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Archive for the Category "Product / Service Reviews"

Sandboxie – Recommended Free Tool!

 Author: admin Apr 16

So last week my machine was working away with a few programs, doing some “automated SEO” and all of a sudden my firewall and antivirus shut themselves down and some magical piece of software popped up telling me about all these hundreds of problems with my computer. Some nasty Malware had infected one of the sites that one of my programs had gone to and then managed to infect my machine! It was something along the lines of “Internet Security 2011″ or some other spammy fake antivirus name that tries to force you into paying for the software, in order to remove these fake problems. I spent a while removing it (about 3 hours total to remove every trace of it!) and then decided I would upgrade to Windows 7 from XP anyway.

So I ordered Windows 7 from Scan and as usual it arrived the next – just as I finished backing everything up to an external disk! Right – I wasnt getting this nasty Malware again so started looking into VMware and similar programs, at which point I found Sandboxie. This little program works similar to a virtual machine – but its a lot quicker and easier to use! Simply install it and it adds a “Open with Sandboxie” option to any programs when you try and right click them. When you open any programs with Sandboxie it uses an isolated part of your hard drive so that any nasties do not harm your computer. This means that even if your running any automated software and it visits an infected site – your computer isnt harmed. When you have finished running the software simply delete the sandbox and all the nasties are gone!

You can copy selected files from the sandbox to your main machine if you want to (ie any created files) or you can tell Sandboxie to punch a whole in the sandbox for selected folders/files so that changes are made to the original file rather than the sandboxed version.

You can even use Sandboxie for your normal internet browsing to help protect you from any sites that have been infected. It is free software with no restrictions. They do have a paid version at 29 euros which allows you to set certain programs to always open with Sandboxie so you dont have to remember.

If you are using any automated software – or even if you just want an extra level of security when browsing the net, I suggest you head over to Sandboxie and download it now. As I said, its free (and no affiliate program so reason for me to promote other than its a good piece of software) and I have noticed no slow down in my computer or the software running within Sandboxie.

And just to give you an extra reason to download it – from the Malware I got infected with, all of the FTP details for all of my sites was stolen and most of my sites infected! Luckily Im with TSOHost who restored all my sites back to before the infection and I deleted all my FTP accounts. Security tip 2 – Once you have finished with FTP access, delete the profile!

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Advanced Web Ranking

 Author: admin Aug 19

I was looking around for some software to make monitoring SERPS a bit easier as I am now building quite a collection of sites and it was becoming time consuming checking them all by hand.

I was recommended Advanced Web Ranking keyword research tool by 2 different people so decided to give it a go. They offer a 30 day trial, which unlike a lot of sites, you do not have to register to download! A couple of clicks and the 70MB download begins without giving out any contact details, so you know you’re not going to get loads of spam from them.

Once you have installed Advanced Web Ranking, you are greeted with some sample data. Where several news sites rank for different key phrases. This immediately gives an idea of the power of the software. Select a keyword and the sites you want to monitor and Advanced Web Ranking will take care of the rest. It gives you the current website ranking position, previous position, change and their best rank, which is exactly what I needed! You can have the data displayed in a graph, which is good for a handful of sites, although I would imagine that as soon as you end up with more than 5 or 6 sites it starts to get messy.

The other section of the software that looks like it could be very helpful is the “Visibility” report. This takes the information from the main report and lists each website, along with how many keywords the site is ranking number 1 for, how many in the top 5, 10, 20 & 30, how many have moved up/down and a whole host of other data, including a “Visibility Score” and “Visibility Percent”.

With both reports you have the option to select the dates that you want to compare the new search engine ranking data against. So you can show the increase over the last day, week, month, year – any time period you want!

Each time I open the software I find more and more new features. The latest one I have just found is a “Triggers” function. This allows you to set up triggers (kind of obvious huh?) when certain events occur. For example you can set a trigger so that when any of your keywords enter the top 10 it lets you know, or you can set an alert so that if your term “widgets” ranks for number 1, you get alerted, or even to monitor when your competitions keywords drop!

My only slight niggle is that the logo looks too much like the Firefox one and I have already opened it twice by accident, although that’s easy enough to change.

So overall this piece of software seems like a lifesaver, it does everything I need, and more, in a fraction of the time any other software I have tried can do it! Once my 30 day trial is up I’ll be buying the $399 (about £250) enterprise version. The only benefit of the $599 version over the enterprise version is that if you have multiple users, you can all share the same database so probably not any use to any/many of us affiliates.

