules" of SEO are still as relevant as ever.

Example B is a keyword that indicates someone is most likely looking for information. More precisely, they are looking for clear instructions on how they can speed up their own WordPress website. This is a case of a keyword where a long, well-written and optimized piece of content will win the SEO battle, because that's what people expect and are looking for.

Pre-Panda, you could win the ranking game for virtually any keyword, by simply creating lots of content, optimizing it for the target keyword, adding some images and throwing lots of backlinks at it. Now, you first have think of what exactly people are looking for, based on the keyword. Depending on the search query, long content might be right or it might be completely wrong.

Increase User Engagement With Good Copywriting

In the above step, we've made sure that we understand and deliver what an incoming visitor is really looking for. Another crucial factor is to effectively communicate that we have the answer the visitor is looking for. This is a matter of writing good copy.

The most important pieces of copy you need to write for your SEO'ed pages are:

• The page title
• The meta description
• The headline
• The first sentence after the headline.

Let's use the "how to speed up WordPress" keyword as an example. The title and meta description are what shows up in the Google search results:

The title implies that I have the answer the searcher is looking for by containing the exact keyword as well as showing that it's a comprehensive and step-by-step guide. People are more likely to be looking for a detailed set of instructions that takes them through the whole process, than just a random collection of information and tips. "Ultimate step-by-step guide" communicates that I'm offering the former.

The meta description reiterates that it's a guide and ads a note about the use of free methods. People searching for this term are more likely to be looking for a free, do-it-yourself guide than a paid service. The final sentence adds an element of specificity ("76%" instead of just "faster"), which helps make your claims more credible and tangible.

This is what people see when they click through to the actual blog post:

The headline simply re-iterates what the search snippet already stated. This is helpful, because it communicates that you are indeed in the right place. Confirming to a visitor that they are still on the right path, after each click, is generally a good idea. Apart from that, I have to admit that this title isn't incredibly inspired.

The leading sentence is highlighted with bold text and makes a simple statement: here, you'll find everything you need. The "if you've been wanting to speed up WordPress websites that you own" part is almost too explicit. Obviously that's what they want and I'm making it clear that I understand what they are looking for, to an almost silly degree. It's working, though. The article in question is quite popular.

Familiarize yourself with the basic principles of copywriting, to learn how to create attention-grabbing titles, headlines and opening paragraphs. Crazy as it may seem, good copywriting will actually help your rankings, these days.

Increase User Engagement With Interactive Elements

If you add a comments section, calculators, quizzes, surveys or other interactive widgets to a page, that will increase user engagement. At least, as long as the widget is in line with the user intent implied in the search query.

The same even goes for social media sharing buttons: people who share your content socially, are already significantly more engaged that people who don't. One more reason to make social sharing as easy as possible.

This step is difficult to generalize, since it depends very heavily on search queries. Ask yourself: could there be any kind of calculator widget that would help answer the visitor's question? Calculator widgets are easy to come by and cheap to have custom programmed. Or could you add a poll or quiz to the page, that matches the general content? If a keyword lends itself to any of these, adding such a widget can lead to a huge increase in user engagement and your site will benefit from it, all around.

Increase User Engagement by Getting Warm Traffic

The warmer your traffic, the more engagement and social sharing you will see. In addition, there's a virtuous cycle that can get set in motion, because more engagement and social sharing can lead to warmer traffic. People visiting your site because a friend or trusted source recommended it on facebook or twitter are like endorsed traffic: they will likely be willing to take a closer look at your site and see it in a positive light. Similarly, if you already have many comments on a page, new visitors are more likely to leave a comment of their own. It's easier to join an existing conversation than to be the first person to speak up.

How do you get warm traffic? By being involved in your market, by communicating with your visitors and through social media, by building a personal brand and putting your personal stamp on everything you do and above all, by building a mailing list and treating your subscribers well.

To Google or Not to Google

All this brings us back to the principles of the New Traffic Paradigm. I hope you now also see part of the reason I transitioned from being heavily focused on SEO to the New Traffic Paradigm, where SEO is no longer the be-all-end-all of the business, but rather one of several useful components, built on a solid foundation.

The new rules of SEO can complicate a few things, but they also have their bright side: you can take steps towards building a sustainable business and a strong brand and those very same steps help you gain higher rankings and more traffic from Google.

