This blog gets a lot of traffic from people searching for blackhat and general SEO tools and software so I thought I’d continue my series of tool reviews. Today, we’ll look at a tool called BruteForce SEO, all the hype around it and what’s behind this hype.
Strictly speaking, BFSEO is not really a blackhat tool – and has never been positioned as such by its owner, a certain Australian named Peter Drew who has previously enjoyed some tool related fame connected with his previous release, Bad Ass RSS (infact, when you search for him in Google, you get nothing but his own blogs, search pages etc. – which can only mean one of the two things, namely that either nobody is talking of him or he does a really good job at reputation management – or possibly even both).
But however Pete’s skills at online marketing himself and his releases may rock, the tool itself, BFSEO, is a failure at large. First announced and prelaunched in September 2008, this tool boasted a nifty set of features that were either supposed to come with it right away or be delivered soon after – e.g. an automated solution for social bookmarking submissions – only to be failed or released much later, this all with a monthly subscription fee. That very social bookmarking automation module only came out with the February update, so you would have had to pay the monthly fee for half a year to get what’s been announced as the functionality to arrive next week after the launch. The tool itself came out buggy, many early subscribers complained they couldn’t install the updates, or the tool stopped working after installing the updates. The software’s windows do not fit smaller resolution screens, some buttons end up below the fold with no way to access them, the tool crashes often in the middle of something… – the list goes on and on.
A typical screen a BFSEO user is likely to see :
Technically, BFSEO is a Windows-only desktop application built on .Net and running in a browser (IE, of course) instance. Consequently, there is little to no way to integrate it with your server based tools.
From the point of view of its functionality, BFSEO is a ripoff of SENuke for those who are familiar with it, with a little twist. It starts with a screen where the user should enter the details of the project – such as keywords, the URL of the site to be promoted, existing accounts in Google, Yahoo, Tripod, etc. or as an option create those accounts. It took the developer a while to figure out the places such as WordPress.com actually send email confirmations with a link to be clicked before anything is activated there – and for the audience the tool is mareketed for (beginners wanting to make some money on the web and not knowing much about it) this is of course far from the obvious. The tool has often been struggling with captchas in its different versions – and truth be told, it does not solve captchas but serves them up to the user for the user to solve them manually.
The next step is adding the articles/content – here we meet the next bunch of problems, such as lack of support for UTF encodings and consequently, inability of the tool to work adequately with any languages other than English. In the later versions, Pete added a twist claiming to generate “unique” content out of any material given to the tool – but the same content with a different set of HTML tags inserted into it hardly qualifies for being unique. Also, at different stages users have complained about their content disappearing should they want to save the project for later use and quit in the middle of it – which is kinda a desirable bit of functionality, considering that the complete run of the tool takes about 4 hours with the user having to provide input every now and then.
OK so, after you’re done struggling with adding your content the tool starts creating your pages in Yahoo! Geocities (that is, provided it hasn’t failed to create you an account there), Google Pages (never seen this one succeed in half a year), Tripod (50% success rate), WordPress.com, Blogger.com and submitting your article to a bunch of article sites. (The accounts for those article sites are created by a separate module that is not connected to the tool in any way and does not support automated exporting of created accounts into BFSEO, so you have to enter them manually). After this step is done, the feeds from all the places that have them are submitted into feed directory sites, for some of them again you had to create the accounts beforehand with a different tool and no export option. After all of that is done, theoretically you can also bookmark all the stuff that’s just been created in social bookmarking sites – again same story with their accounts.
Mind you, from the point you start the tool running creatoing the pages and up to the point it is done submitting bookmarks there is no way to stop or pause the tool or skip any of the steps – you are bound to sit and watch it run slowly without any real progress indication you could trust and enter captchas manually every now and then. hence, definitely not a blackhat tool. I cannot really imagine a blackhat having so much time on his hands as to sit and watch his sites’ pagerank grow like this.
Truth be told, the results of such a run are quite effective, and the sites run through BFSEO get indexed pretty fast, and the mini network, should it get created successfully and not dropped or hung up somewhere in the middle, is quite powerful due to kinda smart interlinking done in the process – but should the run fail anywhere there is no way to intelligently redo it or fix what has failed or pick up where it dropped, or even get the info of what has been craeted already, thus turning it into waste.
What is even more disappointing is Pete’s attitude towards his users – he kinda had a system in place to listen to all their complaints and bug reports, with multiple channels to do so – from built in functionality in the early versions of BFSEO (which he later killed off) up to having a forum for his tool users – but he tends to ignore most of the feedback and suggestions anyway. His developer (not even sure it is the same developer still, seeing how the tool was completely overhauled at some point) contected at least some of the users soon after launch – but even the feedback on bugs provided to the developer (Pete himself is no coder and maybe it explains it) did not help as we haven’t seen the bugs we mentioned fixed up to the version we’ve seen last before we unsubscribed.
Why have I subscribed to it in the first place? The hype around the launch was pretty big, the marketing campaign was quite an interesting one, with a countdown till launch page, pre-release signups, limited number of spots available at every stage etc., plus as some of you may know I am into building my own tools lately so I kinda wanted to see how others handle it. Besides, since one of the goals of this blog is to review the tools currently available in the market, and Pete himself has not offered me to review his tool like some developers do, I needed to know what it’s all about to then be able to answer people’s questions adequately.
Was it worth the money spent for me personally? Yes absolutely – I now know what mistakes to avoid and how not to kill an effective marketing campaign by releasing a failsome tool. Would it be worth it for you? I doubt so, unless you are a newbie wanting a quick start and even ready to tolerate the bugs for that purpose – but as soon as you learn about the mini-networks, authority sites, interlinking and what works best, unsubscribe. No matter what new features he promises. It might take him another half a year to release them.
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