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How To Outsource Backlinks

 Author: admin Jul 17

In my previous article about outsourcing backlinks, I recommended oDesk, which allows you to outsource a variety of different tasks. You simply post an advert with a description of what you want doing and how much your budget is. Usually within a few hours you will have a handful of applications for the job you are outsourcing.

Since posting the original outsourcing backlinks article, I have had several PM’s, emails and comments asking me to give the names of the users I outsourced my backlinks to, or an example of the advert I had posted. Now, Im not going to give out the names of the users I outsourced to – I’m keeping them for me, but I will give an example of how to advertise on oDesk for backlinks.

—————-START OF ADVERT—————-

Title: 120 Profiles with backlinks from Angelas Packets.

Descriptions:

I need 120 profiles creating on websites from Angelas or Pauls Packets.You MUST already have the backlink packets.

You will need to create an email address (either Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail) and to create all the profiles with. I will supply you with a username and 2 links to put in each profile.

You will need to supply me a spreadsheet with the URL of the backlinks and the username and password of the profile.

All the backlinks must be created within 48 hours of the job being accepted. All backlinks must be created by hand, no automated software.

—————-END OF ADVERT—————-

Thats it, simple and to the point. Remember that a lot of the people applying the job wont speak fluent English so try and keep it as easy to understand as possible. Obviously you can specify other things such as only to use page rank 7 sites, or only use sites from packets from 2009 – just remember to keep it as easy to understand as possible.

My other piece of advice would be that when you give the job to someone DO NOT close the job. There are some people on oDesk that will mess you around and not bother working – just cancel the job (you dont pay them), and select someone else. If you close the job you have to mess around creating a new advert and waiting for more users to apply for it.

So now you know how to outsource backlinks, head over to oDesk and started!

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Outsourcing Backlinks

 Author: admin Jun 22

I posted the other day that I had found the joys of outsourcing backlinks. This post is a review of the oDesk experience.

oDesk is easy to sign up to, nothing you wouldnt expect to answer for this type of service. You do need to give them your card details when signing up. Once signed up they charge your card with two difference transactions, both of which add up to $10. It took a few days before I could check the amounts to get my account verified, but you can start outsourcing backlinks or any other work as soon as you create your account.

Once your account is created you can login and post a job. Posting a job is kind of like posting an auction on eBay. You select the category you want the job to go into, in the case of outsourcing backlinks, I selected SEO. You then complete the job title and description. I tried to make the description as easy to understand as possible, but make sure that everything was covered – remember alot of these workers dont speak English very well. You are then able to select the qualifications that the applicant must have in order to apply – I left empty. The final part posting the job is the pay! You can select to pay per hour and tell them how many hours per week you need them for, and how many weeks you will need them for, or alternatively, as I did in this case, a fixed fee for a set amount of work.

Now my job for outsourcing backlinks has been posted and is available for all to apply to. You can either wait for users to apply for the jobs, or select users that you think may be interested in outsourcing backlinks and invite them to apply for the job.

Once you have an applicant/bid you are happy with you simply click a button to hire them and they are added to your “team”. From here you can send them messages with attachments, monitor their work, pay them and plenty more I havent explored yet.

The whole process is about as simple as it could be, and oDesk dont charge you anything. oDesk take their cut from the workers pay (ie if you pay them $10, oDesk take $1 and the worker gets $9).

As for the quality of work…

You would have thought that outsourcing backlinks would have been a simple task, with the right software in place it doesn’t take long and its not difficult to understand – they even have a PDF telling them exactely what to do!!

The guy who applied for the first 60 profiles I tried outsourcing made no effort to contact me, didnt really understand what I wanted him to do and when I eventually managed to explain to him he just disappeared and stopped answering my messages. Since then I have cancelled the assignment and created a new job for outsourcing 120 profiles!

I didnt bother inviting anybody I thought might be interested in outsourcing the backlinks this time and just left it for the workers to apply. Within 2 hours I had 5 people apply, one of which bid $10. Couple of clicks and he was hired! I was just in the process of writing a message to him to say what I needed doing, but before I could finish the message I had an email from his asking for the URL’s and Anchor texts for the links so he could get started.

