I have yet another exclusive application review here, it is a simple dofollow blog comment finder similar to CommentKahuna. The software we are looking at here is called The Free Blog Commenter (will be shorten to TFBC from now) and where it differs from its competitors is its speed and sheer volume of blogs it will find for you.

While Blog Comment Demon can and will find a staggering number of blogs for you to comment in it is a little outdated and will result in google temporarily banning you from their search if you keep searching with the tool, a common fault with SEO software that rely on google to search for websites. TFBC does not have this limitation as it uses other means to derive its results.

Speed wise I don’t really think that it could be a whole lot quicker, it makes full use of threads (which means dual core processors will speed this puppy up well), generating upto 15,000 blog pages to comment on per keyword per plugin. Whats more is that TFBC will search for three types of blog comment plugin on blogs and could mean as many as 45,000 blog pages PER KEYWORD.

If that isnt impressive enough on its own merit (45k pages per keyword) then perhaps the fact that it is completely free. All you need do is goto www.thefreeblogcommenter.com and enter your email address to be sent the download link.

Just in case you don’t realise how great blog comments can be to your SEO efforts you may want to think about possibly the most important factor in SEO, backlinks. Backlinks are the main ranking factor for most search engines these days and as such you should be getting as many as you can, blog comments are great as they provide keyword relevant contextual links and allow you to set the anchor text.

If you are in desparate need of backlinks then this software really is worth its weight in gold. Go get it now and get to work.

If you have an opinion about this tool leave a comment below, the creator reads here often so it could be a great way to get your ideas implemented into the next version (or even a completely separate tool all together)

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.

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.