Indexing and Linking with GSA Search Engine Ranker

I tend to use GSA search engine ranker for some my own “churn and burn” sites quite often. I was reticent about using it for clients, however, after I recently stopped using it for one particular client, I noticed that a few months later their rankings started to slip, so on it went again, their rankings recovered. In short, used the right way, this great little SEO application really works a treat. It is also an excellent indexing tool.

You don’t get content control and you don’t get a list of more than a hundred high authority links as standard. But for churn and burn, GSA Search Engine Ranker is a decent tool.

While it doesn’t handle content as well as either SEO Autopilot or Ranker X –  the importance of handling of content is getting more important at every Google update, so if you want a precise content strategy, the those are the two tools that stand out –  GSA Search Engine Ranker is a decent neat link maker. Better still it is perhaps the best desktop link indexer on the market.

If you know what you are doing, it’s a great, inexpensive and powerful tool.

Even for those promoting valuable sites it is easy to see how it could be very useful to add variation to the mix particularly if you set it up properly. There are plenty of resources on the Internet that explain how to use it normally, this post is specifically aimed at setting up for long-term running to get high quality links from content sites with limited number of existing outbound links.

High Quality Back Link Building

Where to Submit?

This first screenshot shows how I set up the platforms. The only changes I would make here would be if I had a PDF file or a decent video then I would check the boxes for document sharing and video sharing. A caveat here would be that I would prefer that both were under 5 MB in size to prevent the process from slowing down too much or problems with proxies.

These platforms are the one which allow user content and not just a few words. I also find that directories, guest books pingbacks, trackbacks and the like offer very little value and often only last a day or two. It’s easy to inflate the number of links created into the thousands if you include these link types, but in anything other than the shortest terms they offer very little value. Too many directories, guest books and image comments could conceivably harm your site. I avoid them.

Keywords and HTML Anchor Text

An easy mistake to make is to confuse anchor text and keywords.

Video showing my standard set up. It may see what you’re looking for in here. Apologies for the sound quality.

The key words are the ones used by GSA search engine ranker to find sites to place your content on. They’re exactly the same as you going into Google or another search engine and typing in those words or phrases and seeing which sites come up. A common mistake I see is people confusing them with categories or tags. They are search terms.

Optimizing for Keywords and Anchor Text

Good practice here is to start from the left and move to the right getting less specific as you go. The first term should be very specific to your niche. As you add they can get a little looser while still remaining on the general topic you’re looking to create links for.

There is no point putting terms like miscellaneous or general in there, as they will often just return dictionary definition sites for the word “miscellaneous” and the word “general”. Remember, these are search terms and not categories.

Anchor Text

I tend to use only the first anchor text box and put in at least 10 variations, 20 or 30 is better.

Only these two alternatives to main anchor list

I’ll then use generic Anchor text which is inbuilt into GSA Search Engine Ranker to about 20%, and naked links to a similar percentage. This means that 4/10Links created will not use your targeted anchor text at all, and then with the variation of 30 different anchors, Most will only be used about 2% of the time. Pretty much perfect.

Content

I’ve mentioned before that I tend to use Kontent Machine for most of my content.The exception here is blog Commenting where I will set up10 or 15 Individual comments In a decent spinning tool such as Spinchimp. The spinning each one individually, and finally converting them into one double nested line. See below

After A One Press Spin

GSA Settings for Effective Link Building

Submission and verification is where you can really make big mistakes and potentially slow GSA down to a crawl as well.

Remember the aim is to create high value links only.

I have GSA captcha solver running alongside SER, and behind that I send those that have a value of PR4 or greater that GSA captcha solver struggles with to a service, in this case Deathbycaptcha.

Skip form fields and hard to solve captchas

If a form cannot be filled in, I “Skip”. It is set to “Ask User”, so you’ll need to change this.

Verified Links must have exact URL. set to YES, particularly if you want to later build a second tier of links.

Skip sites with more than 150 OBL. This sounds a lot, but in practice GSA counts all outbound links on a page whether they are navigational links to the same site or not. It’s rare to find even the cleanest of HTML site builds that contains less than 50 links without having a single third party link involved. If you set this too low then expect dramatically reduced results. Under 50 and in practice they will be very poor.

150 may be a little on the high side for some, but I strongly suggest going no lower than 100

Skip with PR below. I often set this to 2 – though 1 is also fine. However the next setting

Skip also unknown PR – is vital! Always tick (check) this box. Most trash sites are unknown PR and you’ll create a lot of PR N/A links on a lot of trash sites if you leave this unchecked.

Again, to re-iterate, this is specifically to create high value links only. Quality not quantity.

And with a PR above – I use 7 or 8 here. I don;t want to even try and create links on site like CNN or Blogger. A lot of search engines have their own WEB2.0 set ups (like Google with Blogger) and I Don’t want to spam those sites with my URL and risk getting black listed.

Use PR of Domain should be selected as well.

If you have the content then you might notice that by default “Article Wiki” is not checked. Feel free to check that.

What Search Engines To Use

Don’t rely entirely on Google. It’s better to pick a language and then scrape from every available search engine that GSA Search Engine Ranker has built in for that language.

“Ah!” I hear you say” What if we get some sites that are not indexed in Google from these lesser engines?”

RIght click menu by language or country

Well, you will. Not many, but a few. Google has a coverage of well over 90% of all English speaking sites (for example) – in fact it’s closer to 96% the last time I checked, so maybe 1 in 20 or 30 links created on sites scraped with another engine are not Google indexed. So what? the vast majority will be (there is huge overlap) and you are saving proxies and getting variation by not hitting Google over and over again.

Right click in the main body of “Search Engines to use” box and select “Check by language”. I select “English” for example and there are about 138 of them. Several of these are Google however. .co.uk for instance as well as the usual .com, but well over 100 are not, and they provide great variation, most sites they produce are indexed somewhere on Google and it will spare your proxies from a ban. win/win/win.

Captchas and Proxies

AS I mentioned above I use GSA captch solver and Deathbycaptcha. The image below shows how I set this up.

Send hard captchas to a service

Notice that GSA’s captcha solution is used for most and is first choice. Only if a high value (PR4 or higher) link fails to be solved do I pass it over the the paid service. This means that a couple of dollars can last for weeks as only links that are really worth it are sent to the manual service

Scrape with public post with private

Proxies? My rule is public for scraping, private for posting. As I mentioned above, if you use a lot of search engines you really don’t need that many proxies. 20 reliable ones might well be enough for all but the spammiest of jobs (and I don’t suggest spamming).

The above settings work well. You can of course increase the thread count if you have a decent PC and a fast internet pipe, the VPS I run on has several other applications running as well and GSA is treated almost as a background task. With 10 threads it takes very few system resources on even a modest server or VPS.

Other Considerations?

A decent server or VPS is best. For under 20 dollars per month you can hire a VPS that will run this software with ease – and other tasks besides. While you can run it on a desktop, GSA Search Engine Ranker is a tool that is best left running for days, weeks, months even, and the saving on your electricity bill might be worth renting a cheap VPS.

Content is vital. The better quality you get the more it will survive and prosper. Click through is a great thing to get from your first tier links.

As you are creating fewer links (of higher value) with this method, then spend a little more time on better content.

GSA Search Engine Ranker is not a universal fix. It’s not the best linking tool out there, but it is capable of doing a decent job in many circumstances, and for the price remains well worth it if it fits the role you are after.

Originally published on demondemon dot com by Paul Rone-Clarke