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 qality rather than quality: 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!

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

If you’re serious about SEO, a tool like this is an invaluable part of your arsenal.

Read on to get the details.

SEO SpyGlass Video

The features and functionality of SEO SpyGlass are best demonstrated in video form. Watch this to see how the tool works:

SEO SpyGlass Limitations

The main problem with SEO SpyGlass is that most of the links it finds are still provided by Yahoo Site Explorer. Yahoo’s backlink reports have been getting increasingly flaky and I’ve seen strong fluctuations in the number of links displayed, with a tendency for it to display fewer links now than it did a few weeks or months ago. Sometimes, you can do a search for the same site twice, just a few hours apart, and get significantly different results.

The point is: Yahoo is not a very good source for a backlink report. It’s still probably the best freely available source, but it has it’s weaknesses.

Having said that, SEO SpyGlass still gets a few extra links from the other search engines it queries and, more importantly, the true power of the tool lies in it’s ability to analyze and filter each of the pages containing the links it found.

SEO SpyGlass Alternatives

Here’s a rundown of some competing products:

WebComp Analyst

WebComp Analyst is like a weaker version of SEO SpyGlass. It uses Yahoo as it’s only source of the link reports and while it can also do a “deep” analysis on all the pages containing the backlinks it finds, it’s output is far more limited than that of SEO SpyGlass. WebComp Analyist only reports on the page PR an anchor text in the deep analysis.

Quite simply, the free version of SEO SpyGlass is more useful than the full version of WebComp.

Link Diagnosis

Link Diagnosis is a free online tool for backlink analysis that works in conjunction with a Firefox plugin. It does an analysis that includes PageRank, anchor text, dofollow/nofollow/missing, outbound links on the same page and a “link strength” indicator, based on their own calculations. It also provides a report for all indexed pages on the domain you analyzed and lets you export all the data easily.

I don’t know where the Link Diagnosis data comes from, but from my tests, it’s clear that they don’t have a very strong source for their backlink searches. Yahoo site explorer usually finds more (although not a lot more) links than Link Diagnosis.

Having said that, the analysis is useful and thorough and it’s quite a good offering, considering that it’s free.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is a very high-end service that provides backlink analysis based on their own crawling of the web. In other words, these guys have their own “search engine” that they use to do backlink analysis. This way, they are not dependant on the lackluster backlink reports Google and Yahoo provide.

Of course, this kind of service also comes at a price and in this particular case the pricing is pretty steep. While the smallest package is quite affordable at $17/month, it also comes with some pretty severe limitations, so even as an “amateur” SEO, you’ll probably be needing the “silver” package for $50/month. And the price goes up exponentially, from there, for higher packages…

The price is justified, of course, but for most people, SEO SpyGlass for free or for a one-time payment of $99 will do just fine.

SEOmoz Pro

SEOmoz Pro is the service provided by SEOmoz. Like Majestic, they also do their own crawling of the web and while I don’t know all the details, if you follow the SEOmoz blog and look at their documentation, you get the impression that these guys are a good bit crazier about what they do than the Majestic SEO crowd.

It also looks like SEOmoz Pro comes with more features and functions than Majestic does.

Conclusion

Backlink analysis is one of the first steps into what I’d consider “advanced SEO” and I recommend it to anyone who’s got the basics of SEO and backlink building more or less figured out. In fact, just looking at various pages and their backlink profiles can be very useful for learning about SEO and getting an idea for why pages rank the way they do.

My number one recommendation for an analysis tool goes to SEO SpyGlass, especially since the free version of it is already very useful. If you want to go deeper into it than that, then my second choice would be SEOmoz Pro, despite the pretty hefty price tag.

Do you know any other tools like this? Any other favourites? Let me know and I’ll take a look at them and maybe include them in the article!

Cheers,

Read on to find out.

SEO Blueprint Overview

Without any further ado, let’s go into some detail on each of the three tools in SEO Blueprint:

Link Blueprint

Link Blueprint is a fairly simple link-exchange system. You can add sites of your own to the system and request links to those sites. This will cost you credits. Other Link Blueprint members will link to your site and you will link to their sites, which earns you credits.

The system makes sure that there is no reciprocal linking going on. Link exchanges like this can work, but Link Blueprint doesn’t offer anything that sets it apart from other, similar systems.

It should also be noted that Link Blueprint requires quite a bit of manual work. For me personally, it’s too time-intensive and too fickle to bother with, but if you invest the time and effort necessary, you can make Link Blueprint work for you.

Article Blueprint

Using Article Blueprint, you can submit spun articles (using an interface where you spin articles paragraph-by-paragraph, very similar to the Unique Article Wizard system) to a network of websites. Every article you enter gets posted on 470 sites, which looks great at first glance, but doesn’t hold up very well under close scrutiny. The problem is that the articles you submit are buried away somewhere in the background on 470 sites that aren’t article directories or blogs. The sites are on all kinds of topics and all they do is feature an inconspicuous “Articles” link, which leads to a completely non-optimized back-end with piles of articles from all the Article Blueprint members.

