Article Marketing Robot – Experiences & Review

Nov 29, 2011 by

When I started to learn more about  the world of article directories then of course first of all I have started to discover and submit to these directories with Allsubmitter. Soon I have realized that although Allsubmitter is a wonderful all-purpose submitter tool, I might be a good idea to try a specialized submission software, simply because when it comes to article directories there are a lot of peculiarities Allsubmitter is not that good at handling. For instance some article directories are using reCaptcha which cannot be properly handled by Allsubmitter, but even worse, there are a bunch of article directories where you are supposed to copy a number into the captcha field that is displayed next to the field itself: again a problem Allsubmitter cannot automagically solve. Same applies to random-generated passwords sent in e-mails after registration for instance

Specialized directory submitter

This is a situation where a software with a narrower focus can be helpful: an article directory submitter, and Article Marketing Robot is one of them. I don’t know exactly why have I opted for this piece of software (perhaps it was the cheapest with its $97 price tag or the downloadable demo version? ), but I can recall that having read through some web pages of these submitter tools, I was totally fed up with extremely long web pages with an endless sequence of testimonials, bold headings written with Impact typeface, words highlighted with yellow background, special prices just for now, just for you: all in all the worst onine marketing style which might be boring, annoying but almost never believable or convincing.

Complete solution for popular directory scripts

So finally I found myself playing around with Article Marketing Robot, which can basically submit to directories built with only a few popular scripts like Article Friendly, Article Dashboard, ArticleMS, Article Beach or WordPress. Unlike a general submission tool, AMR can handle seamlessly the whole submission process: it manages directories, directory lists and link building campaings, it offers an article writing and spinning tool, scheduled submissions automagically handling all the stages of registration, e-mail confirmation, article submission and even provides a reliable and detailed reports on the success of our article directory submission campaigns.

Problems with AMR

Unfortunately Article Marketing Robot has its serious shortcomings too:

  • First of all it is written in .net framework (or what) which makes the entire software crawl on older or weaker machines. As I previously used a netbook only for the sake of Windows-only SEO tools just like AMR, I had to buy a brand new laptop so that I will not have to wait for so long until the software refreshes the database lists I am actually using.
  • When I started to use Article Marketing Robot, it included about 10.000 URLs in its directory list which should have been called as a pile of garbage with some article directories scattered around. It contained items like IP addresses, duplicated entries and a lot of other addresses which obviously never seemed to be a possible URL for an article directory. While having a lot of irrelevant URLs in the directory list is not really an issue with a tool like this which is based on the brute-force send and forget method, it’s just somehow disappointing when you are supposed to have paid for a quality software. Since then a lot of sites have been axed by the developer, but unfortunately quite a few working ones have been also removed from that collection with this purging.
  • When I bought this submitter, the built-in captcha connection with captcha solving services was broken, so I spent quite a lot of time with solving captchas manually. This was good for getting some hands on experience, but again, it is not quite fair that you are supposed to install and use various beta versions as a workaround for a bug once you are to have paid for a stable software.
  • Some features appear for a certain version and sometimes these disappear or are changed in the next release: well, you might argue that this software genre in general is far from being mature, but it is also weird when you see some big changes and removed features when upgrading from one minor release to other.
  • Finally it might be a bit embarrassing that you cannot see what’s happening under the hood: why can’t you send an article to your own WordPress-powered article directory, how come that there are a lot of sites which are created apparently with one of the supported scripts but the software can’t just recognize and properly handle these directories, etc, etc.
  • Using this submitter, you are quite close to spamming: I mean you are signing up and sending out submissions to a lot of sites regardless of their niche topics or submission guidelines, without being able to easily and properly control which category would be the best pick for your article.

Advantages of using AMR

Although the list of advantages will be considerably shorther, the major selling point of purchasing a specialized article directory submitter even if you are using an other tool for directory submission like Allsubmitter is that everything is way much faster than doing it manually or with an all-purpose link submitter tool.

Summary

While Article Marketing Robot is far from being a polished and mature software, it is well thought out enough to save a lot of time when you want to deal with article marketing. Article directory owners might not be that happy when their directories are hit by thousands of submitters, but AMR proved to be a useful tool to improve your rankings in Google for niche keywords with deep linking – even for international, non-English sites. You can submit to somewhere close to thousand different article directories, but don’t expect much more valuable links at the end of the process than just a few hundred.

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How to find almost all directories?

May 10, 2011 by

There are three different ways of building systematically your own link directory (or social bookmarking site or article directory) database — all of them is based on finding certain footprints or texts present on only the kind of sites you are looking for by scraping search engine result pages.

