Experience with WebCEO
Experience with SEO Power Suite from Link-assistant.com Comparison of WebCEO and SEO Power suite
The trueth about those programs is.
They will not improve your search engine ranking. But they can do you serious damage.
Especially the backlink approach. I have bought both programs and tested them. I will come to the results of the handling later.
The main thing is:
I have paid a lot of money for the programs and instead of getting backlink partners, I was banned as a spammer from my provider (hostgator).
This has nothing to do with wrong use from my side. The programs do this automatically anyway.
How do both programs detect possible backlink partners? The perform keyword searches in Search engines and list keyword related sites as well as Sites that have existing backlinks of your sompetitors (if you provide them).
After this first step, the programs begin to scan the sites for contact addresses and perform WHOIS look ups.
What I did not know: This step is called URL Harvesting and is unfortunately a method of spammers as well(You can google it). It is not surprising, how else should it work, but to be honest, when purchasing a program for several hundred bucks, then I don't think about legal compliancy, because I expect it to be conform..... Would have been better to think about it.
It is not too difficult to detect that the mail addresses are from URL
harvesting :
When you use them and send bulk mails to the addresses asking for back links, you will have a lot of bounces because the data quality of URL harvested addresses is very low. Bouncing rates of more than 10% are very uncommon. You have to expect bouncing rates of 20-30%. What immediately happens is that your mails are getting blocked. In my case I could not even send 100 mails to the intended destinations. Instead of getting back link cooperations hostgator has deactivated my emails from my business URL when they detected that I was using automatically generated mailing lists.
I have discussed the issue with hostgator, but they called the procedure / this approach still URL harvesting and refused to enable my email again. I still have web space but no access to mails. I can not even create a new mailbox. The just sent me a form to cancel the contract and move to another hoster, what I will definitely not do, because I have paid for the webspace and I will use it. I was luicky, because the URL my website is hosted on is just my secondary Domain and usually I am using another Mail Domain for communications with customers. But if you use your regular mail of your primary domain, you will have a real problem.
One thing to mention here:
WebCEO support was fair at least. Link assistant (SEO Power suite) just ignored my mails and demand for support.
Hostgator is a separate case. They don't ignore the mails but have no manners at all and seem not to know how to deal with customers. Well the company is obviously too big and they think the can do whatever they want.... Another danger for your business sites.... Don't expect them to help you if you have serious problems....
To come back to my experience with the SEO power suite respectively the comparison of SEO power suite vs. WebCEO: Both programs are claiming that they are the best SEO optimization software available. This should justify the high price for the software.
Is it worth their money? Well, if you are willing to pay for damaging your business and image, then go ahead and purchase it. You could as well pay for getting a stroke with a hammer.
Mybe you can improve your site ranking with the HTML optimization tools, but this is available for free. The only thing that really could boost your SEO ranking are backlinks and this is exactly what these tools can NOT do for you.