This is not meant to be a ranting post or a slant on any individual but recently there have been a lot of people claiming things about No Hands SEO that just aren’t true. Some of the type of things I am talking about are:
The below are myths and are not true, read below to find out why
- No Hands SEO can only do blog commenting
- All links made by No Hands SEO are low quality
- No Hands SEO will get you penalised by search engines
While these types of comments are often said about everything and anything SEO related the rate at which these myths/lies are perpetrated about NHSEO is more than your average tool and I never could quite understand why this is. Obviously as the creator of No Hands SEO I am by no means an unbiased source but as anyone that is aware of my history as an SEO and software developer they will know that I have always strived to provide a great and effective tool, I have created free tools and supported them for years without ever sending out promotional emails or trying to monetize it, purely to give back to the Search Engine Optimisation and Internet Marketing community.
Because of my position as the developer of NHSEO the burden of proof in conversations where people state these falsehoods has always fallen on my shoulders, where the “accuser” (couldn’t think of a better term, it is not meant as a put down) would state his/her opinion I would have to spend my time, sometimes an hour or more, showing the type of links that are very possible/easy to generate with NHSEO and the types of rankings / traffic improvements that can be had simply by clicking the Go button. Obviously this is a terrible use of my time as it is time that could just as easily be spent improving my software and providing a great value for my customers.
This is what my aim is with this post, so that in future if I see someone posting falsehoods about my software I can just point them here and get on with my work rather than having to reiterate the same points to disprove their impressions of NHSEO again and again.
Myth / Falsehood / Lie 1) No Hands SEO can only do blog commenting
While the main focus of No Hands SEO early on in its life (2011) was indeed blog commenting it never was a simple blog comment poster and never was intended to just post blog comments. It always has had the capability to crawl your website to find inner pages to promote, get a website indexed within a day (most often just hours), automatically search, post, and check backlink targets as blog comments and trackbacks, ping new backlinks and many other things that no other tool could do on auto pilot. No Hands SEO at the time truly was a 1 of a kind type of software with nothing else being even similar, NHSEO really is the original fully automated backlinking tool and still is the most automated and easiest tool of its kind to use.
Now as I said originally the main focus of its backlinking was from blog comments and trackbacks because at the time these were incredibly effective at generating search engine ranking improvements, since then there have been many different platforms and link types added to the arsenal of No Hands SEO allowing its users to leverage links from not just Blog Comments, Trackbacks and Indexing sites but also Forums and Image Galleries.
I do not quite understand why so many are hard on blog comments these days as backlinks from blogs can be a very effective tool for improving rankings and traffic to your website, many people are still using them daily and there are too many services offering these types of links for them to be ineffective. The main issue is more in how they are used, I will cover correct link building technique for best effect soon, using tons of variation in your anchor texts and using your own custom niche relevant comments is one way to ensure you are improving your rankings not harming them. This, and other, rules should be adhered to regardless of method of backlink generation, variation is the lifeblood of ranking improvements and if you vary everything as much as possible you will never get hit by a penalty or be left out in the cold when Google switches up their algorithm.
Myth / Falsehood / Lie 2) All links made by No Hands SEO are low quality
This is one of the more egregious things said about No Hands SEO and really says more about the person saying it than it does about NHSEO. The fact that NHSEO can target 45 different link platforms (currently, will be increasing regularly) should be enough to prove that there is an incredible range of the type and quality of links that NHSEO is capable of making. With this range of quality will obviously come some 0PR pages with lots of outbound links but also there will often come links with high PR (Iâ??ve personally had PR8 links) with few outbound links.
I had someone asking about link quality just today via email (what prompted me to finally write this piece) so earlier I setup a profile for a new domain I had setup just a couple of weeks ago and decided to run it for 10 minutes. I had this profile setup as a page, pointed it at the homepage, set domain PR minimum to 1 and maximum outbound links to 1000 so the links were at the very least decent. I used just 38 proxies, 10 posting threads and 2 searching threads, if you have used NHSEO before you will know that all of these settings are very conservative and by no means is the maximum of what can be achieved on a VPS with a good connection.
Within the first 10minutes NHSEO was able to generate 11 links, remember that this was a new profile with just 10 posting threads with limits to what links could be made, and the link check of these new links revealed the quality level of them:
The image above is what I sent to the person that emailed me earlier today and it is also what gave me the idea to write this post. I also decided that I would run for an hour to see just how many of these good quality links could be made with these incredibly conservative settings in an hour and the results for that hour are below:
As you can see an hour in and other platforms have started receiving some links (WordPress is the first platform to be searched for which is why in the first 10 minutes all links were WP comments) and we see much more of the same high PR, low OBL links which could only be described as great quality links. Consider the fact that this is the result of less than 5 minutes work setting up the profile and everything else being handled completely automatically by the software you would be hard pressed to make any sort of negative comment about the quality of the links NHSEO is able to generate.
