Buyer Beware! -Search Engine Ranking Software - Useless

As all webmasters look to create better ways to achieve link building, in hope of gaining top search ranking, more and more software is developed and sold to make this task "easier" and quicker.

However the problem with this as a lack of knowledge of processes, creates a waste of your time and money.

Lets look at this based on a product that claims to generate back links from high page rank wordpress blogs. Wordpress is well used free blog software that has a huge following . Many top bloggers are using it due its easy use and friendly free tools or "plugins" – which provide more functionality.

The software I looked at claims to post comments on high ranking blogs, in the market of your choice simply by clicking a few buttons. Wordpress is on its 2.2 version and is very aware of these actions, as are wordpress programmers.

So I log into my own blog, and I see I have 104 comments for moderation like:

"Hi !!! -The Author, you - super hero!" and "What beautiful text and visitors!"

Well thank you very much – (head beginning to swell….) however they *all* link to "questionable subject" sites at Blooger.com – the free blog site. Now all of this links have very similar comments, so my best guess is that similar software has posted the links.

There are 2 faults with this method:

1. Plugins stop these comments ever appearing- I use a plugin which will highlight these links and them make me approve them before they even display. Lets say for a minute that I don't have the above plugin and the comments are shown on my site - then comes the second problem.

2. External nofollow Tag– The main reason this software exists and is being used as the owner area seeking "High PR links" That's high Page Rank links back to there own websites in order to rank higher in Google.

However Wordpress, in its most basic form uses what called a "External Nofollow" –Tag on all comments placed on the blog (I believe blogger and other blog platforms also follow the same outline)

The no follow tag does not pass on any of the page reputation on from the page which means you get no benefit from the link at all, it will not help your ranking.

The best way to see this in action using Internet Explorer is to follow these steps:

1. Go to any blog page, that has comments on it, with external links

2. Click View >> source on the top menu bar

3. In the new text window that opens click Edit >> Find

4. Type: external nofollow in the box

If you are using the firefox browser- (which I highly recommend) – you can load a SEO for Firefox extension ,which make it very easy to see these links and it highlights them in red:

It also provides a wealth of information as well on the sites you are looking at ,about links, alexa rank, Page rank etc

So back to the software- Who does it really help? Well the programmer who got paid to make it, the marketer who made money when he sold it (and sold resell rights to it as well)- everyone except the person using it!

Also at the same time do you think Google would approve of its use? They left it to the programmers to update the wordpress software and keep everyone (well almost everyone) honest.

So when looking at software to help your business, (there are many helpful software tools) be aware that anything that totally automates any process is unlikely to be effective when a few people start using it. Especially anything that has a purpose purely just to create links for search engines, which is highly disliked by the engines as its seen as attempting to influence results.