Finding sites which call themselves directories

It might be rather ineffective on the English web due to the enormous volume of (useless, paid or otherwise not that useful) directories where a search engine  “web directory” or “link directory” strings  can be found by search engines, but if you are looking for foreign language sites, it might be still useful such as looking for “Webverzeichnis, Webkatalog” or the “Annuaire, Annu” words if you want to find German of French sites respectively.

You can add up some adjectives to these like “Free” or “SEO friendly” to the above expressions or other special keywords which can be found only on link directories (or sites dealing with link directories) such as for instance “ohne Backlinkpflicht” (“without compulsory backlink” in german) or otherwise narrow down to the type of directories you are looking for such as “deep link directory” or directories with “instant approval”.

The topic of the website you are about to promote with directory submissions can be also incorporated in these search queries, although a query like “Real estate directory” will scrape both directories accepting only real estate related links and subcategories of general directories.

Finding directories with footprints of directory scripts

Taking the most popular link directory script as an example, one expression which can be found on a huge number of link directories poweded by PHPLD happens to be the expression “powered by php link directory”, although there are many oher directories, where the owner has paid an extra fee to remove this attribute from the directory’s footer.

Other typical thing is the submission page’s URL: PHP Link Directory Script’s link submission script can be found at submission.php, so if you are looking for this sites with the inurl:submit.php special expression, you will find many PHP LD sites. Unfortunately many other systems or sites which have nothing to see with link directories have similar urls, therefore it is better ro refine this expression and use the inurl:”submit.php?c=” expression in Google, as the submission pages corresponding to certain categories have URLs like this.

Submission pages sometimes tend to have other specific texts, so examining a few directories of a certain kind you can figure out commonly used expressions (which are part of a default template of that directory script for instanca) you can find similar submission sites easily.

Anyway you can use Google and search for directory footprints expression to find a lot of footprint texts and expressions.

Finding sites by detecting links to submission forms

Although the words which are used by linking the submission forms show a great variety, you can discover which are the most commonly used expressions such as Add URL, Suggest a site, etc. The easiest is way of gathering all possible variations is to collect the verbs used for submission, suggestion and adding plus the words used for links/sites:

[enregister|proposer|proposez|s'inscrire|inscrire|referencer|réferencer|soumettre|ajouter|ajoutez|présenter] [votre|un|mon|une] [site|site internet|site web|lien|url]

As you can see in the above example we gathered different verbs and their most commonly used forms, then added other possible variations for the most requently used nouns in this context. Having put them in the word spinning syntax used by Allsubmitter’s value generation module and let processed by this module, you will get a long list of every possible combination:

“Enregister votre site”
“Enregister votre site internet”
“Enregister votre site web”
“Enregister votre lien”
“Enregister un site”
“Enregister un site internet”
“Enregister un site web”
“Enregister un lien”
“Enregister site”
“Enregister site internet”
“Enregister site web”
“Enregister lien”
“Proposer votre site”
“Proposer votre site internet”
“Proposer votre site web”
“Proposer votre lien”
“Proposer un site”
“Proposer un site internet”
“Proposer un site web”
“Proposer un lien”
“Proposer site”
“Proposer site internet”
“Proposer site web”
“Proposer lien”

and so on….

Some of them will be grammatically incorrect or for other reasons seldom used, but this will not be a problem, because if no site has these bad expressions normally created by machine translation only then it will not even give you false positives.

If you cannot find enough directories

Before you start to systematically discover link directories with a specialised tool like Allsubmitter, you can usie a directory list published on some web site as a starting point: although many directory lists are rather outdated, these will help you to identify what’s common in certain types of directories, thus give you a good start for creating your own expressions to scrape search engines in your search of directories.

As search engines will provide you with only a limited number of results for each keywords and expressions you might want to try expressions narrowed down to certain top level domain names, so instead of  “Link Directory”, you can use the

  • “link directory” site: com
  • “link directory” site: net
  • “link directory” site: org
  • “link directory” site: info
  • etc. expressions too

This way link directories will give you four times more results hopefully, as having only a few hundred initial results is just not enough given on the fact that how many of them will be filtered later on during the process.

If you’ve found just too many sites

Using the above methods you will have a whole lot of false positives: sites which are not directories, sites — like this directory blog — which only write about directory scripts or submissions. Allsubmitter has a few handy features to filter these lists and eliminate unnecessary items:

First of all you can determine which expressions’ presence would indicate in the directory that a site has a submission form and let Allsubmitter to find exactly where the submission forms are located too. Cases when sites which have internal links with texts usually referring to submission forms but on the referred subpage no actual forms can be found by the Allsubmitter (because for instance the form is only available for logged-in users) can be also determined.

