Ok so hands up who has heard of Rank4???? Nobody?? Well that is because this is an exclusive review intended to bring news of?the new Rank4 system to the public. Lets start with what this system is and what it does…

?What is Rank4? It is similar to SQUIRT in that it is a web application that takes care of your indexing and ranking for your sites. With the easy process of filling in 4 or so fields in a form you can have your site added to directories, social bookmarking sites, pinged to lots of blog lists, added to rolling link lists, mentioned on many blogs and other techniques that are not to be disclosed (trust me when I say I asked…. a lot).

How much will the tool cost? Currently the cost is not set in stone but is likely to be released around the $70 a month mark. This will market it below the cost of SEnuke and SQUIRT but still more so than Bookmarking demon. If it is worth this will have to wait until later on. I must stress this is still very early in development really and as such lots can change including its core featureset and the cost. We are in the midst of a conversation about a $10 a month discount for readers of SEO software reviews, so stay tuned for a unique discount right here.

How many places will it publish my link to? Well quite a few actually, the system has the capability to submit to lots of major high PR bookmarking sites like propeller, jumptags, stumbleupon etc etc over 20 major sites and counting. As far as smaller sites go there are currently at least 50 social bookmarking sites which will have increased to more like 200 by launch (still to be announced). Directory wise there are currently about 20 directories with a mix of PR and backlinks but this will be increased to over 100 by launch and over 250 by the years end.

Thats cool what else does it do? Well as I said above it will ping your site to one of the biggest ping lists collected and tested to be working, like SQUIRT it will crawl your site and repost deep pages of your site so you can be assured not only the homepage is receiving link love.

So with all that out the way what are our first impressions of this tool and what it offers? Well at first you may be fooled into thinking that the basic template and stupidly simple form may mean that the tool itself is simplistic and basic in its uses, but look deeper and you will find lots of things under the surface that you have overlooked.

Unlike SQUIRT and some other tools there is support for randomisation in the titles, description and tags which means when you publish your site you can gain lots of seemingly random anchor texts, to disguise your actions from the search engines, and descriptions for unique yet contextual page content. This in itself puts it a step above the other tools.

Just how good is the social bookmarking submitter, well the system so far has the capability to use a private proxy owned and run by the Rank4 guys and an inifite amount of accounts so that submissions are spread thinly across lots of accounts to reduce the risk of banning. All accounts are handled by the Rank4 team and as such there is no time wasted on setting up.

The directory submission system is built directly into the submission form and requires no extra time to be submitted, it uses the same randomisation in the titles and descriptions, all directories are owned and run by Rank4 so you needn’t worry about confirmation emails or the risk of getting denied, all sites are welcome (if they are legal). Unlike the SQUIRT directories these directories actually have PageRank, backlinks and history.

The ping and crawl system is much like the one found in SQUIRT only it publishes to a greater number of services even at this early stage in development, it crawls X amount of pages and pings them then goes deeper and pings even more pages. There isnt much more to be said about that part of the system really, its a simple yet highly effective method of getting you’re site out there and receiving visitors right off the bat.

As part of the submission your links will be published to blogs and rolling link lists on many different niche sites that again are owned and operated by the Rank4 team as well as having history, page rank and backlinks. This is something that no other system really offers and is really great for raising your link profile.

I have been informed that initially the system will be offered up for review by a group of some of the more influential bloggers out there and then a short term discounted offer for some public beta testers before it is released to the public. If this tool is released at the published price of $60 a month ($70 -$10 using our discount coupon) it will be well worth the money especially with the included scripts for tasks such as cookie stuffing, website translation by page, databases and the unreleased Blog Food (***EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW COMING VERY SOON***) system.

I am just sad that my testing time was as short as it was but I can assure you this thing works, I submitted a site and when I got home 3hours later my site was already ranking quite well, this on a previously unindexed site. I will keep you updated on this service when the closed beta test has commenced (of which I am a member).

P.S if anyone is interested in becoming a closed beta tester (free) leave a comment here with your email and credentials and I will pass them on.

Ok so here is a review of a golden oldy, Win HTTrack has been around for literally as long as I can remember and has been useful to me many times in my professional life. Basically what it does is it will crawl a website and mirror it on your hard drive so you can browse it, or scrape it,?later on.

The plus points of downloading a website before scraping is that when you are testing out your scraping script you will not be wasting bandwidth and the scraping can be done at the same time you download another site meaning you can maximise your time.

There are a couple of issues with using applications such as HTTrack, Win or Web (Linux/Unix version), in that it will download the entire site, not just the pages you need but the entire site (ways around this to come later on), and also that it will struggle to download sites that dont have standard navigation routes, such as search driven sites, AJAX / JS?navigation etc. There is an option for inputting login details, username and password, so you can download membership based sites.

HTTrack is a multi-threaded system hogging machine when it wants to be but as such doesnt mess around in doing what it is meant to do. I really like it and find that its short comings are far outweighed by its positives. Best thing about it is that it is free so anyone can check it out.

Hello there and welcome to my new blog, here I will be highlighting and giving honest reviews of some of the more stand out software solutions out there be they for “White Hat” or “Black Hat” SEOs. Whenever I was looking to buy a new product for helping me build links or for an article to go viral I would spend ages just looking for a legitimate review place for these softwares. The main issue with finding legitimate reviews is that they are always sponsored by an affiliate scheme and as such are always good reviews, it is very hard to find anything negative about new products.

Now this is not to say that everything I say will be negative about products or that I am not sponsored by affiliates but I will always give honest reviews and explain views expressed by other parties and third party experience along with my own. I have been at this for quite a while now and have a veritable toolbox of apps that I use on a daily basis, some that were very effective then but not now, some that have never been effective and others that are as good today as they were when they were released.

My comments section, though moderated, will never remove any negative comments (only spam). I hope to provide a place where people can really discuss a new product without worrying about a mod wanting to give an overly impressive image of a given program. Anyway with all of this out of the way I will be getting right down to the meat and potatoes of this blog and start my reviews off with some classic apps that are still doing the rounds in one guise or another…