As many of you may already know I have a close connection with the Rank4 team and have been testing their ranking tool and some of their new tools.

History of Rank4
Rank4 was originally meant to be a subscription based indexing and ranking tool based around many tried and tested practices of social bookmarking submission, directory submission, link baiting, search engine baiting and other proprietary techniques. While this aspect of the membership site is still intact it is changing its focus slightly away from simple indexing and ranking tool to a fully blown community site with many tools for generating and scraping content for a vareity of platforms.

Current status
It is currently treading water with the Rank4 tool making sure that all facets of it are working and stay current and expanding on the nature of the system by rotating through hundreds of accounts with hundreds of link baring websites.

The interesting part of the site is the new tools that will be available to members they are now going to be offering a content generation system for forums and blogs based around Yahoo Answers and article sites (such as ezinearticles and many more). They have a downloadable script in the works that is a PHP based server side script that mimmicks the features of PRStorm, the bonus of this is that many servers have very quick connections and it will search for sites to spam based on keywords you input rather than a standard list of overused URLs.

Another tool in its very early stages of development is the auto commenting script based around a common blog plugin that allows a very easy way to generate hundreds to thousands of instantly approved blog comments, again based around keywords that you a targeting rather than a static list of URLs.

Conclusion
While Rank4 has been disappointing with its constant delays and lack of any real press releases (other than the inside scoop by myself) it is showing some real promise, hopefully I can get my hands on the other tools (Yaho Answers content poster for forums is fully working and tested by myself) to test and will get back to you guys to let you know how it is all looking.

Until I have seen the whole package I will reserve total judgement as a lot can happen with the Rank4 tools techniques in a matter of weeks let alone months. If you want to be the first to know when Rank4 opens its doors go there and sign up now, it is free and they wont send any mail that isnt related to opening its doors.

If you want to know anything more about Rank4 leave a comment below and I will make sure that it is answered at some point by them, they do check here fairly regularly.

I initially was going to make this post part of my last post but thought that it would serve better as its own entity. I want to explain some of the best practices as far as using the WP autoblog plugin goes. In the last post I mentioned about adding lots and lots of feeds well one place I always manage to find lots of feeds is directly from google, yahoo and feedburner.

You can use the addresses below, exchanging the word KEYWORD for a URL safe keyphrase:
http://feeds.technorati.com/search/KEYWORD
http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=KEYWORD&ql=en&s=f&pop=l&news=m&n=100&format=rss
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=KEYWORD&format=rss
http://www.blogdigger.com/search?q=KEYWORD&sortby=date&type=rss
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=KEYWORD&ie=utf-8&num=100&output=rss
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt

If you replace KEYWORD with your keyphrase and then add these feeds to your plugin config page you will have 6 feeds, do this for 10 keywords and you will have 60 feeds right there, very useful if you wanna speed up setup of this script.

Pimp up your blog, leaving your WP installation standard looking and working will leave you open to scrutiny by the SEs so for the sake of a couple of minutes download a new theme, possibly something with ad spaces, and get it uploaded. New themes can give better CTRs and even be better laid out as far as SEO is concerned, if a theme is the difference between 10k pages indexed and 100 pages indexed it is worth changing.

More plugins, have a look around at some SEO plugins, these can really help with your site structure and lead to more optimised SEO and inner linking. Get an auto commenter, this will help to build variety in your inner linking of your blog posts and could also help to keep a visitor on your blog. Mix up your autoblogs with some other sources of posts, maybe use a plugin that auto posts some affiliate feeds or youtube vids, anything you can think of to give some variation and/or more income.

XMLRPC update services

This is so important I thought I would bold it. If you are unaware what this part of your WP admin area is all about it gives you the facility to announce your new posts to lots of blog aggregators that get huge amounts of traffic, think social bookmarking sites but just for blogs. In your “Settings” area under “Writing” in your WP admin area you will see a text area at the bottom of the page labelled “Update Services”. In this box you should add as many XMLRPC update services as you can find, it takes no effort to add these sites once you have a good list so you may as well stick in a huge bunch of them.

What you dont have a list? You dont know where to find them? Ok I will give you my personally list right here, it is what I use on all of my blogs and find that it is a decent list that works fine for me:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

To use this list simply highlight it, copy it and then paste it into your “Update Services” box in your admin and you are good to go. If you have anymore of these update services I will happily add it to my public list after checking it out.

Well I think that is pretty much it for now, I will get a couple more posts out by the end of the week hopefully and see how it goes, I was hoping to get a more recent preview of Rank4 out soon as they have been adding more things and fixing a few bugs so there should be something good to talk about there. Also I will be having an exclusive look at a new open source website engine that is very uncompetitive at the moment, I cant mention much but I think this could be the social bookmarking of 2009.

Take it easy guys

Ok so its been a while but Im kicking off the new reviews with a personal favourite of mine so I will try to be as clear aboout what this tool does and does not do without getting too excitable. Ok for starters what this tool is is a plugin for Wordpress that takes a bunch of RSS feeds and pulls articles, adds to your blog and then sends a trackback to the original blog(extended functionality not available in the original plugin, more on this later).

Now if you are unfamiliar with a trackback it is essentially what some forums and blogs use to announce that they have linked to their site, some of these forums and blogs will in turn publish a link back to your site automatically. Trackbacks have been turned off on a lot more sites recently so this side of the plugin has decreased in effectiveness in the recent year or so, nevertheless it still works to some degree and will result in hundreds of links in most circumstances.

