If you already own AutoPligg read this post anyways. I promise you’ll learn something…
Today’s tool review is of a tool called Autopligg by the Syndk8 crew. You’ve probably already heard of it by now but I’ve been using it for the last 6 months or so and I wanted to give you some insight on the tool and maybe some resources if you don’t already have it. Autopligg is a windows or serverside based tool that spams the popular Pligg platform, which is a CMS that basically is like Digg. There is a TON of sites out there using the PLIGG platform which makes this tool more than deserving of a review.
How Is It Useful
I use the word spam tool hesitantly in the case of Autopligg because it’s unique in the fact that yes it is a spam tool and it is automated link building but I think its real power lies in using it for white hat purposes and a way to mass post your stories to a whole lot of fuckin sites that want your posts. If you look at the typical PLIGG site it’s structured much like Digg with categories and you put up your links in those categories and people can either vote them up or down and people leave comments on it. Ya know all that bullshit you’re already familiar and tired of. You can get links one of two ways on them. You can post your links (typically article links if you don’t want them deleted) as stories or leave comments. Very few of these sites are very high PR or of a high link quality but anytime you have a platform that allows you to post links on it with well over a 100k working sites out there using it; It becomes a link builders wet dream. For that Autopligg becomes a very useful tool. Here’s where the catch 22 happens however.
The Quality Of The Links It Builds
It’s no secret that I’ve never been a believer in nofollow and its ability to be “not followed” but I’m never very vocal and definitive about it because 10 minutes after I say something about it, it could change lol. Ain’t that a bitch. The main story links are nofollowed by the Pligg platform. So every link you post as a story will be nofollowed. HOWEVER! The link will be the top outside link excluding the site’s possible navigation. It will be in a heading tag and have your anchor text. Plus it gets its own page that will be cycled through the main page. Here’s the strange shit, the comment links are dofollow. They are only placed automagically by the platform by putting the full url including the http:// in your comment. They are dofollow but they don’t have your anchor text. They don’t cycle through the main pages and they are standard links beyond the point of the page’s navigation. By now, if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you should already know what link type I prefer….both! But lets not loose focus on the point of this tool by worrying about the quality. It is by all uses a Link Volume building tool NOT a link quality building. It’s nice to have at least a bit of link quality with every link so they produce the link worth necessary to make them count instead of going supplementals. This brings up another SEO concept that the tool was kind enough to also address, link indexing saturation. I was really curious with all the links it builds at once if it’ll have at least something to get them indexed. It does have a pinger that also allows proxy use. Cool! Good enough for me. Between that and the outputted list of successful postings I have everything I need to get as high of a link indexing saturation rate as possible. Kudos on that.
How Is It Not Useful
I may spare no punches when it come to the negatives of tool reviews on BlueHat but to date I’ve never given a negative review of a tool. This is simply because I’ll only post the review if I think the tool is useful to you the reader. I tend to reserve that right when asked to do a review. Autopligg does have a VERY strong negative side which I was really hoping would go away in the months since it’s release that way this review can be all positive and not get a negative just because of a few issues that typically work themselves out after the first few months after it’s release. At this point, almost 8 months later, it appears this isn’t going to happen so the beef still stands. Anytime a new link building tool comes out there’s always those few people (amateurs) that want to get their “monies worth.” They use the tool in the most retarded way possible and do it as hard as they can. It typically makes the tool worthless for the first couple months. It does them no good and provides no benefit and at the same time hurts everyone else and the tool itself. Autopligg stemming from the Synkd8 crowd who is notorious, and even self proclaiming, for pulling this kind of shit wasn’t expected to be an exception. ESPECIALLY since it has a windows based version. At least with serverside versions you have to have at least a few braincells to use the program and with web based you can cancel their accounts. So this was entirely expected, but what shocked me was. It was and since the launch always has been only about 3 users of the program that have been doing this idiotic irresponsible use of the tool. Unfortunately as I mentioned above, they’ve yet to stop.
