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

 

Overview

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

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

What it Actually Does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Bottom line: I don’t recommend this product.

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

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

BuildMyRank Overview

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

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

BuildMyRank Video

Results With BuildMyRank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PageRank Distribution

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Click Here to Sign Up for Your Free Trial!

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

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

Blog Networks in this Review

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

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

Test Setup

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

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

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

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

Test Criteria

For this experiment, I will monitor the following criteria:

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

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

Article Directories vs. Blogs

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

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

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

Ranking Results (After 30 Days)

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

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

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

Network Reach (30/90 Days)

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

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

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

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

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

Network Quality (90 Days)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Results After 30 Days:

Results After 90 Days:

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In today’s update, I want to share some exciting initial results and tell you about the two most important factors that lead to great rankings for the sites in this project.

First (new) Commission!

There are currently three sites in the Throw Money At It project. #1 is a product-review site that’s already earning a steady income, #2 is a brand-new AdSense website and #3 is a product-review site that has been around for a while, but has never made any money (~200 clicks sent to a product that just won’t convert – time to change products).

On this last site, I added five new product reviews that I had ordered from one of my content sources. Only about a week after being added, most of these articles are already on the first or second page. Here’s a snapshot from my rank-tracking report:

Most of these keywords are what I’d consider “medium competitive”, since they are keywords for popular products, that have many affiliates building review sites and articles and competing for the top spot.

A few points to consider:

• The fact that the content is very fresh helps. It’s not unlikely that those rankings would drop again, if I did no further promotion.
• The keywords in question do not have very high search volumes, but they are “product name review” keywords, which are usually great in terms of conversions.
• One of the reviews earned it’s first commission of $39, after sending just nine clicks through the affiliate link.

While the site is nowhere near recouping the roughly $1K investment I’ve made in it so far, I take this early first commission as a good sign.

What about the AdSense site? It’s filled up with a dozen pages of decent content and I’ve had several types of links built to it, but it has not reached any front-page rankings yet and traffic is still practically non-existant.

On-Page Optimization

If you’re wondering what kind of magical super-backlinks I used to make the rankings for site #3 shoot up like they did and maybe wondering why I didn’t do the same for the non-performing AdSense site, the answer is simple: there are no magical backlinks involved.

In fact, the great ranking results site #3 is getting have almost nothing to do with backlinks. There are two “secrets” to those rankings that I want to share with you right now. Secret number one is what I call “Rich Content Optimization”. I’ve written a short guide on this topic, that you can get completely for free, here. In a nutshell, these are the elements I put on a page to get high rankings out of the gate:

•  Lots of Content
  I’m talking about 800 words minimum for a page I actually want to get ranked in Google. 1000+ words is better, 2000 words is great. Google clearly favors content-volume these days.
• Quality Content
  As explained in part 2 of this project, I use high-quality, well researched and well-written content only. Even though I still have a couple of sites with low-quality content that are doing okay and making me money, I’m doing far better with the sites where I’ve invested a bit more and published only the cream of the crop.
• Images
  I use a minimum of two images per post or page (that’s excluding logo/header images or anything in the sidebars). Ideally, I want to have one image for each segment of an article, so that you can always see at least one image as you’re scrolling through the text. Images definitely help not only with rankings but also with user-engagement and conversions.
• Lists and Formatting
  I try to have at least one part of the text in list-format, either as bullet-points or as a numbered list. I also use sub-headlines to segment the text. I don’t know if Google pays any attention to well-formatted vs. unformatted text. I suspect they do. What I know for sure is that good formatting can increase conversions dramatically.
• Video
  If possible, I add one video to each of my target pages. Google is loving video right now and if you get a listing that includes a video-thumbnail, it does wonders for your click-through rates.

Here’s an example of such a video-thumbnail in the Google results:

All of the above makes for content that is way easier to get ranked and get good results from than your typical 300-words-for-3-bucks article or auto-scraped content. But there’s one more factor that comes into play and while I don’t like it, I can’t deny it.

Site/Domain Age

For my underwhelming AdSense site, I know that I need to add some more media (images, video) and tweak the formatting here or there, but what I also know is that rankings won’t happen over night. One big reason that rankings did happen more-or-less over night for site #3 is that this site is already more than one year old. The AdSense site, on the other hand, hasn’t even seen a full month pass, yet.

Apart from the amount and quality of content and apart from backlinks, site age is definitely an important ranking factor. It will take at least a few months before my new site gains Google’s trust, in my estimation. Until that happens, I won’t be going crazy on spending money for backlinking services. I will keep a steady flow going, but I don’t expect floods of traffic within the first few months.

I am considering experiments with aged domains or pre-existing websites, but haven’t made final plans yet. Maybe there’s something in there for a site #4? I’ll let you know if I decide to go ahead with this idea.

That’s all I have to report for now. As you know, SEO is a rather slow process, so I don’t expect anything dramatic to happen anytime soon. I do hope that I can get some top 5 rankings pretty soon and maybe a few more commissions. I will, of course, write another update, as soon as something worth reporting transpires.

All the best,

All Posts in the “Throw Money At It” Project:

1. Part 1: The Project
2. Part 2: Outsourcing Content
3. Part 3: Real-World On-Page SEO – currently viewing
4. Part 4: Results After Two Months

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!

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

SENuke X Overview

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

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

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

Some Numbers

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

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

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

Using SENuke X

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

(Video is expandable to full-screen mode)

Success Rates

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

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

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

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

Complaints

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Get Your 14 Day Free Trial of SENuke X

Bonus Video: How to Use SEnuke X

Whenever you see high PageRank backlink building services or link packets and aren’t sure whether they can be trusted, the video below is what you need to know about. When it comes to high-PR backlinks, much of what you read is misleading. Some of that is deception-for-the-sake-of-marketing, some of it is ignorance and some of it is just due to habit and convention of how we talk about links (i.e. we use the wrong expressions out of habit, even though we’d know better).

The video below should clear up some of the confusion caused by all this:

Let me know if you have any follow up questions or comments!

Cheers,

Check out the video below.

Cheers,