Fourth Impressions of SENukeX

June 12, 2011

Well, Holy Gawd, beejazus and begorrah! SENukeX is finally working. As I mentioned in my previous post about SENukeX, I gave up trying to use it on my aging Win XP system and rented a Windows VPS server to run it instead (I went with AccuWebHosting following recommendations). Looks like that was a good move.

SENukeX has been ticking away unattended for the last week. I can see that it’s crashed a few times but each time it’s recovered, restarted and continued on from where it fell over, just as it’s supposed to. Plus, it runs 24/7. Now, assuming it did run properly on my XP setup, I’d have to leave my PC running 24 hours a day – and I prefer not to leave electronics running unattended because of the remote possibility of them spontaneously bursting into flame and burning down the house. Besides, on a VPS, the software can use the full resources of that computer and run more backlink campaigns than my PC since I’m using my PC for lots of other stuff every day.

Building SENukeX Backlink Campaigns

Building backlink campaigns actually takes a bit of time though I’m sure I’ll get faster at building them as time goes by. At the moment, it takes between 1 and 2 hours to build a campaign. That’s because I’m using 4 articles per campaign, 1 press release (which I have to write myself) and 1 video (which I have to create myself). Then I have to come up with about 20 titles for articles (i.e. I’m spinning the article titles), author bios to use for the article directories and comments to leave on social networking sites. I probably spend more time than I need to “crafting” these.

SENukeX can build comprehensive backlinking campaigns using its “Wizard” feature but, as I mentioned in my last post, I’m using the Shock & Awe tactic created by another SENukeX user. This tactic has to be built manually so this takes a bit of added time.

So What’s Happened After A Week?

Right, it’s been a week since I posted the last set of site statistics for my Cheap Electricity Options site, Classic Comic Book and Facts About Pregnancy. Here are those June 3rd stats for reference (click images for larger view):

And here are the site stats for today, June 11:

Cheap Electricity Options Site Progress

I didn’t actually get any time to create an SENukeX campaign for this site so maybe what I’ll do is use it as a control against which to measure how the other two sites are faring. Cheap Electricity Options should stay pretty much where it is in the rankings as there’s no active promotion going on for it. There will be changes in its stats as the search engines gauge its relevance and I’m sure new sites in this niche will appear which, in turn, will also affect the rankings.

All three sites are autoblogs – that is content is being added to them on a regular basis without my direct input. All three blogs are also using the Web Traffic Genius plugin which submits backlinks to various RSS aggregators so all three blogs have a passive backlinking scheme in place.

However, if SEnukeX works as described, I should see some pretty dramatic changes in ranking for Classic Comic Book and Fact About Pregnancy in the coming weeks.

In the last week, Cheap Electricity Options has remained at PR0, has seen its Alexa ranking rise from 594,098 to 591,471; Google backlinks remain at 10; Yahoo backlinks have increased from 2,935 to 3,119; Bing backlinks dropped by one to 15; pages indexed in Google rose from 3,040 to 3,460; pages indexed at Yahoo remained at 491 and pages indexed at Bing dropped from 129 to 98.

Overall, there’s been a slight improvement in its ranking.

Classic Comic Book Site Progress

I created a Shock & Awe campaign for the Classic Comic Book site on June 4. Shock & Awe campaigns actually comprise 3 parts and work over 3-4 weeks. I ran the first part of the campaign over 5 days, so SENukeX spread its submissions to article directories, social bookmarking sites, press release sites and video sites over a 5-day period. Today I’ll be kicking off part 2 of the Shock & Awe tactic for that site.

On June 3rd, the Classic Comic Book Alexa ranking was 2,157,949 (the lower the number on Alexa, the better). Today, it’s 1,833,023 – a rise of 324,926. No change in Google PR (it’s still at 0) but I wouldn’t expect to see a change for at least a couple of months. Still no Google backlinks but then they’re always slow to get added and reported. Yahoo banklinks rose from 520 to 627 though Bing backlinks dropped from 13 to 9. Pages indexed in Google rose from 15,700 to 19,900; pages indexed in Yahoo remained the same at just 2 and pages indexed in Bing dropped from 176 to 156.