Building a mailing list is useful for SEO, because it gains you warmer traffic, more user engagement and more social sharing. But the main reason to build a mailing list is because it's a hugely valuable asset to your business and you should do it, even if Google never sends you a single extra visitor, for it.

Focusing on providing a real, valuable service to a specific group of people is useful for SEO, because you'll be delivering what people are really looking for, which will increase user engagement. But the real reason to do it is because it's much easier to promote a real service through many different marketing channels, than it is to promote a thin affiliate site or a made-for-AdSense site.

Creating and selling your own product is useful for SEO, for many of the same reason focusing on providing a service helps with SEO. But the real reason to do it is because it gives you a lot more control over your marketing, it puts a real asset into your hands and it opens up marketing possibilities that you never have, as an affiliate.

Optimizing your website for increased user engagement is useful for SEO, because user engagement has become such an important ranking signal. But the real reason to do it is because more engaged users equal more income for you, almost no matter what type of website or business you have.

Building a brand is useful for SEO, because Google looks for brand signals, because you'll get brand-name searches and because it will lead to more trust and more engagement among your visitors. But the real reason to do it is because it just makes all of the above that much easier. Having a trusted brand (even if it's a small, personal brand), ultimately translates to more money in your pocket and that's something that will last, even if Google changes its mind about the importance of brands.

Following the new rules of SEO and following the New Traffic Paradigm will lead to better websites and better, more profitable businesses. I know it might seem complicated and difficult at first, but never fear: that's just your brain starting to accumulate highly valuable knowledge and skills. That feeling of "this is difficult, but I'm doing it anyway" is a clear sign that you're on the right path.

What are your thoughts about the new rules of SEO? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

All the best,

Thanks for the images go to Marcel Germain and Brett Weinstein.

I know you’ve been told otherwise. I know that “Google wants good content” is a phrase repeated over and over, often by people who should know better. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true and believing it could be dangerous.

In this post, let’s examine what Google really wants and what that means for you.

Correlation and Causation

Before you start calling me a hypocrite, I’ll admit it right away: yes, I have often talked about the importance of good content for your websites and your marketing in general (and I will continue to do so). In fact, it’s clear to me why people keep saying that Google wants quality content. A quick glance at my own portfolio of websites makes it clear that those sites with low-quality, cheap, outsourced content are not faring as well as those with higher-quality content.

So, what am I on about?

We need to remember that correlation does not imply causation. For example, in some areas of the world, there are more human babies born during times when storks are nesting in the same region. In other words, there’s a correlation between the number of storks and the number of babies born. However, we know that this isn’t a case of one thing causing the other. The data is incidental and does not prove that human babies are, in fact, delivered by storks.

Similar correlations are constantly paraded up and down the news media, in their relentless quest to classify all inanimate objects in the world as either causing or preventing cancer. It’s easy to forget then, that just because two things coincide doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.

And so it is with Google and good content. Right now, there is some correlation between low quality, badly written, scraped and spammy content and low rankings. And there is also a correlation between quality content and high rankings. But there are two reasons why it’s important to realize that these are merely correlations, not causations.

Reason Number 1: Robots

Google’s evaluation of the web is based on algorithms. Robots and maths, if you will. There is no way for them to automate the human process of looking at a piece of content and seeing whether that content is “good” or “bad”.

This is a very important thing to keep in mind. Even if Google are getting better and better at separating the chaff from the wheat, quality-wise, they can’t actually detect quality. They always have to find a round-about way to approximate quality.

The original innovation was their PageRank algorithm, which treated external links on pages as “votes” for other pages. This is a round-about way of crowdsourcing the impossible task of evaluating every web-page on the Internet to every website owner on the Internet.

PageRank is still part of what Google do and, along with many, many other signals, it’s now joined by social metrics. The idea behind using social metrics is basically the same as the one behind PageRank: crowdsource every active Internet-user to determine the quality of websites. Google are looking for human signals to help them separate good from bad websites.

The reason I bring up social signals is because they serve as a great example for the correlation/causation issue with quality content: to make social signals more relevant and less easily exploitable, Google take something like “author authority” into account. A tweet from a twitter account with no followers and little activity doesn’t count as much as a tweet from a highly popular, highly active account. If you have a ton of followers, you have more credibility and your tweets carry more weight (and the same principle applies to other platforms).

