No Hands SEO Reviewed

Product: No Hands SEO Version reviewed: 1.7.2 Website: http://nohandsseo.com  Price: $77 (with discount)

So what is No Hands SEO?
No Hands SEO is a new breed of backlinking tools that have been created to be as automated as possible, just 3 inputs and you can start building backlinks. What made NHSEO so popular was its quick setup and the fact you didn't have to touch any settings to start building links

No Hands SEO uses many different techniques and methods to gain backlinks and improve search engine positions, the link sources are listed below:

• Whois posting
• Blog Comment submitter 
• Trackback submitter
• Image Comment Submitter
• Website Crawler
• Auto checker
• Pinger

The list of techniques used may look meager, especially when compared to the likes of GSA Search Engine Ranker, but the main selling point of the tool is its ability to be used on any website or webpage and have the correct techniques applied accordingly. For example crawling of website and whois submissions are only performed on websites which saves time that could be wasted when promoting.

How hard is it to setup? 
Almost too simple, you enter your website address, some keywords to search with and your desired anchor text and that is it. Once the profile/s are entered all you need to do when you load No Hands SEO is to click the start button and the tool takes care of the rest.

There are plenty of settings and options that will determine how the tool works, for instance you can set things such as Pagerank and outbound link limits, proxies and the usual things you would expect from any decent SEO tool. Most of the inputs and setting options have their own dedicated pop-out text that appears when you hover over to aid in setting the tool up for your needs.

The amount of settings can be a bit daunting for some but I am of the opinion of the more the merrier, especially when they are optional.

How much does it cost?
The retail price for No Hands SEO is $97 but is available on a number of popular SEO/IM forums at a $20 discount, making it $77 one time price.

The cost of a product should not be just the number after the dollar sign but also how it relates to what it can do for the user and how much time it saves. As NHSEO takes very little time to setup and can work endlessly it is worth every penny and then some in my opinion.

How much work is it to use?
Over the years a great many softwares have come and gone proclaiming to be the easiest tool ever created but very few actually live up to that hype, many claim automation when what they mean is that some aspects of jobs are automated but you still need to tell it what you want automating. No Hands SEO is definitely different in this aspect and almost everything is setup and ready to go.

It really is as simple as enter in your basic website information and hit start, it really couldn't be any easier. The next step in automation from here would have to be telepathic controls.

Effectiveness of Link Building
Blog comments, image comments, trackbacks and whois links aren't the highest quality links available and they are likely bested by many types of manually created links but we are looking at a fully automated tool here and you cannot expect caviar links for burger effort, or something to that effect.

People have been talking about the demise of these types of links but they definitely still have their place on the SEO landscape. When you are trying to index your tier pages these links can be invaluable and will likely also give those pages a boost in ranking potential which will trickle up to your money site.

I have done and still do run this direct to some of my money sites and have only seen improvements with this tool. Where it tries to set itself apart from the more recent competitors in ScrapeJet and GSA Search Engine Ranker (reviews coming soon) is its ability to automatically crawl your website to promote internal pages. It will also perform different techniques depending on the type of profile it is running which is a great feature that neither of the other tools do not have.

Main Features
The main features are full automation and its promotion techniques. Out of all the "fully automated" tools I have been testing recently this is definitely the most automated tool, in fact it is the most automated backlinking tool I have ever had the pleasure to "use". I say "use" because really all I do is click start and leave it running on a VPS.

There are a range of platforms that NHSEO will post to and these range from being good for getting a website noticed and indexed by the search engine to relevant links with the possibility of a dofollow link. Most links will be nofollow but I regularly get PR4+ links and have even got some as high as PR7, I have heard of higher but these cannot be expected often with these types of links. Even with most links being nofollow you are getting relevant links from an endless supply of different websites some with high PR and with a good range of quality which you would expect from any genuine linking pattern.

Another unique feature of NHSEO is its ability to store and check every target, post, live link and prevent posting to not only the same post but also the same domain. This feature really limits the amount of complaints you will receive as you are not bombarding webmasters.

Due to the automation it is tempting to simply enter in a profile and leave it at that but it takes little effort to setup the profile with unique custom comments and setting unique anchor texts for each page will ensure a great boost as every page of your website will be getting relevant links with their own set of anchor texts. There is support for Spinner Chief 2 (currently free) which will spin your comments for you so you can have unique comments posted every time.

You can set limits for PageRank and Outbound Links on a per profile basis or globally and generate backlinks from any specific region.

System Resources
NHSEO has a reputation on the forums for being a resource hog and it has been in the past but this is no longer the case. It is not the most resource efficient tool on the market but storing and referencing every target and post will use some CPU cycles. In the more recent versions I have not seen anything above 20% processor usage and this is with only an occasional spike, normally it sits at just 1-3% CPU usage even at 60 threads on a Core2Duo system.

