Saturday 10 March 2012

SENuke Reviewed

Product: SENuke
Version reviewed: 2.4.24
Website: http://www.senuke.com


For those unfamiliar with SENuke it is one of the few very memorable SEO tools that really has stood the test of time and kept truly relevant over a span of years. Obviously SEnuke has changed a lot over the years adding new promotion methods but has always stook to its core of posting to video, article and web2.0 sites.



So what is in SENuke?
SENuke is a multi-tool made up of lots of smaller tools, these include:
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Directory Submitter
  • Web2.0 Submitter
  • Video Submitter
  • Article Submitter
  • Press Release Submitter
  • RSS Submitter
  • Forum Profile Creator
  • Website Indexer
  • Pinger
Right off the bat that is one of the main reasons SENuke was popular on release and is as popular today, it uses a bunch of techniques that have proven to be effective

How hard is it to setup?
Installation is largely simple as it should be when a tool comes with an installer. Setting the tool up before starting it on your profiles is a slightly different matter. With the first startup setup of your profiles there is a huge amount of info that is needed so SENuke can go off and work.

The large amount of setup needed for your profiles is due mainly to how many different techniques it will leverage for your linking needs, you cannot realistically expect to have a tool know exactly how the user wishes to promote the webpages. Even though there are lots of fields that need entering there are clear instructions for each input and plenty of functions to auto-fill fields that are don't need to be user specific, this is a great plus and really makes the process easier, not fool-proof by any means but simpler.

How much does it cost?
This is where SENuke really falls flat, its price. At $147/month it is one of the most expensive backlinking tools on the market, a lifetime license can sometimes be purchased for around $2k but you really have to know that this is right for you before dropping this kind of cash on a tool.

While $147 a month is very high I do feel that a monthly charge is justified in this case as all of the websites need constant updating and a monthly charge ensures that this continues. While I think a monthly charge is worth it I cannot agree with the valuation. There are alternatives to the "mini" tools in SENuke and often do things better, more sites or wider variety of sites to submit to, and often for a one-time fee.

There is a $67 cut-down version of SENuke but it misses most of the reasons you would pay for SENuke such as its innovative diagram designer (more on this later) and the majority of promotion tools. I am not sure why they would sell this license at all really as it would be hard to justify paying $67 for a tool with its specs let alone $67 monthly.

How much work is it to use?
A real pet peeve of mine is when a tool is billed as being "automated" or "simple to use" when they really aren't but luckily SENuke is true to its word in being a real hands off experience. After setting up a profile it requires nothing other than to be left on to do its work. The scheduler can be confusing at times, not really being clear when it is going to do what, just occasionally firing up and doing something.

After a while things become clearer and it is a piece of cake to get multi profiles all being promoted independantly without any need to do anything.

If the price doesn't put you off then you will be glad to know that SENuke is one of the few powerful SEO tools that really can be left unattended for days on end.

Effectiveness of Link Building
Due to proxy timeout issues, and time constraints that prevent me from re-testing, I am unable to give exact empirical data on how often a submission is successful or not but I can see that after the slow proxies (bad private proxies that should have been replaced the day before) were dumped there was a good percentage of successful submissions that resulted in links.

The sites that SENuke works on are largely high PR websites (often PR3+) which is a good thing, however it is the domain that has this high PR and not the pages on those sites that you are creating. As you are creating new pages on these websites you are generating lots of PR0 links with no history. That may all sound very negative but it isn't really as bad as you would think.

So what good are a bunch of PR0 links? There are so many SEOs out there that fixate on one type of link, often high PR or .edu/.gov links, that they forget the bigger picture. It is always best to have a good natural looking linking pattern and most websites linking patterns have lots of low PR links. As the links are on authority domains with plenty of history the links will be valued towards your rankings.

The main gripe with SENuke now and in the past is the devs not staying on top of the sites and keeping them at a high percentage chance of success, this is a real shame. With a high monthly charge should come a very high accuracy of the sites that it submits to and even though it works with many sites there are not really enough to justify the price.

Main Features
One of the biggest features of SENuke is its setup wizard and it is definitely very easy to use once you know what all the inputs are asking for, the best bit of the profile wizard is its auto input filling functions for sections that are not specific to your website. In most software the wizards can be as cumbersome to use as simply entering information manually but SENuke really does make it easy to understand with a step by step approach that breaks down the whole process of setting up your profiles into much more manageable steps.

A huge feature in SENuke is its ability to simply download content for posting and automatically spin this into new unique articles, obvioulsy this will mean a lower readability of your articles and web2.0 pages but I was using it for backlinking so this was not a concern. It has great integration with its own spinning system (50 spins per day per account only) and The Best Spinner, to be reviewed in the future, which means you can make your content very unique very quickly with just a single mouse click. This feature is not to be overlooked, it really is that useful.