What they’ve done is, they’ve opened up like 10 instances of the program and put in a single super long comment into the comment poster that’s nothing but a ton of links to separate subdomain spam on a single site (i guess after buying the tool they couldn’t afford more domains). They have a macro restarting each submissions over and over and over so every single post on every single Pligg site instantly gets hit with a ton of worthless spammy links. The main domain has been banned for months now so instead of stopping the script they just forwarded the domain as if it was going to do them any fucking good. Especially since they forwarded the domain and all its subdomains to a single wordpress blog with some spammy text written by the worlds worst content generator and no ads or offers or particular keywords. Here let me show you what I’m talking about and you can decide if this isn’t the most retarded shit you’ve ever seen: http://www.5wing4.net/story.php?title=Cat_Urine_Removers-1. If you’re like OMG that’s my site he just outed consider this before bitching to me. If you don’t want attention don’t be an attention whore. You did it to yourself, fuck off I don’t care. The sites were worthless the moment you got put in charge of SEOing them anyways.
So please, use this tool responsibly. Even if others aren’t it’s still a very useful tool and one I would definitely recommend you have in your arsenal because like I said, it’s for link volume and deep link volume not link quality. For that reason I’ll go over the best way to use the tool and how to get the most out of it, because often times the trick to harnessing the optimal power out of a link building tool is using it correctly.
How To Use Autopligg The Right Way
As with all Blue Hat Techniques the short answer is, mimic the white hatters. Now that you know how not to use the tool I’ll show you how I used it and got a lot of success. I am actually planning on writing a guest post for this for SEOBook that’ll cover it more in depth, but for now I’ll at least introduce what I call MacroNiche Blogs and if he doesn’t end up publishing it I’ll at least post it here for yall. <- Check it out Quadzilla another new SEO concept! Quick copy paste copy paste copy paste!
MacroNiche Blogs
People often talk about Niche Sites and MicroNiche Sites. In case you’re not familiar they’re basically talking about the size and focus (scope) of a particular site. For instance a niche site might be a site on female orgasms. It’ll have the main page which sells some product(s) related to those and it’ll have a few other articles on particular such as Gspot orgasm, Clit orgasms and various other myths. Each of those pages will also typically sell a product or an offer related to them as well. A MicroNiche Site is very similar except its more focused such as the main page being solely on the Gspot orgasm then a few supporting subpages on the same topic but all pushing the same product and offer. Since I love to confuse things I tend encompass all of these types of sites into the single “Money Site” term. This is because i technically consider every site no matter where it is in the empire’s scale a niche site because it does focus on a niche thus it is a niche site. Therefore I tend to group things on the intensity and focus of the site pushing a single offer or product. A Money Site would be at the top of that scale. Therefore a MacroNiche Site or in this case MacroNiche Blog is exactly what it implies. It’s a single blog that encompasses a very large niche but doesn’t focus on that niche. Instead it focuses on lots of much smaller niches within the single site and uses the authority being passed through the subsections to help the others so new sites for each microniche isn’t required to rank for each individual offer.
Although accurate I may have explained that in a way that was a bit more complicated then it is. Let’s use an example, an example that happens to be the very first test site I used AutoPligg on. My blog’s macro niche was Health. I then looked through a bunch of offers on some CPA networks and made a list of niches based on all the offers I found that would fit into the Health macro niche. So I setup my blog with a bunch more categories such as: Weight Loss, Hair Care, Teeth Care, Bodybuilding, Skin Care, Exercise. The list goes on and on. I was very thorough in my niches. I then put in some subcategories under each that were my microniches. These were more focused on individual offers. For instance under Weight Loss I put in Dieting, Diet Pills and under Teeth Care I put in stuff like Teeth Whitening and under Exercise I put in Exercise Equipment, Yoga blah blah.
This MacroNiche structure was the perfect test for AutoPligg because it utilized AutoPliggs most powerful attribute, it’s ability to build both deep link volume and main page link volume. Had I have only used a Niche Site or a MicroNiche Site after submitting the main page and all the subarticles I would have become immediately limited to just spamming the comments for further link volume. The ability to continuously use both the article submission for the microniches and the standard niches and the comment postings for the main page authority and link volume gives this structure a huge benefit in it’s overall domain authority and it’s ability to quickly rank new posts. So that’s exactly what I did and continue to do.
