A few weeks back I bought a piece of software called PR Prowler created by TopNet Solutions

The idea behind the software is that you get to enter any search phrase and it will search for it on google, crawl every site, pull an email address (usually from the whois info), and send them an email which you write. This is used of course for what I call “link begging.” Hey link begging works if you do it right, and when you have a brand new site with no foot in the door, spending a little time on your knees can help tremendously. OK, so I took that a little too far.

Back on track.

The advantage of PR Prowler is how much damn time it saves you, especially if you have a content site. If I ever chose to promote this site, I could enter “SEO articles” or similar into PR Prowler and easily beg the thousands of websites that come up to link to me because I am useful. OK, so I’d have to lie a bit. :) The program does show a great deal of useful information about each site like current page rank, outbound links, and whois information. So at least I know who’s worth lying to.

The major disadvantage of PR Prowler is it’s lack of ability to filter out sites. No, I do not want to send an email that might be potentially viewed as spam to FBI.gov. I have to trash the entire list because an authority site put a word with the letters s e and o in it. PR Prowler was definitely a well thought out program though. They must have planned for that sort of thing by putting in a feature that searches the back links of your competitors. I found this works the best, because these sites are ones that are usually more willing to link in the first place, and you have less chance of spamming about.com. I definitely use this feature more than any others, but it does have it’s drawback. It queries Google for it’s back links. Everyone knows Google actually displays very little back link information about sites, and most of those back links are actually internal links. Don’t understand what I mean? Try searching for link:homevideo.about.com.

All in all I’d have to say PR Prowler was definitely worth the $95, but don’t think for a moment this software will be your cure-all for link begging. It is at least a great start, and the best solution I’ve ever seen. I’ve tried quite a few.