A couple of hours later  I received a report with the first 30 profiles in, I checked a couple and they all looked ok. Sent him the next batch, again a couple of hours later and I had another report! I have since gave him the final 60 profiles and I am waiting for him to complete these.

This is guy is better and faster than I expected and I will be sure to use him the next time I am outsourcing backlinks. He lists a variety of other types of links he can build so I may try some of them out.

So to sum it up, I got 120 backlinks built to the standard I would have built them myself, for £6.80! 120 profiles (240 backlinks, less than 3p per link!) would have taken me about 10 hours (5 minutes per profile), all thanks to my new best friends over at oDesk. I was paying $5 per month for Angela’s backlinks and doing all the work myself, I can now pay $5 per month and get 60 profiles created for me, and still get the packet (all the links are provided in the report!). So, will I continue outsourcing backlinks through oDesk, I think the answer is a definate yes!

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Angelas Backlinks – 6 Weeks On…

 Author: admin May 13

A month ago I did a follow up review for Angelas Backlinks which I had been running for a couple of weeks. Since that post I have received another packet from Angela, and also unsubscribed.

I received Mays packet and worked through the whole packet in one shot. A couple of days later I went through and checked what links were still there and which had been deleted. 3 or 4 of them had been removed and the rest were still in place. I also noticed that my IP, domain and email had all been blacklisted on a VBulletin spam site. This prevents me from signing up to any new VBulletin sites which use the same plugin. With about 25 new links built the site moved up in the rankings from 5th & 6th to 3rd & 4th and then finally up to 2nd & 3rd.

So for each site I have built the links for I have had a decent jump in SERP, so why have I unsubscribed? The simple answer is the amount of people using these packets is too high. As soon as the packets are released the sites get a massive hit of traffic and start putting measures in place to stop the unwanted traffic, including marking users as spammers. What I will say though is that the TYPE of links do work and Angela’s backlink packets also do work! So rather than buying the link packets and hitting the same sites as everybody else resulting in sites being blacklisted, links being lost etc I have decided to find my own links.

The links are the same type of links as Angelas except I can sneak a handful of profiles in over a couple of weeks, rather than the site being hit with thousands of new users within days. Sure it takes longer as I have to find the sites in the first place, but once you have a decent list you can use the same sites over and over again without being noticed. Not only that but you can find niche specific pages!

As an example, I was looking for some video games links, I managed to find 36 at PR4-PR7 in about 45 minutes. If you count all the sites I found, PR1-PR7 (didnt record the PR0 sites), I found a total of 59 sites! 59 sites, all with dofollow links, in the niche I want to target that arent going to get spammed and my links removed!

Tips for helping your profiles go undetected…

1) Do not use a product/website name as your username. For example if the site you are promoting is “BlueWidgets.com” do not sign up with the username “BlueWidgets”. This makes it obvious that you are there for one reason only! Use a ‘normal’ forum name such as “John1456″.

2) Do not use an email address linked to your website. Again if you are going to be promoting BlueWidgets, dont use the email address admin@BlueWidgets.com. If the website has accounts manually approved the chances are you arent going to get through!

3) Some people think that by posting in the forum it will help your profile get indexed quicker. This is true, but if you just spam the forum your account will get deleted and you will lose the links anyway. Only post in the forums if you have a valid post to make.

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Angela’s Backlinks Review – Part 2

 Author: admin Apr 09

Last week I posted my Angelas Backlink Packets review after a couple of days of using them. This is an update of how well Angela’s Backlinks are working for me.

On Monday, I received an email from Angela with links to the April backlink packets. To try and stop spammers and people distributing the lists around the internet Angela has taken steps to protect the documents. The protection comes in the form of you needing to enter your email address, which is then checked to make sure you are allowed to open the document. There are several problems with the new protection though, including only being able to open it on one machine, not being able to copy it to a word document, or even print it!

I also had a problem with the first document saying I had opened it on too many machines, despite only opening it on one machine. I eventually got everything sorted though and can now view the documents, but still cant print them which is quite annoying.

Last week I said about 2 sites I had linked to, one sitting at 3rd & 4th and one which was sitting at 11th. Those positions were still steady last night when I started doing this months Angelas backlinks. I went through the first 10 links from the packet and added a link to each of the sites (some sites only allowed 1 link, so I linked to the higher ranking of the 2 sites). I wasnt expecting to see any change in rankings for the first couple of days, however this morning after checking the links my site which was ranking 3rd & 4th is now 1st! The other site hasnt moved yet though.