Download WP autoblog

So we know what the tool does lets get into how the plugin is used. As with all WP plugins you will first need to upload to the plugins directory of your WP blog and then login to activate it in your admin section, sounds easy right? Well thats because it is. Once activated you will need to enter in you’re RSS feeds into the text area in the plugin admin section of your WP admin. When setting up this plugin you will want to add A LOT of RSS feeds, this will work with as few as 20 feeds but you should really be looking at 100 at least, maybe even 1000 if you can get that many unique feeds.

Once you have input your feeds simple click the “Run WP-autoblog” plugin button and then walk away from your computer and get yourself a bevvy, you’ve earned it. Now I know what you are thinking, “Is that it?”. Well yes and no, for starters it is never good having a site up with no monetisation so you will either want to be setting up these blogs with the intent of procurring a bunch of links without any effort so that you can redirect, at some point in the future, to send those links to a money site of yours. Alternatively you can add some adsense on there or some related affiliate ads.

I would advise against having these sites up for too long as you run the risk of getting the site delisted from the major SEs and they lose their value, it is better to have them running for a few weeks to a couple of months max and then redirect. One major drawback with these blogs is that they are incredibly server intensive so you will ideally want a VPS or small dedicated server. I recently tried having 1 blog running on some unlimit hostgator hosting and with 40 RSS feeds they will literally block any visitors because the plugin is working overtime.

The plugin described in this post is based off the Elliot Back plugin with some extra functionality.

Welcome back to another follow up on the social bookmarking software review, this time we will take a look at a couple of wordpress plugins for social bookmarking and see how they stack up against each other.

Auto Social Poster - $197

Ok for a start I gotta say OUCH!!! $197 is a big pill to swallow for a wordpress plugin, I realise there was a lot of work going into this plugin but from all accounts it may not be as useful as it would seem at a glance. Yeah sure it bookmarks to a whole bunch of high PR quality domains but it will not even semi-automate account creation, it must be done manually and then entered into the software, not much fun I gotta tell ya.

Also as this tool is a plugin for wordpress it is highly limited in its uses, it can only be used on WP blogs. There doesnt appear to be any account randomisation so all bookmarks get published to the same account which means your account will get banned pretty quickly on all bookmarking sites, this is not good.

Ok well I dont really wanna delve too much deeper into this software as you would be much better off buying something like bookmarking demon, setting up countless accounts across loads of bookmarking sites and getting indefinite amounts of backlink love without having to pay through the nose for a very limited piece of software. Now if they lowered the price to be around $50 maybe it would be worth the hassle.

Socialize it Pro - ??

 Sorry guys but this one is a little too elusive even for me. I searched and couldnt even find their homepage let alone an affiliate link. I could find a cracked version but I detest these so didnt wanna put my system at risk. From what I hear it is very similar to Auto Social Poster in that it is a blog plugin that has no account creation module to it. I dont like the sound of it already so Im going to just through out my objectibility and stop ranting now.

If you want some serious links either get a standalone windows bookmarking software or use one of the web based social bookmarking applications that will be reviewed in my next post. SQUIRT and Rank4 may be some of the best web promotion tools out there for straight promoting websites.

Ok so with the initial part of this post out of the way lets get to actually looking into these different social bookmarking softwares and see what each one has to offer us in terms of traffic, links, ease of use, reliability and all those other factors that make using these softwares good or bad.

Bookmarking Demon ($97(v3), soon to rise to $147(v4))

I have been using this program by Edwinsoft for just over a year now and have seen it go from strength to strength to meh. Basically it has become somewhat outdated in its uses and the drivers (for social bookmarking sites) that it supports, now there is a good reason for this in that Edwin has taken some time out of updating drivers to concentrate on creating the new version which from most accounts seems to address a lot of the criticisms placed upon BMD. That is not to say that BMD is a useless tool right now, far far from it.

For the one off $97 fee you will get monthly updates for life and access to future upgrades such as the much touted new version 4. Ok this sounds like a good deal, what sites can it handle? Currently it is really only useful for gaining links back from scuttle sites. Most of the major site drivers have become outdated and as such are pretty useless. Some scuttle sites can give good returns in that they generally are not heavily moderated and have a mix of templates and IPs to gain backlink juice from.

Is bookmarking demon worth $97 baring in mind it really only is a scuttle site submitter? No. Is it worth the $97 considering you will get a free upgrade to v4 when it comes out? Probably.

It really is a shame that BMD isnt in better shape at the minute as I have really enjoyed using this software and would recommend it to anyone on the basis that version 4 turns out half as good as it is meant to be but I cannot be sure that it will as I am not part of the beta test team. I will update here when a newer version has been brought out.

SEnuke - ($97 per month)

Ok so you’re probably sat here thinking DANG why so much? Well Ill tell you why so much, because SEnuke is possibly the most feature rich windows application for doing keyword research, finding affiliate products to promote and lots of link building functionality. This tool is great for getting links from a variety of places such as youtube, myspace, google videos, stumbleupon and many many more major high PR sites. It is a great piece of software for finding a niche, spinning some articles and them posting them to a bunch of sites to get your articles published and promoted all in a very short amount of time.

However there is a but to this program and a big but at that. It seems very limited for extensive link building. For getting noticed in smaller niches it is great and is a very unique tool in the scope of its uses but for pushing existing sites to hundreds of sites and building thousands of backlinks from unique sources with a range of PRs it will sadly not satisfy. If I were to recommend spending $97 a month on a piece of software like this you would have to be an affiliate marketer that simply publishes articles and hopes to rake in some profit with an ever expanding net of articles and blog posts.

This software is not really aimed at those just wanting to gain hundreds of backlinks quickly it is more about gaining a select bunch (around 20 or so) quality high PR backlinks which are great for ranking when the competition is low, which you can see using this software. It isnt for everyone but is a kick ass tool in its own right.