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.

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. :)

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

Read on to find out.

SEOLinkRobot Overview

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

Available Link Targets

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

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

Total Link Targets: 79

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

SEOLinkRobot Video

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

Mini Nets and Limitations

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Click Here to Check Out SEOLinkRobot!

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

Cheers,

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!

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

Rank Builder 2.0 Overview

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

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

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

Total number of link targets: 1385

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

Rank Builder 2.0 Video

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

Problems…

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Read on for all the details.

Magic Submitter Overview

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

Magic Submitter Link Targets

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

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

Total link targets: 1555 (as of April 2011)

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

Magic Submitter Video

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

Scheduler and Designer

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

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

Working With Magic Submitter

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Until then, stay tuned!

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

Click Here to Get a Magic Submitter Trial!

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

SENuke X Overview

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

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

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

Some Numbers

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

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

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

Using SENuke X

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

Success Rates

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

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

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

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

Complaints

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Get Your 14 Day Free Trial of SENuke X

Bonus Video: How to Use SEnuke X

Overview

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

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

Why Update WordPress?

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

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

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

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

How is This Different from Fantastico/QuickInstall/SimpleScripts?

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

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

Cheers,

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

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

Article Marketing Robot Overview

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

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

Link Volume and Link Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it’s Rubbish?

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

It Does Build a Lot of Links

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

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

It Saves Lots of Time

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

Link Reports

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

One-Time Price

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

Stellar Support

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Click Here to Get the AMR Discount

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.