With those 2 myths totally obliterated letâ??s move onto the last point which was really popularised last year with the Penguin update:
Myth / Falsehood / Lie 3) Using NHSEO will get you penalised in Search Engines
Last year Google released their Penguin update which was aimed at tackling what they vaguely called webspam, luckily they did elaborate as that is a very vague term and could cover many different tactics and acts. In the release blog post by Matt Cutts (head of the Google Websearch team) he explained that the webspam they were targeting was on-site tactics such as keyword stuffing, duplicate content, cloaking and other devious tactics that people have been using to rank for over a decade now. That is all good and well but how does that factor in to link building if the update was officially targeting content?
In short; it didnâ??t, not like some people would have you believe. The idea that the first Penguin update targeted link spam came about when Matt Cutts posted an image of Keyword stuffing for those that were not aware of what this tactic was. The image showed a chunk of classic keyword stuffing where a huge block of text is just a jumble of keyword after keyword with no intent of creating any readable content, just literally stuffing the websiteâ??s keywords into the page to ensure that they pop up in the searches for those keywords. So how does that show that Google were targeting link spam in their update?
In short; it didnâ??t. The keyword stuffing example was obviously taken from some form of SEO software cracking website which was obviously trying to rank for lots of cracked software related terms and as such the names of lots of backlink builders was stuffed in there multiple times for multiple different key phrases. All this showed was an example of keyword stuffing; nothing more and nothing less. Yet many posited that it showed that Google was somehow going to â??turn offâ? these tools or stop them from working regardless of the fact Cutts was showing an example of keyword stuffing and it was in no way related to the software that was mentioned in the example. This is possibly one of the most successful attacks that he ever made against SEO software as many people saw the image and put 2+2 together and ended up with 7.
So that is the origin of this myth and sadly over a year later people are still perpetuating it without taking a minute to sit and think about how hard / idiotic it would be for Google to try and enforce some form of penalisation against people making backlinks to their websites. Google has shown on an almost yearly basis that their algorithm updates are ineffective against backlink software and this shows no sign of changing any time soon, their search rankings are full of keyword stuffed and cloaked websites and there are still common occurrences of websites with no mention of a certain keyword ranking on the first page for it and only because of 1mil or so link being generated in a week (http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/jr-vip-lounge/570725-inappropriate-site-ranking-highly-competitive-term.html). Examples like this just go to show that when Google makes an update to tackle one thing it has many side effects they were not expecting so they could not make an update which penalised people for making a few hundred links daily as most websites on the net would trigger the penalisation and there would be no websites left in their index.
So I am sure some of you are reading this thinking:
â??This guy doesnâ??t know shit, what about this negative SEO I have been hearing so much about?â?
I have heard of negative SEO and am well aware that some people are using it to lower rankings. On the other hand I have seen just as many attempts fail miserably where the attacker ends up vastly improving (or solidifying) the rank of the website they are attacking. To have any sort of successful negative SEO campaign it must be performed on a new website (authoritative sites with some history and a half decent backlink profile) and must involve in the region of 100s of thousands of backlinks pointed at a website every day, often it will even take a number of days.
This was not a product of the Penguin update, it has been possible to harm rankings temporarily via mass spam with a single anchor text for some time now and is rarely as effective as some would have you believe. As I stated previously the targets of these attacks will often return to their original position or even improve it.
This is not the sort of thing that someone could realistically perform accidentally with No Hands SEO, as default NHSEO will likely max out at around 1k links daily, so the notion that an uninformed user could permanently really their websites rankings is not just incorrect it is quite outrageous.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say, there are currently more thousands of users utilising No Hands SEO to generate backlinks and the few times you see someone claiming a lower ranking after using NHSEO it is invariably a very new website and just experiencing a Google Dance (when a new site jumps up and down the rankings before eventually settling). I have never seen a single credible instance where anyone has been hit by any sort of penalisation due to use No Hands SEO. Everytime it has been claimed and the claimant has engaged me about it it has always ended up being a google dance or the user simply not seeing the site in the rankings even though it is there (yes this has happened a few times).
So with all of that said I hope it is now clear why I say that No Hands SEO is safe to use and the quality of links absolutely can be excellent if given the chance to be. There are controls to limit the quality of link, the number of links generated per day per profile (in case you are still worried about link velocity), captcha options for getting links from sites with a captcha as well as so many other features for protecting you against any future algorithm changes such as switching up your anchor texts with generic keywords.