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.

A while ago I was checking around to see what new tools there are out there and came across an interesting new(ish) site that allows you to enter in your website and have it be pinged to a whole host of aggregator sites. I mentioned how powerful using these sites was in my last post but without some jiggery pokery only blogs and forums will post updates to these sites.

Pingler.com is both easy to use and very quick for what it does. Pinging WILL bring more traffic and can result in a few backlinks, if lucky, so being able to do this so quickly and easily really is a benefit for those that cannot afford membership services or applications that will do this for you.

As far as being a complete tool there are a ton of applications and services out there that do the?same or better?but most are paid for or more restrictive. If I were to be very picky I would ask that they crawl your site and ping deep pages without the need for submitting deep pages yourself, this can take a lot of time but is worth while. As this is a free non-membership site I think it is a great tool and should be used by all SEOs looking for a bit of traffic but cannot afford a professional tool like SQUIRT, Rank4(still in BETA)?or bookmarking demon.

In my opinion if you arent using pingler (or some other pinging tool) you are missing one big trick in the big picture of SEO. Check it out before they change their mind and make it a members only site.

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.

Roboform? (download here)?is not the same as the other applications I will be looking at in this round up of directory submitters, what makes roboform different is the fact that it isnt a directory submitter at all and if im completely honest it isnt useful to me as a directory submitter. So why the hell would I be sat here writing about a program that has nothing to do with the topic of choice and is no good to me as an SEO? The short answer is that its functions suit the purpose of directory submissions and lots of people swear by it so it cant be all bad. Lets look a lil deeper.

What exactly is roboform if it isnt a directory submitter? In short it is a web browser extension that remembers form details (that you want it to remember) and can auto fill at the click of a button. This is usefull in directory submissions as it will remember all teh usual form field information, URL, title, description etc and fill it in for you at the click of a button. This obviously has many more uses than simple directory submissions but it fits in just nicely with the needs of a directory submitter.

Roboform is a cheap (read free) browser extension with a small footprint and offers lots of features that will come in handy to any SEO given enough time to find uses for it. It is definitely a great time saver when it comes to remembering passwords or filling in form after form, what it isnt good at though is finding directories to submit to. This is where I fell out with roboform, I found that with the amount of submissions I was wanting to do I couldnt be arsed to find the directories to submit to and then manually navigate to the submission page, I know im lazy but meh im also worried about efficiency.

So basically for the cost (free) you would be daft not to at least give it a try, especially if you already have a good list of good web directories (dont forget that the best ones often arent on semi-automated application lists (digixmas and submiteaze) and these give the most benefit) then Roboform is absolutely what you will be looking for. If you are a professional SEO looking for software to semi-automate 100s to 1000s of submissions in the space of a day you are not looking for roboform.