Automation; I have covered this already but it needs to be mentioned again. There is a high level of automation to SENuke that isn't really found in many of the more powerful tools, xRumer, Scrapebox etc all require lots of work to get setup everytime you want to use it.

Feedback and Logging
This isn't something that most people think about but as a long time software tester, designer and general nosey parker I like to know what my tools are doing at all times. Transparency can go a long way to finding out what a tool is actually doing, sometimes they can look busy but not actually do anything.

SENuke does seem decent in this respect, when a submission fails it will add an entry to a log and you can see what modules are active and there is an interesting multi-browser window where you can see what pages are being accessed and the actions being taken on them, I will explain why this is interesting and not a "good" thing later on.

System Resources
There is a problem with testing system resources.... SENuke force closes Task Manager  when it wants to, actually its when it starts a submission but nevertheless it is downright annoying and makes it very hard to guage how much of the system it is really using at any one time.

With just one profile the memory usage can be nearly half a gigabyte (currently 478Mb), this is very high for a tool that is currently sat waiting for its next submission to begin. There is no need for it to be this high. The main reason, I imagine, that the memory usage is so high is due to the way that SENuke uses multiple web browsers to create accounts.

Use of Web Browsers; a good thing?
It used to eb all the rage to use web browser components in automation software as it allowed a quick and easy way for developers to interact with the internet. It soon become apparent that there was a big downside to this method of automation in that it was not very scalable at all. Each browser component uses up a large amount of memory which can limit how much work a tool can reliably do without affecting the rest of the system.

Another huge caveat to using a web browser component is that it will download images, media and, more worryingly, run flash and javascript code. The big issue with running flash and javascript on many websites is the likelihood of contracting some nasty virus(es), I remember trying out a web browser based commenter a few years ago and it would have been decent had it not been for the fact that virus warnings were coming in every minute. A good AV scanner will mitigate most of the worry from this but no virus scanner is 100% effective and there is an inherent danger of contracting something.

One issue that could be cricumvented by SENuke is the way proxies are applied in SENuke, rather than applying the proxy to the web browser control as it is needed the app simply sets the proxy in windows and relies on that. This may seem like a minor niggle for those running on a VPS or who have a dedicated SENuke box but for all other users (majority of) it is a huge pain in the ass. Lots of other apps rely on the windows internet connection settings for their connections and if SENuke has been using bad proxies this will screw things up for them.

The issue of proxies has been brought up many times in the past and for some reason the devs at SENuke have been very reluctant to change it, it is a real shame. There was talk last year of them moving away from web browsers and into using sockets for their internet connections but for whatever reason it still has not come into effect and it seems to have been put on a back burner.

The use of an Anti-Virus scanner is explained and advised when setting SENuke up so at least they warn about this side of things but the proxy issue of being set in Windows after all of this time is just lazy on the part of the devs.

Stability
It has to be said that testimonials on forums and blogs suggests that the stability of SENuke are not great, there are lots of people claiming regular crashes and bugs. From my experience I have to say it has been fine, I have experienced crashes but they have not made any meaningful impact on the usability or effectiveness of the tool.

Why I give SENuke a bit of a pass here is due to its impressive failure recovery, when a failure occurs it will prompt the user to notify of a crash, restart and then continue to post from where it failed. The user prompt is also time sensitive so if the user is not present to OK it it will simply continue on as if nothing had happened. It is a shame there is an inherent instability and that it needs a recovery mechanism but it at least negates the perils of a potential serious crash.

Trial Availability and Money Back Guarantee
SENuke does offer a full 14day trial and a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so you can give it a spin without having to spend a dime. The trial does require a paypal subscription payment to be setup so if you do get the trial be aware of the fact you will be charged if you do not cancel the subscription.

The trial has no limits that I can see, there may be some small limitations but I couldn't see a difference between the full version and the trial.

Conclusion
SENuke really is a great tool for getting backlinks, posting your content to lots of sites and is very easy to use for all of its features. There are some major downsides to it though in that the price is prohibitively high for lots of users and the advancements don't seem to be in line with its price.

Even though the price is very high it has paid off for lots of its users, stories of users creating successful businesses off the back of SENuke alone are plastered all over the internet and I am inclined to accept they are probably accurate for the most part. It really is possible to make much more money from SENuke than it costs so in that respect it is worth the price.

The stability is higher than some users would have you believe and I am happy to set it running and not sit watching it. After the initial quick, thanks to all of the auto generating aids, setup SENuke is a very easy tool to use and could be put to use in any serious SEOs tool box. The main areas I, and many others online, would like to see SENuke improved is in the number of sites it targets and its price.

Scoring Breakdown
All of the below criteria are out of 10.
Usability 7
Price 4
Features 8
Variety of Domains 4
Quality of Links 9
Automation 8
Configurability 7

Overall - 47/70

2 comments:

  1. good article.. you can read tablet news at http://tabletnewsinfo.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. The software is a beast! You can read more about senuke here.

    ReplyDelete