Being a “jack of all trades” in the (web) development world I also love to dabble in online marketing on the side and have done for years when time allows. I have a network of sites on verticals such as bingo, finance, insurance, online retail, mobile phones…. quite a variety you can see and I had trimmed a few off a few years back as it was just too much to handle, a site on hotels was one of those that bit the dust only to have their domain taken over by some PPC king or other…

One aspect of this whole process is that of getting your sites well ranked in search engines and appropriately worded link references placed in the right sorts of places to get drive by traffic to your sites. This is an extremely laborious process unless you either throw tonnes of cash at it or have some people in India do it for you rather badly. Over the past few months thought it seems three products have appeared that try to automate the process of link building as it’s all a scriptable logical process when you think about it.

The players at the moment are scrapejet, no hands seo, and GSA Search Engine Ranker so far I have used two of the three. From my experiences of scrapebox from which scrapejet tries to follow, my expectations were high – scrapebox is an extremely powerful piece of software for mining the web and posting links on blogs then verifying all went well. However although it’s a powerful program for doing things in bulk there’s still lots of manual intervention required, as I have a windows server 2008 VPS online 24/7 something that could just plough away in the background all by itself would be a far better solution.

My experience of scrapejet after purchase was a very short one of just two days, I realised from the logs that an error 503 was blocking the program from getting anywhere with harvesting links, and you still had to manually get a decent set of proxies together then control them yourself from time to time, scrapejet didnt seem to refresh the list or remove dead ones so to cut a short story shorter, I asked for a refund and got it. I then looked into no hands seo which seemed good but people were also mentioning GSA Search Engine Ranker in a better light… so that’s where I decided to invest next.

Now running the experiment and after setting up the initial profiles I honestly have not had to do a thing… it finds lots of good proxies by itself then refreshes the list at an interval of your choosing – it does not use proxies that stop responding, has a very nice variety of link sources to harvest from, it’s multi-threaded and if you don’t use captcha filling services you can just set it to ignore places requesting a captcha and it just chugs away harvesting more and more links expanding to more and more diverse sets of related keywords… it’s not done at a crazy fast rate so things seem more natural as a slow constant stream of links from a variety of types of sites is what you really want instead of 10,000 sudden wordpress links… as you can easily do with scrapebox.

12 hours into running GSA Search Engine Ranker it has submitted about 1000 links for 7 sites I’m doing about 15 threads so keep plenty of resources for the web server and SQL server as they run on the same box. Of the 1000 a very reasonable 232 have been automatically verified with PR going up as high as 6!, I have not  set an upper limit on outgoing links or any restriction on the PR of pages that are harvested so these numbers should give you an idea of performance at low load.

Will I be trying no hands seo next?, I don’t think so - GSA Search Engine Ranker seems to be doing a perfectly good job of this and I didn’t have to spend 1000′s getting a company to do it, or a couple of hundred pounds getting an Indian company to do it poorly, $99 to have 7 link building campaigns running all the time getting more and more diverse and natural is the perfect solution for me.

UPDATE: After running GSA Search Engine Ranker with 10 threads for 5 days I have almost 1000 confirmed links to 9 of my sites which google analytics has reported between 16% and 71% traffic rises throughout the week (content has not changed this week, only link building), links have been posted to pages/domains with PR as high as 7 from what I have seen.

UPDATE 2!: After realising I mistakenly put profile keywords in {spinnable} format rather than comma separated the verified link rate has gone up massively to 1300 in 24 hours… pick your keywords from somewhere like adwords keyword tool and you are ready to rock.

Download the GSA Search Engine Ranker and try to use for 5 days.

Or Buy the GSA Search Engine Ranker On GSA Official Site.

Way back in 2006 I created one of the many affiliate marketing sites that have been giving a handy modest return (not easy when your a one man band, with a full time job, and enjoy spending time with your family!). The site was Bingo Tonight and I wanted to learn from the headaches of a previous site Financeland on how to publish database driven content in a url re-write friendly manner from a handful of templates (views) so I could put new offers, reviews up and have them easily crawled with keywords in the URL for SEO juice.

So instead of the httphandlers and component installed on IIS to handle the financeland article redirects the simple use of a custom 404 page using server.execute served my purposes, detecting from the first part of the URL after the domain what the type of request was (controller), then using backslash separated parameters “folders” to select the records (parameters).

So as I’m here in 2011 going through the MVC 3 music store tutorial application… it’s not entirely that unfamiliar to grasp the concept of turning URLs into dynamic pages through a limited set of classes.

Edit: ahhhh most of the way through the music store tutorial now and I’m seeing the power of MVC scaffolded views… yep.. that’s a very nice timesaver indeed!, the razor engine is very nice and clean to code with by the look of it.

I got my first computer when I was around 10, or earlier… can’t remember exactly – I had two Commodore VIC 20 computers, and two Commodore C64′s, around that time in the mid-80s there was a weekly magazine that came out and had 5 bigass binders that held all 52 editions together. I couldn’t remember the name of it and it’s so obvious… just found it now on wikipedia here. You got little computer programs that took ages to put in to those first generation home PCs and inevitably you would make loads of typos that would take so long to debug you would just give up.

But sometimes they worked, and I guess that has a lot to do with why computers have been such a massive part of my life.

I had a massive purge of facebook friends to strictly people I know, and changed the RSS feeds import to just posts from this blog rather than my network of sites, I’ll keep stuff like Bingo for by bingo facebook alter-ego marketing login etc which makes far more sense all round.

Only a couple of days left until we are all off to Turkey – and me and Natasa got the sneezes… had the doctor check us out this morning and we are not growing pig snouts… just a bit of a cold which will hopefully disappear before we fly out.

Well I believe CERN did it’s stuff a couple of hours ago as me and my wife heard on the radio while driving to work this morning, being told 26 mins to go until they fire up the experiment!.

So now its a couple of hours later and after rewriting half my Bingo website so I can serve news content from dynamically created URLs that the search engine spiders just love, I remember.. hang on… wasn’t the reset button on life pressed a couple of hours ago…

I wonder what they found out so far.