First, once I got the design and categories setup, I hired a couple writers to go through each of the categories and subcategories and schedule several months worth of daily posts making sure each category and subcategory were accounted for within the first month then subsequently each following month at least once. Once they were done I immediately did a directory submission for each primary category as well as the main page along with some social bookmarking and various other link building. As you’re all bound to ask, for my primary keyword for the main page I picked one that was fairly medium competition that would grab the attention of other health related bloggers. That way later when I got that ranking and wanted to do some blogroll link exchanges it was easy to find willing targets. Then every day I would give special attention to the individual blog posts for that day. For each one I would submit it through the story submitter in AutoPligg so it would get several thousand links plus each of those links would get pinged for some link saturation along with a few daily rounds of comment postings for that category and the main page. I would then do a quick scan for similar articles on each post and submit those through several hundred article directories with links to both the singular post and the main page as well as the subcategory with the keywords for each. I would then ping and social bookmark the individual post. After that all I had to do was find 5 new posts with the same keywords as that post and exchange links within the post to the other blogger’s post *cough* Pingcrawl *cough*. This also got the attention of other bloggers in the niches and macroniche to notice my site and be more willing to do blogroll exchanges. That caused each individual post to quickly start ranking the same day/week it was posted and brought up the total site authority with every one. Which brought me to my final step, bringing up the total site authority as much as possible via the main page, by placing links to the main page across my SEO Empire and running some automated link building tools as well as general link building such as commenting on other blogs/news sites. The fact that it was a MacroNiche Blog with legitimate articles on each subject made each post more credible and the site more credible overall so if there was a human review or in the case of directory submissions, more palatable and acceptable to the reviewer.
This is where it turned into a mutha fuckin Money Site! I could go through the offers at my leisure and write targeted salescopies pushing the offers and throw them up as I wrote them as if they were their own microniche site. Likewise when new offers would come out on untapped niches, while everyone else has to start building new sites around them and then start the link building to get them ranked I could just immediately jump in with a new post and instantly hold a new ranking using the site’s existing authority. You actually see this happen all the time when shit like Oprah’s fat ass blogs about a product. All I was doing was using Autopligg and my eye for structure to mimic that effect. There’s obviously a lot of spins and ways to build a MacroNiche Site as with any structure, but if you start out and do it right the first time you’ll quickly learn and expand very nicely. There’s also a lot of macro niches out there to take over such as Business (bizops, grants, paid surveys etc) Consumer Reports (Credit Cards, Credit Reports etc) Downloads (adware, recipe/music/games programs, etc).
Pricing
Now that I gave it a fairly positive review and got you started on how to have success with it (the two make a logical partner) lets talk pricing because as it stands now it’s a bit more complicated then it should be for tools I review. It’s normal for IM tools to fluctuate their prices to accommodate sales volume drops or when they say its only $5 for the first 5 people then it’s a $100 for every person after that. That’s all mind fuck marketing bullshit. The only excuse to fluctuate a price in a tool is when new versions come out (new versions with new features not new versions that simply fix old bugs for that matter) because that causes more development costs along with support and marketing costs. So in that right it’s understandable. Normally as a condition of doing a review I get assurance that the price, at least for the readers here, will not change and that there is always some sort of long standing discount. This time I’m going to break the rule just a bit. When Autopligg released it costed $289. As of writing this post it’s $189. I’m told a new version is coming out next month and the price will go back up to the $289. This is okay with me in this case for three reasons. First, I was okay with the original $289 price so as long as the flux doesn’t go back above that then I’m cool. Second, I’ve been assured that the people who buy at the $189 price will get a the new version free. There’s nothing I hate more than having to buy the same product twice. Third, allegedly the new version will have a new feature of being able to crack the recaptcha captchas used by many of the autopligg sites. This opens you up to literally tens of thousands of new targets. That in itself is a big enough feature to warrant a price change. Finally, after talking to Earl Grey (the owner) I got a coupon code that should last through the price change with the new version.
AutoPligg Purchase Website
Use the coupon code: BLUEHATSEO for a $45 discount.
I recommend you use the Windows desktop version. It’s faster and more efficient then the serverside version. I know I know weird eh 
BONUS
Since lists of good pligg sites are tough to come by and the program requires it, I took the liberty of building my own list for you guys. Here’s the database of the 7,409 pligg sites I use. Although most require manual registration (till the new version comes out) all are scraped by me tested, work and are importable into the program. It should be fairly error free at the time of writing this post, but they do change daily so bear with it if the list becomes systematically worthless as time passes. The best advice I can give you is for now ignore the lists they hand out in the private forum. Most are raw lists and a colossal waste of time to import (several hours each) and only get 200-400 good ones out of.
List of AutoPligg Sites
Right click Save As
