Post comments like a madman with CommentKahuna
CommentKahuna is Windows software that can be freely downloaded for the price of an email address from PortalFeeder. It is designed to search for blog posts that rank in Google for a particular phrase and makes it easier to comment on them. Once you’ve typed in your keyword phrase it will locate up to 50 blog posts on the topic you’ve searched for that are ranking in Google. It also shows the Google PageRank for each post and has options that can be tweaked to filter by PageRank if that kind of thing floats your boat.
Here is a search for “britney spears”:
(Note that Graywolf comes up for “britney spears” in this example. Interestingly, the highest PageRank site returned was a PR5.)
Once you’ve got your list you can scan the URLs and check off which ones you might want to comment on. Then a little window pops up with the blog post in it so that you can read it, and if you’d like to comment there is an autofill button that plops your name, email address and URL into the right places. Nice and efficient. Once you’ve commented you click a button to move onto the next post that you flagged. If you’ve decided not to comment on any of them there is a skip button as well.
Here is the commenting interface:
Once you are done with the whole thing it makes a record of the blogs you posted at so that you can check back in on them.
Am I a manual comment spammer?
No, but if I was this is the perfect tool for the job as long as I wasn’t paid by the hour. Actually, I think this is a pretty great tool for social media marketers that looking to find conversations that Google finds noteworthy enough to rank. Since these blog posts theoretically rank well in Google they are likely to become centers of conversation around that particular search phrase.
I’m a firm believer in adding as much value to the conversation as I can muster whenever I post or comment. It may be a touch naive, but I believe in the long run Internet Marketing techniques that contributing quality content to a particular niche will outperform the quantity approach of making 5 second throwaway comments and then moving on to the next blog.
A great tool for conversation addicts
Aside from the added efficiency, CommentKahuna unearths some pretty interesting conversations that I’d missed on topics I’ve researched. I’ve plugged in about a dozen searches and have been fairly impressed — I hadn’t found many of these doing a search in Technorati or Google Blog Search.
Strangely, while I did poke around in Google’s regular index to try to spot the blog posts that CommentKahuna identified manually the results didn’t really seem to mesh up and it missed some blogs that I definitely know were Wordpress blogs, which was the poll I had restricted my searches on. I’ll have to investigate this more because obviously if the results don’t mesh up to the actual results in Google’s regular index than it might lessen the utility of the whole thing. I’d love to know how the result set is generated.
How PortalFeeder could improve this
PortalFeeder has taken plucked this program out of their suite of exclusive desktop tools they provide for their members and is offering it for free to help create some buzz for the launch of PortalFeeder 2.0, the new and improved PortalFeeder membership program.
I suspect most of their users have traditionally used this to raise their backlink count in Google. If this software also took into account the number of followable outbound links each post had in it and roughed out how much PageRank might be passed be the individual blogs it would probably be a killer app for SEOs.
I get the sense from PortalFeeder’s video presentation that this is now really being positioned as generally the type of social media marketing tool that I’d like to use. Given that, there are several things that I wish PortalFeeder would include in a future upgrade:
- One click buttons for submitting the pages that you comment on to social media sites. It isn’t enough to just put your comments out there — you want to promote the blog posts that you have commented on in order to increase traffic to them. Some of the traffic will trickle down to you, making your comment more impactful.
- Provide a spell checker for the comments box. As it uses Internet Explorer as a foundation my Firefox spell checking add-ons are nowhere to be found.
- Enable it to also factor in and display show inbound link information from Yahoo and Technorati.
- Show the titles in the list interface as well as the URLs.
Oh, and this would really rock as a Firefox add-on. I’m trying to live a monastic, browser-centric life as much as possible and the less software installs the better.
You can download CommentKahuna here. By the way, this isn’t any kind of affiliate link — not because I have anything against them, but more because in this case I’m too lazy to try to locate one.
Matt wrote:
I used this program to find this blog! haha j/k, but sounds like a really awesome way to find relative, important posts deemed by Google like you stated. Could see it being abused but I guess anything can be
Posted 03 Dec 2007 at 10:28 am ¶
Riccardo Giuntoli wrote:
I’ve just tried to install it under wine and linux.
The installation go right with this log:
(Ed: most of log snipped)
…install the Windows version of Mono to run .NET executables
(Ed: a little more snippage)
Some suggestions?
Regards, Riccardo Giuntoli.
Posted 04 Dec 2007 at 2:48 am ¶
mblair wrote:
@Riccardo - CommentKahuna requires .NET to be installed. I’m not too familiar with Wine for Linux but it seems (and a message in the log you posted mentioned it as well) that you might want to try installing Mono to add .NET support:
http://www.mono-project.com/
If that doesn’t work, you might try PortalFeeder’s support section here and see if they have any advice:
http://www.portalfeeder.com/support
Good luck!
Posted 04 Dec 2007 at 12:48 pm ¶
Malignition.com wrote:
It’s sad that this program can’t distinguish whether a blog has a nofollow attribute on its outgoing links. In all other respects it sounds great. Hopefully people (specifically spammers) don’t start to abuse the tool.