It’s disappointing to see that there is literally zero on-page optimization going on in these “article dumps”. It would not take much to set the system up to add proper tags, format the pages a bit less hideously and do some good interlinking. From what I found, looking at the articles, it doesn’t seem like providing valuable backlinks to the Article Blueprint customers is a major concern for the network owners…

Up until recently, Article Blueprint also posted to a series of regular article directories, in addition to the network of 470 sites owned by the creators. If this feature were still part of the package and the network was better optimized, Article Blueprint would be a very useful tool. In it’s current state, it’s not really worth an investment, unfortunately.

In an isolated test, I did not see any significant rank movements for a long-tail keyword, building Article Blueprint links only.

Blog Blueprint

Blog Blueprint is a high-PR blog network which works in the same way as LinkVana or BuildMyRank. You submit short, 100 word article snippets and include one link. Each of those snippets goes out to one single blog in a network of blogs that all have PageRank. As demonstrated by BuildMyRank, this is a method that can work extremely well, if the network is really a high-quality network and it’s ensured that the links get indexed and all that.

Unfortunately, Blog Blueprint is a far less groomed network than BMR. There is no additional work done to ensure indexation of your posts and from what I’ve seen, the blogs seem to get flooded with spammy posts, for the most part. I did see some rank improvements from posting to Blog Blueprint, but since I was an IM-Advantage member and the URLs of your Blog Blueprint posts show up in the Bookmarking tool available only inside IM-Advantage, I could help them along a little and make sure they got indexed. As an SEO Blueprint member, you won’t know the URLs of your blog posts, so results may vary.

Conclusion

SEO Blueprint initially looked like an awesome deal: 3 different link-building tools at a very reasonable price of $67/month. Unfortunately, the tools are all okay, but not great. And in the case of Article Blueprint, I’m afraid calling it “okay” is actually an overstatement.

Here’s the problem: $67/month is not terribly expensive, but two out of the three tools aren’t much worth having, so I can’t recommend SEO Blueprint. Blog Blueprint, the most effective tool of the three, is available separately for $59/month. But instead of getting that, get BuildMyRank, which is essentially the same thing, at the same price, but way better.

SEO Blueprint looked promising, but after closer consideration, I have to put it on my “Don’t Buy” List.

The only question is: Does it work well enough to justify a purchase?

Read on to learn how the Link Juicer works and what kind of results I got with it.

The Link Juicer Overview

Even though the Link Juicer is highly automated, it is still based on content and some fairly well know link sources. The standard account for $47 per month will get you 50 links per day to as few or as many URLs as you choose.

Setup

To set up a new campaign, you basically dump a lot of highly spun content into the Link Juicer (article, titles, tags/keywords, descriptions) and set a target URL or several target URLs. There are recommended levels of uniqueness for each of the content types and it’s advisable to use highly spun content. The longer you want a campaign to run un-touched, the better spun your content should be.

Here’s a video detailing the campaign setup in the Link Juicer:

Backlinks/Link Sources

The Link Juicer will take the content in your campaign(s) and create the following kinds of content:

• Bookmarks on social bookmarking sites
• Posts on free Web2.0 blogs (livejournal, multiply etc.)
• Articles on article directories
• Articles on WPmu sites

That’s a fairly good mix of link sources, in itself. Although I did see some repetition of link-sources across a few hundred links, so I guess the network could be bigger.

A very cool feature of the Link Juicer is the fact that it automatically does link reinforcement, in other words: it builds links to the articles and posts it creates. This happens automatically and some of the articles and blog posts TLJ creates will also get bookmarked or be linked to from other articles and posts, over time. This creates a multi-tier backlink network, passing along more link-juice and making sure a greater percentage of the links get indexed.

Results

There’s no doubt that the Link Juicer provides a solid benefit to SEO campaigns when it’s used in combination with other link-building tools. You can use it to create a nice and steady drip of (mostly low-quality) links to any site and you can use it to really push some significant link-juice to link-hubs (i.e. high-value sites with a backlink to your money-site).

To give it a tougher test, I also had TLJ run on it’s own, with no further link-building, for two test-pages, with each having 10 links per day assigned to it.

Test number one was an indexation test: I created a bunch of Web2.0 blogs, put minimal content on them and then ran the Link Juicer, rotating through all of the URLs. The test-blogs did all get indexed, eventually. It was not an overnight-miracle, but it did work. Considering that I was spreading 10 links a day to five different properties (i.e. only 2 links a day for each site), the results weren’t bad.

For the second test, I created a hubpage for a long-tail keyword and backlinked it using only TLJ. The question was: Would it be able to pull rank all on it’s own?

Answer: Yes, but just barely. Out of 240 links built, Yahoo reports only 5 (interesting: all on WPmu blogs). In terms of ranking, the page went from position 11 to position 7 during the course of 10 days and then gradually dropped back down to position 10. I’m now going to change the content in that campaign and see what happens (will update this post when results are in).

Conclusion

The Link Juicer works very much as advertised. It’s supposed to be a tool for increasing the link-juice within backlinking campaigns, not a standalone tool. For keywords with virtually no competition, it may do the trick, but for most purposes, it’s best use as a “link-bolstering” tool and I recommend using it on link-hubs as well as your money-site directly.

It doesn’t perform miracles, but it does work and at 50 bucks a month it comes with a reasonable price-tag. The fact that it requires almost no maintenance (switch up the content every three to four weeks and you’re good) is this tool’s greatest feature.

But don’t listen to my ramblings: Get a completely free 30-day trial and see what TLJ can do for you in practice.

Click here to get the free trial of the Link Juicer.