In some cases, people are popular on social media because they consistently deliver great, valuable content. On the other hand, you can also be a nonsense-spewing celebrity and be wildly popular on twitter an co.

If we understand some of these inner workings, we can see that good, high-quality content, endorsed by links from high-quality websites and reputable social profiles can lead to high rankings. But so can rubbish content, endorsed by hordes of fans and social media celebs. Some people are famous for being famous. Some websites continue being popular because they’re popular. Quality doesn’t always enter the equation.

Reason Number 2: Money

Here’s the bigger reason why “Google wants quality content” is simply not true: Google wants more money for Google. Period. That’s the purpose of the company: to generate more revenue and more profit for itself, without breaking too many laws, or at least not all at once.

This is the driving factor behind everything that Google does. Of course we all know the argument that follows: “Google wants to show good, relevant content because that’s what keeps the search engine users happy, which is what makes Google so popular, which is how they make more money.”

Sounds reasonable enough and it’s even partially true. As long as showing quality content helps Google, there’s hope for people who create good content. But what if they decide that showing mediocre content from big brands is more beneficial to their bottom line? What if Google keep pushing organic search results further below the fold and fill up as much of the results page as possible with ads and links to Google-owned sites and services or Google partners? What if they start scraping the web to display information directly in the search results, instead of sending users to a website?

At the end of the day, Google don’t care one bit about the quality of your content. You can have the best content in the world and you can have worked harder for it than anyone else, but if there happens to be more money for Google in not showing your content in the results than in showing it, guess what they’ll do?

Time to Panic?

This is not a “end of SEO” post. It’s also not a post trying to scare you or spread panic.

If you realize that Google (the search engine) is driven by algorithms and you understand some of them, you will be able to make better decisions than if you think “Google wants quality content”. “Good content” is a fuzzy concept. Social signals, links, user engagement metrics and content optimization are concrete and real and they are where real results come from.

If you realize that Google (the company) is driven by a pursuit of increased profits, you’ll be in for fewer nasty surprises in the future and perhaps you’ll see why I’m making such a fuss about the New Traffic Paradigm, lately. And of course I continue to advocate creating good, valuable content. But you do that for people and for your brand, not for a search engine (remember: traffic is people!).

Sometimes, the buzzwords and the simple-but-fuzzy concepts are as popular as they are misleading. Seeing things as they really are will help you and your business and that’s why I wrote this post.

Do you agree? Disagree? What does Google really want, in your own experience?

Image credit for the silly robot.

Read this review to see what this product is all about and to learn whether or not it’s worth investing in.

 

Overview

The main selling points for No-Hands SEO are that it’s supposed to be very highly automated and extremely easy to use and that it comes at a one-time cost. Both are attractive selling points, since SEO software often comes with a considerable learning curve and most tools in a link-builder’s arsenal, such as automation tools, blog networks and private networks, come with a monthly cost.

There are many different types of SEO and link-building tasks, so let’s begin by taking a look at what exactly No-Hands SEO actually does for you.

What it Actually Does

Here’s a short list of the functions No-Hands SEO can perform, followed by some more detailed descriptions below:

• Post your site to whois and statistics sites to get it indexed quickly.
• Find keyword-relevant pages, where comments can be left.
• Spam blog comments with links to your site.
• Spam trackbacks with your link.
• Ping pages where links were created.

You begin by starting the program and creating profiles for one or several websites. You do this by entering the URL of each site, keywords that will be used to find commentable pages on relevant sites and your desired anchor texts for the links that the software will create.

Here’s what the user interface looks like, for creating profiles:

No-Hands SEO then crawls your site’s pages and starts scraping for blogs and other pages where comments can be left, based on the keywords you entered.

After this simple setup step, the program is quite true to it’s “No-Hands” name, since you can now simply click the play-button and it will automatically start posting to whois-sites and attempt to leave comments and trackbacks with your links inside. It will also notify various pinging services of any successfully created links. At this point you can basically walk away and just let it do it’s thing.

If you want to, there are also more options to play with and the program does allow for a certain degree of fine-tuning. For example, you can set it to search for pages with a minimum PageRank before attempting to leave a comment or trackback. You can also add your own footprint searches for both trackbacks an comments:

Since it’s a spamming tool, it’s also quite prudent of the creators to include proxy-support. With heavy use, having sets of proxies to rotate through will significantly increase your success rates, as you’ll end up “burning out” IP addresses by getting them blacklisted in anti-spam services.