Stability
I have yet to see NHSEO crash, bugs can and do occur but I haven't been affected by any for the last 3+ months and generally any bug is fixed up quick enough that it has never been an issue this far.

Trial Availability and Money Back Guarantee
There is a 7 day trial available without personal information so you can give it a go, there were some restrictions on its use but I think they have been lifted now. There is also a 7 day money back guarantee that is good for any reason.


Conclusion
I was using NHSEO since November and I have to say it is great that these features have been added and it has turned No Hands SEO into a fully featured automated backlinking tool that is both easy to use and very customisable. Nothing out there is this automated, quick to setup and able to run forever.

NHSEO isn't without fault however, while I run with private proxies and have tested with proxy harvesters without issue the built in proxy harvester is quite useless. I know useless is quite strong but with what I am guessing is a thousand or more users out there using the same sources I do not see many working proxies being harvested. This is a really disappointing aspect of No Hands SEO as the rest of the tool is a dream to use and is very capable.

If you have access to private proxies or any decent proxy harvesting tool you could realistically gain thousands of backlinks every day with a minimum of effort on your part. I have been lucky to be able to use similar tools and have to say that of all of the automated backlinking tools out there this is the easiest and will pull in many more links (reviews of competing products coming soon).

Proxy Goblin Reviewed

Product: Proxy Goblin
Version reviewed: 2.3.1
Website: http://proxygb.com/


Proxies are a very useful resource when using a variety of SEO methods and tools. Usually you will have to pay for some proxies or

So what is Proxy Goblin?
Proxy Goblin is an automated public proxy harvesting tool, it is a set and forget system that is able to harvest an amount of proxies set by the user and output the list to email, .txt file or FTP upload.

Proxy Goblin has all of the settings and options that you would expect from any good proxy harvesting tools with some unique attributes that I haven't seen in other tools. In the output options pane there are program options which will interface with the chosen program and send over the proxies for those programs to use directly

How hard is it to setup?
About as hard as you would expect. For fully automated operation you set your desired number of proxies, the minimum requirement (transparent, anonymous or elite) and some basic timing settings and you are set to create a constantly updated list of proxies.

How much does it cost?
On the website you can get a copy for $67.20 but on some forums there are discounts to be had, WarriorForum has it available for $31.20.

How effective is Proxy Goblin?
When you harvest proxies with Proxy Goblin it will search lots of webpages containing lists of public proxies, once it has downloaded these lists it will get to checking them based on your settings. If you want to use these proxies in google for instance you can set it to check for viability with Google etc.

You can set how many proxies you want and it will find them, the amount of time will depend on your desired amount and the type of proxies you are harvesting. I am not sure if it is quite as fast as Proxy Multiply (review coming soon) but it is slightly more pleasant to use and setup.

Proxy Goblin is definitely capable of harvesting and checking proxies to provide lists of proxies for your needs, these proxies have been great while testing for my next review (comparison of automated backlinking tools) so I can vouch that these proxies are very close to as good as having private proxies but at a fraction of the cost.

While public proxies aren't as fast or reliable as private proxies with Proxy Goblin you can get a fresh list of proxies every 10-15minutes which will really make all of the difference when running any SEO tool.

Conclusion
As Proxy Goblin is not a backlinking tool I won't be scoring it as one but I will give it a solid 8/10 due to its very reasonable price and great automation and output options.

It would be nice to see a slight improvement in speed and a trial (ala Proxy Multiply). Right now Proxy Goblin cannot be beat on options and settings, there is still some room for improvement but for the time being this is a great proxy harvesting tool that is very capable and customizable.

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

What this blog is all about...

I have been working in the IM/SEO industry using many softwares and services for many years now. In all the years I have been using and testing services and softwares there has never been a single reliable SEO software review site that I have seen. There are plenty of review sites laden with affiliate links and misleading marketing tactics designed to push a single product or group of products that pay the highest price.

Due to the lack of honesty and transparency of testing and results there isn't a truly reliable blog or website that is designed to give reliable advice on what softwares/services are worth the money and which ones are little more than successfull marketing campaigns with no substance.

Obviously there are always forums to serve this purpose of getting real impressions of how a tool or technique may work but again there seems to be a large amount of testimonials that are unreliable, biased, misinformed or just flat out lieing. I have literally lost count of the amount of times where a user has spouted his impression as fact and has been corrected literally minutes later. Forums are great for getting a groups impression of something but is also full of people posting with their own agenda.

With this blog I will be putting tools and services through their paces and showing the results of my tests to show no bias. I will not be dealing in opinion and theory but absolute facts and results.