Unfortunately this algo is not working 100% perfectly so you will still have many sites which will not be directories indeed, therefore you should also use an other feature of Allsubmitters’ Catalogue Base handling module which lets you filter lists by the contents of database fields. For instance if you search for %link% of %Link% or %dire% or %Dire% or similar SQL expressions in URLS and web page Titles but you cannot found neither the link nor the directory keywords, chances are high that you can remove that site from the scraping’s results.

Going through all results manually

Once you have systematically gathered and meticulously filtered your results, the last step would be to go through those sites with Semi-Automatic Submission to check whether they are really directories, and whether they allow your sites to be suggested for free or with any other conditions which are acceptable for you.

Allsubmitter provides sophisticated tools for the whole process, effectively assisting you to:

  • gather sites with search engine queries
  • remove duplicated links or domains from the results
  • detect submission forms by examining web sites while deleting all sites which are not responding or giving errors
  • determine other parameters necessary when assessing the results such as Page rank values or IP addresses
  • finalize your directory list by going through the directories with an easy semi-automatic link submission process.

 

 

 

 

 

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Using directories as a honeypot

May 2, 2011 by

Once web directories were widely used as means of navigation on the web, nowadays they are almost exclusively used as means of increasing the number of backlins to someone’s site. Nevertheless you can also install a new directory only to create a kind of honeypot in order to figure out the different tactics advanced link marketeers, black hat SEO professionals commonly reffered as spammers use on a daily basis.

Who will discover your empty directory?

If you publish a link directory or a social bookmarking site on a parked domain of yours or simply at a subdomain belonging to a free hosting service, sooner or later some SEO professionals will discover it by using some kind of search engine scraping, provided that you let Google see your newly created link collection.

Checking your statistics you will be able to see some search queries and discover what kind of directory footprints have your submitters searched for in order to find your site.

Later on some of them will list your directory in their directory lists or even include it in a link submission tool. The first benefit of establishing a honey pot directory will be that it willa allow you to discover some popular directories of directories or submission tools.

What will they do?

On the other hand you can analyze the sites which have been submitted to your directory by trying to find answers to questions like:

  • What kind of anchor texts and descriptions are they using?
  • What other sites have they submitted the same link to?
  • Did the above activities result in any change in Google’s rankings?

All in all investing some time in analyzing your submitters will help you to learn more about effective and “contemporary” link building techniques based on web directory, article directory and social bookmarking site submissions.

These experiences can be quite handy if you are planning to enter a market  or niche where you have not much previous exerience such as foreign language markets: installing the corresponding translation, linking from just a few sites and waiting for the first submitters to come.

Beware of spam

The reason why I suggested that you install your link collecting site on a separate, otherwise not used domain is that this way you can try different kind of directory scripts and CMS-es, thus getting rather different traffic streams and link submitters.

For instance your Pligg-based site will be filled up with spam quickly, unless you take some countermeasures to stop heavy spamming. While a Pligg site will provide you interesting information about the nature of social bookmark spamming, other, basically spamproof scripts such as Arfooo will rather give you examples of a bit more valuable link submissions.

How link submitters work?

All in all if you create a directory site with whatever content, and let it be visible by search engines, then you will be able to get hands-on experiences with some advanced techniques. In theory you could also do this with any legitimate site of yours too, but normally you would never encorurage anyone to submit any kind of links as fighting spam is more important there than experimentations.

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Useful directory lists — only from linkbuilders

Apr 20, 2011 by

When you need a good list of directories or social bookmarking sites, no matter whether you are looking for some general directories or other sites specializing in a certain topic or language, not really the mere number of the included sites count but the ratio of the directories which are still alive and accept link submissions in a timely manner.

Aging of directory lists

If someone once happened to gather a list of directories or social bookmarking sites which was offering SEO-friendly links without nofollow attributes or redirects,  it does not really mean that this list could also work for you. As time goes by, many sites will be shut down, discontinued, become a paid directory, etc. so the older a directory list is, the more useless information it will contain. A two years old list therefore can be completely useless in many cases.

status of the included directories

Not to mention the fact that discovering new directiries is usually the first step when you build an usable database of directories. You should go and see whether they actually accept your submissions, and if so the link they provide will be valid and usable for SEO purposes. Although finding new directories might be not that time consuming, determining whether they are still working, is not the easiest task.

No directory list will do for you!

This is the reason why — based on our experience — you will never find a really usable, up-to-date directory list available publicly on the web. As neither the vast majority of “directory of directories” sites nor “directory submitter software” is owned by link marketeers who are working with the listed directories on a daily basis, the list of directories they offer will always be far from optimal.

On one hand, there will be many listed directories which have never been used by the owner of that list — if it is to be a foreign language or an other niche directory, this is quite common. On the other hand once a site is included, its status is rarely checked by hand and updated accordingly.

Only the directory list that you create

Bad news is that if you have no time to waste by submitting your links to  a number of directories which will never accept your submissions or if you plan to do regular link building, (almost) the only way of getting a really usable directory list is to create your own.