Conclusion

No-Hands SEO really is very easy to use, at least, as long as you don’t get into all of the more advanced options. Despite this, I can’t recommend it and there are two main reasons for this:

1. It’s a spamming tool and all of the links it can create for you are of the high-volume, high-failure-rate, low-impact variety. In fact, everything it does is high-volume and extremely low-impact.
2. If you’re going to spam (which I don’t recommend), then you might want to consider going all-out and investing in the equally priced and much more fully-featured ScrapeBox.

Expanding on the first point, there’s also something of an issue with over-promising and under-delivering, when it comes to No-Hands SEO. The promise is that it will do all of the tedious SEO tasks for you, but the reality is that it only does tasks that are so low-yield, you probably wouldn’t do them manually, anyway. If you want to get pages ranked for anything but the lowest-competition keywords, you’ll still have to go and build some higher-quality links, using some other method.

Bottom line: I don’t recommend this product.

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!

In this roundup review, that’s the very question we shall aim to answer. Read on to see a complete comparison of Article Marketing Robot, Magic Submitter, Rank Builder 2.0, SEnuke X, SEOLinkRobot, SERPAssist and Sick Submitter.

Overview

	Name:	Price:	Link Targets:	Custom Links?	Ease of Use:
	Article Marketing Robot	$87	3758	LIMITED	Fairly Easy
	Magic Submitter	$67/month	1555	YES	Fairly Easy
	Rank Builder 2.0	$77/month	1385	LIMITED	A Bit Messy
	SEnuke X	$147/month	1113	LIMITED	Very Easy
	SEOLinkRobot	$57/month	79	NO	Easy
	SERPAssist	$77/month	???	NO	Very Easy
	Sick Submitter	$20/month	Custom	YES	Rather Difficult

Note that “Link Targets” (the number of sites the software can submit to, to get a backlink) should be treated as a ballpark guesstimate, because these numbers are subject to change. Also, no software will ever get a 100% success rate with the submissions. Finally, most of the tools let you add your own link targets, so the numbers are fluid anyway (“limited” means that only one type of link target, forum profiles or article directories in the case of ARM, can be custom-added).

Summaries

The following are brief summaries highlighting some of the unique features and characteristics of each of the tools in this roundup. I have written extensive reviews on each one of them (and also made separate videos for each one), so I won’t go into too much detail. If you want to know more about any one of the tools, there’s a link to the full review at the end of each summary.

Article Marketing Robot

Article Marketing Robot is actually the odd one out in this roundup. All of the other tools submit to various kinds of sites like social bookmarking sites, forums, free blogging sites, article directories etc. Article Marketing Robot, on the other hand, focuses fully on Article Submissions and nothing else.

ARM is highly automated, pretty easy to use and can submit to massive amounts of sites. Granted, the success rates tend to be low, but even after you clean up the target list by dumping all of the sites where submissions failed, you’re still left with a heck of a lot of links. Add to that the fact that you get in-content anchor-text links and it’s clear that ARM is a serious contender. Plus, the second way in which it’s the odd one out is that it’s the only program to come with a one-off price. Very nice!

More information: Article Marketing Robot Review

Magic Submitter

Magic Submitter is a real “everything-submitter”, from articles to bookmarks to videos and press releases, if there’s a way to get a backlink from a site, Magic Submitter can probably automate it.

It comes with a lot of link targets right out the box and also lets you add your own custom lists of link targets. Some aspects of the user interface take a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, Magic Submitter is pleasantand easy to work with.

Automatic submissions to PDF sharing sites and statusnet-micro-blogs as well as automatic video submissions set Magic Submitter apart from most other tools and it’s nice to have the option to get some links from these less-trodden paths.

More information: Magic Submitter Review

Rank Builder 2.0

Rank Builder 2.0 means well, but can’t quite keep up with the crowd. The product comes in the form of six separate programs that do various types of link building. You can add your own custom lists of forum profiles, but the other modules (web 2.0 sites, press releases, articles,…) aren’t customizable.

Rank Builder is unnecessarily complicated, stating with a convolued sign-up process for the software and ending with the less-than-intuitive user interface which is slightly different for each of the six modules.

While this product is not downright bad, it makes a bit of an unfinished impression and compared to the likes of Magic Submitter and SEnuke X, it’s hard to find a good reason why you’d want to bother with Rank Builder 2.0.

