Sunday, March 18, 2012

Is SENuke X worth the money?



In a nutshell, SENuke X creates backlinks automatically by submitting articles to article directories, creating social bookmarks, submitting press releases, uploading videos to video-sharing sites and creating profiles on forums and web 2.0 sites. This, in itself, is nothing groundbreaking, as there are quite a few programs that do something along those lines. The critical factors to whether it’s all it’s hyped up to be are:
What are the success rates like? (i.e. if the software attempts to build 100 links, how many actual links will I end up with?)
How many backlink sources can it submit to?
How automatic is it really?

SENuke X Review

In case you are wondering about the last question: All autmation software still needs some degree of “baby sitting”. Ideally, you can do all the work once, then have the software take care of the rest. In many cases, however, you need to frequently intervene to activate a next step or do some other manual task. One of the most promising features of SENuke X is that it’s supposed to be almost completely hands-off.

Some Numbers

First, let’s take a look at how many target URLs or backlink sources SENuke X comes with. SENuke X can automatically create and verify email accounts on Y! Mail, Hotmail and AOL Mail. These email accounts can then be used to create the various accounts that you’ll submit content and backlinks to. These are:
39 Web 2.0/Free Blog Sites
86 Article Directories
25 Social Bookmarking Sites
29 Video Sites
5 RSS Directories
21 Press Release Sites
131 Non-Forum Profiles
430 Forum Profiles
This makes for a total of 766 different sites to potentially get backlinks from. In addition, it’s also possible to add your own custom lists of forum profile targets. While many submitters have larger target lists, what’s worth noting is that all of the sites SENuke X submits to have at least a PageRank of 1 on their homepage.

Success Rates

An important factor with any kind of automatic submissions is the success rate (or failure rate, depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty type of person). In short: How many of the submissions actually work?
I've done a few hundred submissions and account creations with SENuke, so far and here are the numbers:
On the account creation, I saw an overall success rate of 86%. That is impressive.
On the submissions across several campaigns I've done, the success rate has been between 70% and 80%. This is a good success rate and it has a lot to do with the fact that SENuke X gets updated several times, most weeks. Sites where submissions fail consistently tend to get weeded out and new sites are added on a regular basis.

Complaints

Overall, SENuke X has been working really well and I've been impressed with most of it. But of course, I also found some stuff to complain about during my testing.
During my initial test, the scheduler did not work the way it should. It seemed like it would just get stuck and manually starting certain task projects didn't help, either. This issue was fixed only a few weeks after my review was published and ever since, I have not had any new problems with the scheduler. It now works the way it should: you simply set up your campaign, tell the software over how many days it should spread the submissions and leave it running. So that's one complaint off the list.
One thing that's a real pity is that you can't go back to the diagram, where you draw out a "link-map" for your campaign, and add new parts to it. As far as I can tell, you can only start a new sub-campaign from scratch, including new profiles and accounts created for everything, if you want to use the diagram mode for building more links to the same site again. You can add new submission projects to an existing campaign, but not using the diagram.
Finally, something that struck me as strange (but isn't a huge problem) is that only .wmv, .avi and .mpg are supported for video uploads. Just seems weird that probably the most universal format for online video, .mp4, isn't included and neither are flash formats.
Out of all the above, the only really fatal flaw is the problem with the scheduler. SENuke X is significantly less useful as long as that isn't fixed.

Conclusion

SENuke delivers on it's initial promise and it manages to be the most automatic link-building tool I've seen since SERPAssist. The latter failed to impress me mainly for two reasons:

1) it didn't produce significant ranking results for the sites I tested it with and
2) it had a very limited amount of backlink targets, a problem that it doesn't share with SENuke X.

With a recent update, SENuke X 2.0 no longer needs to rely on a browser to create accounts and do submissions. Before this update, the software did most of the tasks by running several instances of Internet Explorer and automating the form-filling and clicking necessary for the submissions (which is the way almost all of these link building softwares work). Now, it does the submissions utilizing so-called "sockets". The practical effect of this is that it's a lot faster, uses fewer resources and is a lot more stable.
Overall, this is a huge improvement to the software and it's a feature that can justify the additional cost of SENuke X over some competing products.
More SENuke X Info over here