As per my initial post announcing my intentions to carry out an experiment to test out the effectiveness of two automated link directory listing tools; James Brausch’s Hermusa and Katherine Keleher’s SubmitNow.
Since that post, I’ve been awaiting an update from Katherine with regards to a minor issue I found in SubmitNow. An update was released a few days ago, but unfortunately the issue wasn’t fixed. However, it’s an issue I can work around so it won’t impact the test and I don’t really want to delay any longer.
Today (19/06/2006), I submitted two nearly identical, brand new websites using Hermusa and SubmitNow. The topic of the sites was chosen randomly, just as any other user might. Both websites have similar domain names registered at the same time and both sites are hosted on the same server/nameservers/IP address.
I’ve deliberately tried to keep any differences between the two websites to a minimum so that the effectiveness of each link submission tool will be the biggest factor in how well the sites perform. I will carry out no further promotion on either test website and no one but me will know their domain names.
Progress of each website will be tracked using WebCEO to monitor link popularity and rankings for specific search terms across Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines.
The sites feature Google AdSense ads so I’ll be able to track any income from them too.
Watch this space!
03/07/2006 Update
One of the test websites is already showing several ranking positions in the top 10 pages Yahoo (as high as position 43 out of a possible 490,000).
Please, no more asking me to spill the beans. They’re not yet cooked properly! 
20/07/2006 Update
The first month is over and there’s a pretty large difference in terms of results between the two tools.
21/07/2006 Update
The full results report is ready.