More information: Rank Builder 2.0 Review

SEnuke X

SEnuke was the ganddaddy of all link-building software and accordingly, SEnuke X has some big shoes to fill. It does so rather adequatly with a strong emphasis on ease of use and “hands-off-ness”. The campaign-setup wizard and the simple diagram drawing tool for mapping out your backlink network make SEnuke X very easy and straight-forward to use.

Unfortunately, the forum profile builder is the only component where you can add your own link targets and the diagram builder has a few limitations (not every type of submission can be linked to from all others), but the bottom line is still that SEnuke X can build a lot of links for you, with very little human intervention required and scheduling link campaigns over longer periods of time could not be any easier.

The big downside to SEnuke X is the price: at $147/month, it’s by far the most expensive software in this roundup.

More information: SEnuke X Review

SEOLinkRobot

SEOLinkRobot is like a smaller brother to Magic Submitter or SEnuke: it has fewer features, isn’t as highly automated or sophisticated, but at heart, it’s the same kind of thing. Plus, it comes at a lower price than most tools represented here.

SEOLinkRobot is a solid piece of software and one feature I particularly like about it is that it lets you build open link-wheels with web 2.0 properties as well as more advanced, interlinked mini-nets (including automatic bookmarking) very easily. The downfall of SEOLinkRobot is that it only submits to about 80 sites in total. That’s just way too few link targets, compared to the competing products.

More information: SEOLinkRobot Review

SERPAssist

Using SEnuke X it seems like nothing could possibly be even more “hands off” short of just outsourcing all of your link building to a service provider. SERPAssist proves this assumption wrong. With SERPAssist, the actual submission processes aren’t even done from your local machine or through your Internet connection, instead all you do is define how you want your backlinks built, using a very nice diagramming tool. The resulting link-building tasks are then uploaded and done for you, in the cloud.

Unfortunately, SERPAssist is severely limited in the amount of different types of links it can build as well as in the total number of sites it can submit to. Much like SEOLinkRobot, there’s nothing wrong with the software itself, but it’s just too “weak” because of a lack of link targets.

DISCLAIMER: I assume that the situation with SERPAssist hasn’t changed since I last used it (which is a few months ago). According to their official site, the number of links the software can build has actually shrunk since then and I am awaiting confirmation of this.

More information: SERPAssist Review

Sick Submitter

Sick Submitter is a fairly complex and ultra-customizable link building tool that has a strong emphasis on automating profile links. Sick Submitter can be customized to do almost any kind of link building and in fact it needs to be customized by you, the user, since it does almost nothing in it’s out-of-the-box state.

With Sick Submitter, after you’ve gotten accustomed to use the tool, it will either cost you a lot of time (scraping your own link targets, building custom packets and custom submission templates) or a lot of money (buying pre-made link packets and submission templates provided by the user community). Given that you spend one or the other, Sick Submitter does turn into a very powerful link-builder, though.

More information: Sick Submitter Review

Roundup Video 1

For my conclusion to all this and to see which of the products comes out on top, watch this video:

Roundup Video 2: What Really Matters

Here's a second video, to clarify some important points, talk about what really matters and also a tip on how to use backlink building software for the fastest and best results possible:

Download Video 1
Download Video 2

Conclusion

Watch video one for the real conclusion, but just to have something in writing: SEnuke X is the best of the bunch in terms of automation and I recommend it. Magic Submitter is the best value for your money and I also recommend it. Pick one and start using it to get your stuff ranked!

All the best,

P.S.: I'd appreciate it if you would help spread the word by clicking on the "Like" button. :)

What exactly does Sick Submitter do and is is it better, worse or just different, compared to the competition? Read on for all the details.

Sick Submitter Overview

Sick Submitter is a Windows desktop program that was originally built to create forum profiles as backlink-sources and has since evolved into an “everything submitter” with capabilites for submitting articles, bookmarks, RSS feeds and various forms of profile links.

One thing that comes to mind almost immediately, when you start working with Sick Submitter is “learning curve”. While I wouldn’t say that the software is needlessly complicated, it sure is complex. It does a lot of things in many different ways and it’s highly customizable. These traits and “simple” are mutually exclusive, I’m afraid.