Another overall improvement but nothing standing out from what’s happened with the Cheap Electricity Options site.

Facts About Pregnancy Site Progress

I submitted a Shock & Awe campaign (part 1) for this site on June 6th, so it’s going to complete today. The site remained at PR0; Alexa ranking rose from 840,386 to 758,174; still no Google backlinks; Yahoo backlinks dropped from 7 to 6 and Bing backlinks rose from 3 to 4; pages indexed in Google rose from 1,690 to 2,270; pages indexed in Yahoo dropped from 2 to 1; pages indexed in Bing rose from 6 to 9.

Again, an improvement but no way to tell yet if SENukeX will really boost this site.

First impressions from the above stats would suggest it’s easier to get backlinks from Yahoo but harder to get pages indexed. Bing seems hard to both get backlinks from and pages indexed with.

Earnings

Statistics are all well and good but the bottom line is that a site must earn some money. The Alexa figures suggest that traffic is increasing. Looking at the number of visitors in Piwik for Classic Comic Book shows a downward trend over the last week with visitors being about one third of what they were in previous weeks. This could be down to seasonal variation as a 1-week period is too short to build an analysis on. But something to keep an eye on. Visitor numbers for Cheap Electricity Options is down by a half. However, visitor numbers for Facts About Pregnancy are spiking, well up on previous weeks.

Checking visitor figures for some of my other sites shows an overall downward trend as well, so it probably has to do with the onset of summer and people being outdoors more rather than at their PCs.

Cheap Electricity Options:

Adsense: – No change from $0.00
eBay commissions: $0.26 – down from $0.39 the week before.
Clickbank: no sales.
Visitors: 73 – down from 143 the week before.

Classic Comic Book:

Adsense: $0.53 – up from $0.00 the week before.
eBay commissions: $2.85 – down from $4.16 the week before.
Clickbank: no sales.
Other Ad Networks: no sales.
Visitors: 296 – down from 437 the week before.

Facts About Pregnancy:

Adsense: $0.99 – up from $0.00 the week before.
eBay Commission: Doesn’t use eBay.
Clickbank: no sales.
Visitors: 95 – up from 73 the week before.

So nothing significant in earnings. Again, a week is too short a time to see if major changes are happening. All the sites currently are getting low volumes of traffic and that is one reason for their low earnings.

The Coming Week

This will see part 2 of the Shock & Awe tactic being run on the Classic Comic Book and Facts About Pregnancy sites and possibly part 3 of the tactic being run towards the end of next week.

Final Comments

Backlink building is a long-term, ongoing task. While some results may occur quickly, in general it can take from 4-9 months for site rankings to rise and stick. Running the Shock & Awe campaign on my two sites over 1 month alone won’t be enough to really boost them. I’ll have to run backlink campaigns (not necessarily Shock & Awe ones – mixing it up is probably a better idea) so that the search engines see that the sites are constantly being promoted rather than being a “flash in the pan”.

The guy who came up with the Shock & Awe campaign tactic has told me that rankings can dip after Shock & Awe is run as the sudden influx of links it creates can confuse the search engines. Sites that do see a dip usually recover within a couple of weeks and come back stronger than before. So using Shock & Awe is a bit of a gamble.

I have lots of sites and there just isn’t enough time to use manual backlinking tactics for all of them. While SENukeX does appear to be working correctly now and submitting hundreds of backlinks to my sites, I still need to know that it’s effective at what it’s doing given its price. It’s also eating up my captcha balance – I have two other campaigns running for other sites not in this test and I’ve used up $15 worth of captcha fees in the last week alone! So we’ll see what the coming weeks bring…