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.

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.

SQUIRT ($100 / month) 

This review was originally intended as part of my social bookmarking reviews but as this tool (much like SEnuke) is so extensive in its link building and publishing techniques I felt it needed a little more scrutiny. SQUIRT is not just a simple social bookmarking tool it is a complete website promotional tool for professional web designers wanting to rush their sites into the index.

I will start with the social bookmarking side of this service, this is a fairly recent addition to the tool and added to the list of techniques such as mass pinging, directory submissions and recurring promotions. Some of these techniques are better than others but as a whole they really do push sites into the index pretty quick and result in some added visitors as well as propelling your sites up the search engine results pretty quickly.

In the forum there are a bunch of tools and databases for download which will benefit most all types of internet marketers such as trackback spam software for gaining easy backlinks, a translation script for increasing international page count on existing sites, free access to Auto stumble ( a simple stumbling software for sharing stumbles review coming later) and some other goodies. There are too many databases to mention (currently at 76 databases) which can make for a great base for your websites.

Ok so all this sounds great, what is the catch? Well I hate to say it but there is no catch……

There are a few catches…

The tool has seened diminishing returns as of late, it can now take up to a week to get indexed (not often but in some circumstances) and the support is severely lacking. Many people have seen issues go unresolved for periods of upto 4weeks or more, and this isnt exactly uncommon. One of the main selling points about the SQUIRT service is that you would gain access to Rob and Eli’s experience in this field and that can be very beneficial, but only when they choose to acknowledge your request.

$100 every month is a lot to ask when the service isnt regularly updated or added upon, in 9months or so there has been the addition of Auto Stumble ($15 value at the time), a directory submitter (to ~115 PR0 sites) and a recode of the SQUIRT process. This is not really enough in my opinion. For this money the sales page offers monthly updates and lots of freebies but the updates are few and far between and rarely live up to the hype. I am still thinking a combination of bookmarking demon 4, when it is released, and another tool I about to comment on would be a much better combination of cost, value for money and return on investment.

All in all a great tool if the price tag were a lot lower, or if updates were a lot more common. Good if you are looking to promote a good amount of sites on a daily basis but not for those with less than 100 websites.

So you may have never heard of SQUIRT or Rank4 and if you havent you are very privileged to find out about two of the webs best kept promotional tools out there. Why web applications I hear you ask ( no really I can, I am pyschic or was taht psychotic? Meh….)? Well basically outsourcing all of the account handling and such you rely on someone else for the upkeep of their service.

This may not sound great to most people but the folks over at SQUIRT and Rank4 (separate entities completely) are very knowledgable in getting sites published and promoted to the top of search engines quickly, they know exactly what links give the most bang for their buck and also the best ways to get these links. I have chatted with the owners of both of these services and can totally attest for how professional they are and how much they know about this business.

The added beneift of these services is that you will never have to visit or sign up for any website that you wish to publish to, this in itself can save weeks of manual work or days of waiting for auto tools to create accounts, you can also set it and forget it, basically add your sites to their promo tools and go off and build more sites or write more articles.

Ok with that out of the way lets get down to just what these services are exactly: I was limited for time so I will post the details of these two services in a follow up post.

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.