Custom Lists, Custom Wizards, Custom Everything

Out-of-the box, Sick Submitter does not have a very impressive list of link targets and isn’t nearly as capable as it can be. Sick Submitter is very much based on customization and it has a very lively community. To really get the most out of it, you will either have to download free link packets, purchase premium link packets, use something like Scrapebox to create your own link packets or do all of those things combined.

There are two types of scripts you can add to Sick Submitter: packets are lists of link targets that you can load into the program and run submissions for. Wizard templates are like plugins that “teach” Sick Submitter how to do a new type of submission. For example, there’s a Wizard Template that lets you add your own lists (or purchased lists) of WordPress multi-user sites to then submit content and links to, which is something Sick can’t do out of the box.

Here’s an overview of the types sites Sick Submitter can submit to without additional Wizard Templates:

• Forum profiles (SMF, FluxBB, PunBB, PHPBB)
• RSS Directories
• Link Directories (PHP Link Directory)
• Article Directories
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Blog Comments?

And here’s a non-exhaustive list of what it can do if you add the available Wizard Templates, from the Sick forum:

Sick Submitter Video

To give you a better impression of how this program works, here’s a walkthrough video:

Working With Sick Submitter

What sets Sick Submitter apart from most other link-building tools is that it's highly customizable. This can be a big advantage or a big pain, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, Sick offers a wealth of possibilities, since you can create your own site lists to submit to (using Scrapebox, or Sick's own scraping tool), download free and paid packages and link-lists and even create your very own submission templates from scratch. On the other hand, Sick Submitter requires a lot of setup and customization and the importing of link-packets before it really does anything useful.

In short: the good thing is that you can customize it, the bad thing is that you have to customize it.

Conclusion

I can recommend Sick Submitter only if you really enjoy tinkering with software. If you like the fact that you can scrape your own link lists, import various packages and templates and build your very own link-building machine, then Sick Submitter should be right up your alley and the low monthly price is a nice added bonus. Concerning the price, you need to be aware, though, that Sick Submitter is almost certainly going to cost you more than the $20/month price tag. At the very least, you will also spend some money on various packets and link lists (which typically sell in the range of $10-$50 a piece). In addition, most heavy users of Sick Submitter own Scrapebox, maybe a few private proxies and either a dedicated notebook or a VPS to run it on.

At any rate, don't let the low price tag fool you. It's no use having a cheap tool that you never use because it's too time-consuming to work with.

Having said all that, Sick Submitter is a tool with a lot of potential and it can build various types of links that no other tools can. Once past the learning curve and in the right hands, this can be one powerful SEO tool.

Click the button below to get your free trial of Sick Submitter:

Get Your Free Trial!

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!

If you looked at a typical Google results screen 5 years ago and compared it to a typical results screen now then you’d probably notice some rather large changes:

5 Years ago:

Now:

These screenshots aren’t actual representations of what the search results look like because unfortunately I don’t have any snapshots of Google five years ago, but they’re a fairly accurate representation.

The areas in Red are either Google Ads, Google products listings or other stuff that Google has chucked in that will worsen the click through rate of an organic listing.

The areas in Green are our sites – the sites that we’ve spent ages SEO’ing…

Notice how the “Now” screenshot contains a heck of a lot more red than it does green

That’s right – it seems every day there are new “Google properties” added to filter clicks away from natural search listings to other areas of the Google network.

So, How much has this affected our Click Through Rate?

A while ago I spent a long time researching, testing and writing about how it was

Part of this high CTR was undoubtedly because my PPC ad had a nice bunch of sitelinks underneath it.

Also, the title for my organic listing may not have been optimal for a high click through rate – it wasn’t a bad snippet, I just haven’t tested it to see if it could be improved.

Finally, this experiment was performed in a competitive niche with a full spectrum of 3 PPC ads above the natural listings which will undoubtedly dilute the CTR for the organic listing. However, there weren’t any Google places or product placements to dilute natural traffic. I expect the experiment would have yielded different results if all ads were in the ad position located to the right side of the natural listings where they generally attract a lower CTR.

In Conclusion

I’m finding it hard to argue that a PPC ad with aggressive bidding, when done correctly, can easily outperform the #1 listing in Google natural search.

It’s certainly making me consider introducing new PPC channels to a number of my sites because I can see that I must be missing out on a lot of volume in my competitive niches.