There will be one exception though: in the near future we will offer some of our proven directory lists for a minimum charge. Although many link marketeers would never publish their similar lists, since usually we do not promote e.g. British sites on the English web or German sites on the German web but foreign sites on English or German web, we really don’t have that kind of competitors, with whom we would not like to share our “secret” lists.

Other piece of good news is that there is a tool which significantly eases not only he link submission process but the creation of any kind of directory list which is the simply wonderful AllSubmitter.

We will also give detailed instructions on how to build your own directory lists soon, so stay tuned!

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AllSubmitter – The most powerful directory submitter

Aug 20, 2010 by

AllSubmitter – The most powerful directory submitter

Although AllSubmitter offers a variety of SEO functions, its most important features are focusing on semi-automatic and automatic directory submission. The philosophy behind this directory submitter is to provide an all-purpose directory (article directory, social bookmarking site, etc.) submission tool which is capable to automate any (directory) submission task.

Trust me, I am not exaggerating when I state that this directory submitter is the best and by far the most powerful directory submission tool on Earth — something I have been looking for more than a year, and just came across it by mere coincidence. It’s good to know that there are quite a few reasons why you have never heard of AllSubmitter though:

  • the software is written by Russian programmers, therefore the features and the documentation focuses primarily on the Russian market, so the English user interface and documentation is not up to the standards.
  • given the complexity of this tool (and also because of the lack of documenation) it has a really long learning curve, so it takes a lot of time to get a clue about what this tool can do.
  • maybe it’s jsut too good, so instead of spreading the news about AllSubmitter you’d rather decide not to blog about it, keeping the secret of the tool which makes your directory submissions many times faster. :)

All-purpose submitter tool

allsubmitter-menu

While other directory submitter software usually come with directory lists, by default AllSubmitter has an empty directory database. Although for an extra fee ($49) you can buy a directory list, AllSubmitter is best when you are ready to build your own database — something quite common if you do submissions for a niche or regional or language market.

There are a lot of innovative features to ease the management of your directory list: discovering web directories using search engines, importing directory lists from web sites, getting important properties of the listed directories such as domain Page Rank, and many other features for categorizing your directories, even importing and exporting these lists from/to other AllSubmitter instances, therefore potentially from other AllSubmitter users.

Automated and semi-automated submission

While many directory submitters can handle effectively only one or just a few directory scripts, this directory submitter is built so that it could automate basically any directory submission be the site powered by PHP Link Directory, eSyindicat, indexU or any other, even custom directory script.

For some directories this submitter provides automatic submission, which means that once you set up a directory, you will never have to visit it again, only click on the URL in a list, choose the most appropriate category and enter the Captcha code — something which will make your directory submissions lightning fast.

Unfortunately this tool cannot perfectly handle form elements that are loaded by AJAX calls, therefore you cannot fully automate submission for a site which uses newer Pligg versions (with reCaptcha which is loaded by JavaScript into the submission form) or for certain PHP LD powered directories where you have to choose the category by using a JavaScript-based category chooser.

Similarly you will be able to use only the semi-automated method for many eSyndicat directories where the submission preview is loaded by asynchronous JavaScript code or anywhere where istead of Captchas TextChas (tricky questions) are used to prevent bots from submitting.

There are a lot of other functions such as random rotation of descriptions and titles, a built-in e-mail client to check validation and confirmation e-mails etc., so the only thing I miss is the submission checking function based on site searches.

Conclusion

AllSubmitter is a very sophisticated tool with a peculiar user interface reflecting a well though but rather unconventional system. Once you get familiarized with it you will be amazed by its versatility. To get to that point be prepared to invest $179 in the license and spend at least a week with learning until you get up to speed with this directory submitter. You will also have to get a Windows machine because this tool runs only on Windows XP/Vista/7.

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List of German Pligg sites

Jul 3, 2010 by

List of German language social bookmarking sites powered by pligg. In this post I would like to share with you my list of German Pligg sites. The method I used to collect them was to search for two key expressions almost every Pligg powered site has: “veröffentliche” (means published) and “bevorstehende” (means upcoming). The below social bookmarking and social news site list contains 64 working Pligg sites (as of July, 2010).

I have only included those sites which might be useful for link building. As I don’t want to support spamming, I have not included those pages where I could see that the bookmarking site in question only collects sites from a niche topic, or where the site profile was more like a human-edited social news portal than a “do it what you want, we just installed Pligg on our site with a basic skin, without adding categories and such”. All in all this list is useful if you want to promote German language web sites.

Page Rank 3 German Pligg Sites

PageRAnk 2 Pligg sites in German

German Pligg sites with PR 1

German Pligg sites with Page Rank 0

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