During the week, I created about 5 more pages from marchs backlink packet with links to 2 more of my sites. These sites had been sitting at 9th and 11th before I created the links, after creating the links to these sites they have moved up to 2nd and 9th respectively within a few days.

So the overview of my Angela’s Backlinks Review, a must for anybody using SEO. The effects seem of building these backlinks seems to be almost instant and just a handful of links can send you fromthe bottom of the first page to the top within days!

The only negative to these links is the time taken to create them, although I am looking into different methods of speeding the creation of them up, and also ways of making sure that all the links are indexed and stay indexed in Google. Once I have done a bit of research I’ll post again so everyone can benefit.

If I get through Angela’s packet quick enough this month I may take a look at Pauls backlink packets as well, which is 50 links, PR4+ for $8 (Angelas backlink packets are 30 links, PR 6+ for $5). On paper it doesnt appear as good value as Angelas packets as they are slightly more per link, and the PR is 4+ rather than 6+, however if they have anywhere near as much power as Angela’s then they are definately worth it, even if just used as a backup list of links.

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Angelas Backlink Packets Review (So Far)

 Author: admin Apr 03

As I said in my previous post, I have recently signed up for Angelas Backlink Packets which I started working though on Thursday night.

Firstly, as I didnt get the packet until the end of the month, most of the other users have already jumped in and done their links so some of the sites had either closed registration, removed link fields or changed the fields to plain text only. So far I have gone through about 20 of the sites and probably 5 are “dead”. I was expecting this anyway though so its not really a problem.

When you subscribe to the backlink packets, Angela will send you an email with a link to a page containing that months packets. I thought it was a bit odd that a package of 30 links was spread across 7 zip files at about 2MB each, however once you have downloaded the packages it becomes clearer. This isn’t just a list of URL’s, there is a guide for each and every site, showing you where to sign up, where to put your links and what code to use for the links.

The backlink packet for March contained 32 backlinks, or which there were 2 PR9 sites, 1 PR8 site, 9 PR7 sites, 19 PR6 sites and 1 PR5 site. One thing which I already knew, but is worth pointing out with Angela’s links is that these are the Page Ranks (PR) of the homepage of the site, your link will be on a newly created profile page, or an inner page on the site with lower or no Page Rank.

From what I have seen so far, there are 2 different types of links in the packet. The most common one is a profile page on a forum or networking site which contains your links, and the others are sites where you will need to leave a relevant comment on either a blog or forum to squeeze your backlink in.

The content of the sites vary widely, covering an array of niches. In this months packaet there were web development sites, health sites, law sites and many more. Obviously this will vary from month to month, but if you do find a site which is in your niche then it may well be worth a bit more than just a profile link.

As I said at the start, I’ve gone through about 20 of the sites and created the backlinks. I did 5 on Thursday and 15 yesterday. I have put 2 links on each site, pointing to 2 of my sites. Is it too early to expect results? Yes. Have I seen any results? Yes.

One of my sites which had been sitting comfortably at 6th & 7th on the first page has now shot up to 3rd & 4th, with only one site outranking me taking positions 1 & 2. The second site I linked to was more of an experiment. A site I had created a month or so ago and hadnt got around to do any backlinks to. The site had been indexed, but wasnt in the top 200 for my targeted keywords. The site is now ranking top of the 2nd page, at number 11 for the targeted keyword!

I thought I would do a little more digging. From what I can see in Google, only 2 of the links I created have been indexed! Once I have added the rest of the backlinks, I’ll go through and collect all of the backlink URLs (should have kept a note of them from the start!) and either create an RSS feed to submit, submit them to a social bookmarking site, or post them on a blogger/blogspot blog, or possibly a combination of all three!

So, my review so far… This backlink packet costs $5 (£3) per month for a minimum of 30 URLs. From the 30 URL’s probably 20-25 of the links will still be working at the end of the first month and I would imagine this will drop to 10-15 with time. However, provided my results dont drop too much from their current rankings then its definately worth the $5. If adding the extra links, and getting all the pages indexed pushes the rankings up even further then that will be even better.

The main “problem” I am having is the time to create all the links. I have seen a few WSO’s for automation or speeding up of these link packets so I need to do a bit of digging around and see if any of them are any good.

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO, Product / Service Reviews  | 6 Comments