OF course SEO isn’t dying – I just write that to attract your attention ;) But, you have to admit, it’s pretty interesting to just how much volume PPC ads can take from the natural results!

Have you noticed this yourselves / have any data to report? I’d love to hear from you in the comments box below!

On the other hand, us online marketers are often the people who own such sites and make money from them…

Slap: The Second Coming

It’s not too long ago that Google deindexed thousands of “MFA” (made for AdSense) websites and closed AdSense accounts of webmasters who were essentially spamming the search results with extremely low-quality sites, targeted at very specific, long-tail keywords. This might have cleaned up the search results to a certain extent, but it didn’t entirely solve the problem, of course. As indicated by the “search engine spam” blog post mentioned earlier, that first slap was only the beginning.

By now, the second slap has already happened (or is, perhaps, still happening) and once again there are many stories of de-indexed sites and decreased rankings circulating IM forums and blogs.

No one knows exactly what happened, although Dan’s post about the micro-site business model and Ben’s post on how not to make money online provide some useful insights. From talking to many fellow marketers about this and from asking my newsletter subscribers about it, I learned that this most recent slap seems to have affected far fewer sites than one might initially think, looking at all the buzz around the topic. It’s clear that whatever Google did, it didn’t affect thin, low-quality affiliate sites in general. Too many of those remain un-affected. For the record: I also have a few remarkably thin, low-quality and non-unique sites in my portfolio and none of them have suffered a slap.

My suspicion is that AdSense sites were the main target and the reason for that is simple: Google has lots of data on AdSense sites. In fact, any changes made to remove crappy sites from the SERP are most likely to affect sites linked up to AdSense, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, before any other sites, simply because Google has the inside scoop on sites using their services. My second suspicion is a point that Ben also brought up in his post: having too many sites in your AdSense account puts them all at risk. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that one webmaster is unlikely to own 200 websites and fill all of them with quality, unique, relevant content, after all.

Niche Marketing is Dead (and all that…)

So, is this the end of AdSense sites? Is it the end of niche marketing or affiliate marketing all together? Of course not, despite the panic that tends to spread whenever Google makes any significant change.

Google’s main objective (apart from making bucketloads of cash) is to show the most relevant, useful results possible to it’s users. For example, for many search terms for physical products and product names, Google shows shopping results:

This doesn’t make owners of affiliate marketing sites for physical products particularly happy, but it is a great way for Google to serve it’s users better and connect them more directly to what they are looking to find.

Building small sites targeting long-tail keywords still works. Building all manner of spammy backlinks to these sites also still works for getting them ranked in the top spots. Basically, everything you already know about niche marketing still works. But, I believe that building thin sites is a short-term strategy, no matter how you look at it.

The Long-Term View

The long-term strategy is to build sites that provide the best, most relevant result for the keywords you are targeting.

This may mean that you have to go a bit further than grabbing some generic PLR and using it to fill five pages on a micro-site, as little more than a vessel containing your affiliate links. But it also means more earnings potential per site.

And let’s take an even-longer-term view: Building micro-sites and SEO’ing them is a low-leverage activity. It’s grunt work. It’s a fantastic way to get started, in my opinion. It’s a priceless way of learning some of the fundamentals of online marketing and of generating a good bit of income. In fact, it’s a great way to break away from a 9-to-5 existence and become financially independent (disclaimer: you’ll probably be working longer hours than at a day job to achieve this, but that’s not the point).

However, it’s not something you want to keep doing indefinitely. Sooner or later, you’ll be looking for ways to grow your business further. This could mean hiring some people to do the site building and SEO for you. Or it could mean building out bigger and better sites and services online and using your SEO and marketing experience to get them noticed.

What if you created a website that become a central hub of activity in your niche, because it provides real, unique value and doesn’t just act as a bridge-page to get the visitor to a product via your affiliate link? What if you offered a service that people in your niche just can’t live without? Do you think that will ever get slapped by Google? And if it did, how much of a difference would it make?

Understand that I’m still talking about niche marketing here. You don’t have to try and create the next facebook or the next zappos. If you can provide something real and unique to even the tiniest of niche-markets, that could be enough to build a very profitable business on. You know how they say that 1000 true fans are all you need to have a successful business? From my experience, I’d say that, if anything, that number is too high.

How are your niche-sites faring, since the latest Google slap? And what’s your long-term view for your online business? Let me know in the comments!

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