Today I’m doing a review of Social Robot.

But for this review I decided to do things a little differently and also interview one of the product vendors Mike Thomas. Honestly Mike has interviewed me several times about my own products and it was nice to be able to be on the other side of an interview for a change.

Ok so what exactly is Social Robot? Well we all know that in order to get Google rankings you need to have back links. This is one of the triggers that Google uses to rank the importance of a website. Google assumes that sites with back links are more likely to be good sites since people have taken the time to link with them. This is logical when you think about it.

The problem with this is that now so much content is added to to the internet every day and it takes time to get natural back links to that content. Because of this a very standard SEO practice is for the publisher of the content to build their own back links to their URLs themselves. This is why people do social posting, guest blogging, forum posting, and a ton of other things to build back links to your site. Simply put you need them.

The thing with building back links to your site yourself though is that its a ton of work and lets face it no one likes to do a ton of work. In fact I don’t spend much time at all building back links to my site or to my videos even though I know I really should. I don’t do it because its boring, time consuming, and frankly just a pain.

Social Robot is designed to to do all the back linking for you. I always say that software is a tool and a good tool is one that makes something you would normally do yourself (or should be doing) more easy. Well it does not get much more easy than ‘do it for you’ and because of this I was interested in testing this software. So I got my review copy and went to trying it out.

The very first thing that Social Robot is designed to do is create accounts for you on the book mark sites. Normally in order to post a link to them you will need to create an account with an email address and confirm a link in an email that you get sent after you sign up. Social Robot can do this automatically for you.

To get it to do this I needed two things. First I needed an email account. For my testing I followed Mikes tutorial and created a free HotMail email account. I also followed his additional instructions that made sure all the emails I was sent ended up in my inbox. This is to ensure that the confirmation emails dont accidentally get sent to spam. Setting up a HotMail account took about 3 minutes and was very painless.

The second thing that is needed is a way to solve captchas.  These are those little text boxes where you enter text to continue. This software cant solve them so you need a different way to solve them. Fortunately it does integrate with several captcha solving services.

Now I want to be clear that these services are not free. However they are so low cost that they might as well be free. The one I decided to use was called ImageTyperz and cost $1.65 per 1000 captcha’s solves. As I said this is basically nothing. Once I had my email and captcha service set up I was ready to get going.

I was testing the very basic version with any upgrades that comes preloaded with 50 sites that you can post back links to. There is a better version that has 100 preloaded sites. As well as a OTO that lets you get several hundred more sites into the system. But I wanted to test with the most basic version.

Following the instructions I created my link and my post in the software. You can manually enter your own post content for the back link it makes to the book marking sites or you can just enter some keywords and Social Robot will pull in some relevant text content for the link. I decided to go the easy way and just click the button to have it pull in content automatically.

Once I had my content I entered the URL of a YouTube video I wanted to build back links to and pressed the one click, do it for me button. Now I will admit I was a little concerned about something Mike said in the interview. That no software like this can have a 100% success rate. Because of this I was really keen to see how many of the sites this would actually be able to sign me up for. How many of the emails I get it would be able to automatically verify and finally how many of the back links would get correctly posted.

The first thing this software needed to do was go to all of the book mark sites. As I said I set this to do 50 back links so that means it needed to sign me up for 50 book marking sites.

It took about 2 minutes for it to create all of the accounts for me. It then took another 100 seconds or so to confirm all the emails. The email confirmation naturally took longer because the software had to wait for the emails to arrive. Of the 50 sites I wanted to post to it was able to signup and confirm 46 of them. This is a 92% success rate. I was happy with that.

The next thing it needed to do was post all my text and back links to each of these book mark sites. This process took about 2 minutes total. Of the 46 sites that it was able to signup for it was able to post links to 37 of them.

This means that it was able to successfully post to 81% of the sites I had signed up for and 74% of the original 50 sites I wanted links to. Basically, over all, it was successful 2/3rds of the time. Not super awesome but not bad at all. Especially when you consider that I didnt have to do anything myself.

The end result was that I got 37 back links to my video without in a few minutes without me having to do anything. I was sitting here just watching it work because I was timing everything for the review but I could have left the computer or done something else if I liked.

One thing that I will point out though is that the over all process took about 5 minutes for just the 50 sites. What this means is that if you are going to post to a lot more sites, hundreds for example, it might take quite a while to complete. Also I noticed that it took a good but of my CPU usage to while it was working. Because this is CPU intensive and could take a while it might be best to set this up at night before you go to bed and let it do all the back linking while you are asleep. When you think about it that’s not a bad deal actually. Have your own ‘robot’ software post back links for you while your in bed. Hey you still have a computer while your sleeping and your still getting internet service even though your asleep and no one is using it. Why not put that ‘dead time’ to work?

Ok so what about the software itself? Its very well designed and coded. I tried to break it but I was unable to. There where no errors or problems that I could see. One thing I did notice is that it has a lot of customization options which can be a little intimidating. However for most people, probably about 90% of them, these options are not going to be needed. Most people are just going to be clicking the do it for me ‘one click post’ button like I did.

If you want to know what the options are though, if you have a problem with the software or need support there are several ways you can get help. This has ‘quick tips’ that show when the software loads. It has a users manual you can read. It has a quick start video you can watch. It has a forum you can visit. It has a way to contact their support. All of this is built right into the software. So yea I’m going to say that they have the support thing covered.

It also has a button that you can click which will automatically check for any update to the software. If one is available it will download and install the update for you. This is a nice feature that I was really glad to see they included.

Now I normally do not review the OTO’s but in this case I know what it is and I questioned Mike about it so I at least want to mention my thoughts on it. Depending on the version of Social Robot that you buy it will come with either 50 or 100 book marking sites preloaded into it. The OTO is a monthly fee service that constantly crawls the internet and adds new sites to your software that you can post links to.

Because they have a dedicated server running 24 hours a day crawling the net it needs to be a monthly fee so I can understand that. But the question becomes: is it worth paying a monthly fee for? Well honestly I dont know. I dont know because I have not had this software for several months so I dont know how many new sites its going to add each month. What I do know is that currently there are an additional 900 or so sites in the system. I also know that if you decided to opt out and cancel furute monthly payments you dont loose the sites your have already had added to your software. Because of this I think that the OTO is worth buying for at least 1 month. Get it for the first month just to get the extra 900 book marking sites that their crawler has already found. Then after that you can decide if it is worth paying for future months.

Ok so what do I think of Social Robot over all? Well first I want to be clear this is not a magic button. Its a tool. But it is a tool that automatically does a very tedious and time consuming task that we all really should be doing if we want to rank. While it is not perfect in that it does not have a 100% success rate as a developer I know that 100% is just not possible. I actually thought its success rate would be somewhere around 50% but in my tests it was 74% which was above my expectations.

Anyone who has followed my blog have heard me say that the good products are the ones that are tools. The ones that will make your life easier. This is one of those tools and it is well worth considering.

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 A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.

About the Author

Brett Rutecky

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Brett Rutecky is a full time online marketer, web developer, and entrepreneur. He has developed scores of Facebook apps, dozens of custom web sites and hundreds of scripts.

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