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 10:27 pm ¶
mblair wrote:
@Malignition.com - Actually, they’ve just come out with a version that does exactly this. I downloaded it yesterday and haven’t had the chance to test it too much yet but it seems to do the trick.
Posted 13 Dec 2007 at 5:10 pm ¶
Sectionals wrote:
I had no idea that service like this existed. I must check it out, thanks.
Posted 14 Dec 2007 at 1:53 am ¶
Joanne Mason wrote:
I downloaded CommentKahuna a few weeks ago and found it easy to set up and start using. I’d like to see a spell checker in a later version as well. Otherwise, I think it’s a great tool for promoting your websites.
Posted 20 Dec 2007 at 9:53 am ¶
OnlineSoffiya wrote:
Wow… i think this tool is very good for beginners like me. TQ
Posted 24 Dec 2007 at 9:52 pm ¶
DirectoryMaximizer wrote:
Hey I think that’s a very useful piece of software for link building. Wondering how did you even access that page, couldn’t find it from the main site’s url. Anyway it’s good you posted this and good that I found this post of yours
Posted 15 Jan 2008 at 10:46 pm ¶
Biuro Nieruchomości wrote:
Nice tool but doesn’t it go towards black hat seo ?
Posted 20 Jan 2008 at 1:34 pm ¶
Julia wrote:
Hello Mark,
Thank you for a nice software review. I tried CommentKahuna but now I am using Fast Blog Finder. It supports the features you wrote about such as spell checker, social bookmark tools, ability to show the number of outbound links on the page. So, I’m quite satisfied with this tool.
Posted 29 Jan 2008 at 3:23 am ¶
Home Study Courses wrote:
I tried Comment Kahuna and sadly found it wanting. It was extremely difficult to find blogs that didn’t do nofollows on the posts. It seemed to me that it checked the whole page, and if it saw any nofollows, that blog was black listed. Rather a crude approach if you ask me.
I gave it 2 hours of my time and found a few blogs, but nothing worth bothering with to be honest. I guess if you have more time than money, then maybe this is a good tool for you.
Posted 31 Jan 2008 at 3:58 pm ¶
Web Technologies wrote:
This is such a wonderful tool! You can’t imagine how much time it has saved me in locating blogs, especially finding the ones with “nofollow” turned off. The new version sure does the trick! Good one.
Posted 06 Mar 2008 at 1:34 pm ¶
Tom Roompot wrote:
I hate tools like that. No doubt it’ll rather help to spam blogs. You’ll soon have lots and lots of spam in your comments.
Posted 07 Mar 2008 at 4:03 am ¶
ArcadePenny wrote:
Fantastic tools, nut provided you can get throught the registration screen.
Posted 10 Mar 2008 at 6:59 am ¶
Webhostingpad wrote:
I have bought comment kahuna last month, is not what I expected. It’s still not many blogs inside the system.
Posted 17 Mar 2008 at 2:42 am ¶
Ben wrote:
I think that is a really good thing for those people who like to write comments.
Posted 26 Mar 2008 at 12:27 pm ¶
Jenna wrote:
Sounds like a neat tool! I’ll have to look into this! Thanks for sharing!
Posted 27 Mar 2008 at 1:12 pm ¶
Karn Patel wrote:
I have only heard about this just recently, how long has it been since this program has been released.
Posted 30 Mar 2008 at 10:11 am ¶
KLadofoRA wrote:
heard about it just for couple of day and I can say it amazing
Posted 30 Mar 2008 at 2:16 pm ¶
Dll Files wrote:
Seems like a great piece of software. Definitely gonna give it a try. Thanks for sharing…
Posted 30 Mar 2008 at 6:03 pm ¶
Jon wrote:
I recently got this, and I’m trying it. So far so good.. you’re right though it needs more since I use firefox. But I guess they don’t care they’re just offering it for free for the e-mail addy.
Posted 04 Apr 2008 at 12:13 am ¶
China tours wrote:
I gave it 2 hours of my time and found a few blogs, but nothing worth bothering with to be honest. I guess if you have more time than money, then maybe this is a good tool for you.
Posted 04 Apr 2008 at 7:51 pm ¶
Julia wrote:
no more manual messages
Posted 20 Apr 2008 at 5:05 am ¶
DietaDimagrire wrote:
Thanks for your review.
I am actually using it for my link building and it actually brings up blogs in my locall language too.
Now these results are not 100% accurate, but it well worth the while.
Roby
Posted 27 Apr 2008 at 3:55 pm ¶
Dale wrote:
I like this blog alot. Keep this coming..lots of good info..Comment Kahuna is pretty cool, been using it for a while now.
Posted 06 May 2008 at 4:31 pm ¶
Abunza wrote:
Looks like a great tool, I’m going to check it out for sure! Thanks! …Looking through the rest of your blog.
-Jeff
Posted 08 May 2008 at 10:49 am ¶