Notice: If you are spending most of your link-building time using these tools, and you aren’t going after a PPP keyword (porn, poker, pills) then you probably don’t need to do this. Even though it can make sites rank, it has to be a serious money-making keyword because the sites won’t last long.
Do not do this because “it’s cool” and you see people talking about it on forums. Most of them are just wasting bandwidth.
Do this because your grey hat and white hat campaigns are so effective that you can run black hat. Or because you’re in some “sketchy” niche. Or because you want to burn some sites to the ground learning new things.
Mindset – Big Picture
Automated tools are really fun. If you can notice a pattern in what ranks, and surf a wave, then you can do this. Your income really comes down to how quickly you notice the patterns and how quickly you can scale the operation.
Realistically, all you want to do is find places that rank well to post original content (auto-generated, probably unreadable) in mass. Then you will tier those (build easier backlinks to those) and work on getting those crawled and indexed.
The challenges are mastering each software (we will eventually have full guides written on each one, the problem is the updates come out so rapidly on them, that we don’t have time to test and prove something works by the time the market changes), removing all bottlenecks, finding a great proxy source, and having a campaign that just works.
GSA-SER
GSA’s products are the hottest thing on the market right now. It’s because it flat-out works. Because GSA built an entire product suite that marketers need (the Captcha Breaker and Indexer) they have really made spamming a beautiful user experience. The time to learning this software is much shorter than anything like XRumer or ZennoPoster.
The thing that will always change is which platforms are the hottest to post to. Services are starting to pop up allowing you to get the new platforms before the official updates come out. We won’t recommend any at this current time. Just be mindful of the newest platforms. Watch the SERPs of what actually ranks. Right now it’s blog.co.uk, tripod, and webs.com. Before that WordPress.com was killing it. It’s really powerful when you find a site that allows freshly created users to post blogs after the root domain, not on a subdomain. As long as it doesn’t get burned out with idiots posting weak content, you will be able to rank a lot of stuff very quickly.
You want to focus GSA’s resources in the content posting direction at all times, not comment spam or bookmarks. Comment spam and bookmarks are halfway-decent for tiers. If you’re like us, you just want to outsource that so your machine focuses on the 20% of stuff that gets 80% of the results. Let someone else do the tiering.
Learning GSA-SER
1. Where we started learning it, YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/user/RinTinTindy/videos – Santos has some great videos. We could bore you with a 40 page guide and have to constantly update it, or you can watch his videos. Just watch his videos and keep up.
2. Your own testing. Pick some obscure keywords and see if you can get them to rank with a very soft blast. Don’t go into a competitive niche day one. See if you can get something random and pointless to rank with a particular set up (Light switch cover plate dimensions – just something ridiculously long tail but relevant to a YouTube video you create for it, or a random web 2.0). Once it ranks, it’s worth scaling up to a major campaign. That way you know your resources will generate a result when you release the flood gates.
Tips
We haven’t found it necessary to go crazy on the exclusions. Like minimum PR, bad word exclusion lists, etc. It just wastes resources. It makes you feel “white hat” but you’re a black hat, admit it. It’s not going to last. Who cares if it gets penalized?
If it gets scraped from Google, it’s probably okay anyway. Leave Yahoo, Bing, and all other random search engine results out of your scraping. Use what Google gives you to rank. It’s most likely to be the safest just by the nature of it showing up.
Content Foundry
Use Content Foundry in conjunction with GSA-SER. It is the best content generator we’ve found. We don’t like to make it human-readable, but all of the tutorial videos are self explanatory. The only negative is the monthly expense.
Kontent Machine
This is second to GSA in terms of content effectiveness and ease of use. It has been kicked out of our toolset for the most part, but it isn’t because it’s a bad tool. Content Foundry is just better.
Captcha Breaker
GSA’s Captcha Breaker saves money, so it is our first attempt at breaking captchas. It is ridiculously fast at breaking captchas, too. We like to set it to multiple attempts, then send it to Death by Captcha (paid service) as a final attempt. Realistically you can just set it to attempt only on Captcha Breaker and be ok.
Spam Machine vs. VPS
We will not recommend a VPS right now. They aren’t bad but to get a powerful one, we would rather just own it ourselves. We are running our own spam machine off-hours on a 100MB broadband connection. A VPS may be a great solution for you, but because we aren’t actively testing them, we won’t recommend one.
How did we build our machine? Here are the parts from the invoice:
CoolerMaster Case RC-343-KKN1 ELITE 343 microATX MINI TOWER No PS 2/1/(5) BAY USB Audio Black
CoolerMaster Power Supply RS500-PCARA3-US eXtreme Power 500W ATX
Intel Motherboard BOXDB75EN Executive Series LGA1155 DDR3-1600 PCI Express DVI-D/VGA microATX
**Max Memory Supported (Dependent on Size): 32GB**
Intel CPU Core i7-3770 4Cores/8Threads 3.4GHz 8MB LGA1155
Crucial Memory BLS8G3D1609DS1S00 8GB DDR3-1333MHz Ballistix Sport 32GB Total RAM
Intel SSD SSDSA2CW080G310 9.5MM Gen3 80GB 2.5inch MLC SATA 3Gb/s
Samsung DVDRW SH-224BB/BEBE 24X SATA Black
Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit English 1Pack DSP DVD
Now, there are some things you can point out immediately that “don’t make sense” – here are the answers to those questions:
1. Why such a beast? Would a $400 computer from Best Buy not be sufficient?
We wanted this one to run anything and everything we could throw at it for years. We wanted it to be high quality and strong, too. No cheap parts breaking or blue screens of death when something goes bad.
2. Seriously, why such a beast? 32GB of RAM for a 32 bit application? It can’t even use that much!
You don’t need it, true. But we run multiple applications simultaneously. Memory should never, ever hold us back. Ever.
3. Why only 80GB on the hard drive? It’s a “beast” right?
That’s what cloud servers and Dropbox are for. Those don’t eat up resources when you have 32GB of RAM.
4. I built this same exact setup and had 1.24 GB free. How does this even function?
We ran into that problem. It’s a pointless system pagefile that takes up all the space. Disable it. It is not necessary with 32GB of RAM.
5. No Wifi?
Hard wiring is better for bandwidth.
6. How many threads can it run?
A ridiculous amount. Our previous spam machine would hang around 600. 200 is all you need. This machine doesn’t really have a limit. That’s why it’s built this way.
7. Seriously, why is this even necessary?
When the next best thing is released (GSA will never hit 64 bit), we are ready.
RankWyz
It’s huge right now, and we are testing this one.
Proxies
You will need some killer proxies. We have burned out so many proxies in the past year it is sickening. There are rumors of IPV6 proxies coming along will eliminate this problem entirely. In the meantime we are stuck with IPV4. We loved ERRSY (currently down) and are still subscribed to buyproxies.org. Finding good proxies is a challenge.
Hacked Links
This isn’t automated, but it’s definitely very black hat. And it is incredibly powerful. There is one type of link that is killing it right now: 0 height (and obviously contextual). It’s not a “hidden” one like an entire DIV – those don’t pass juice. These are 0 height (more of a responsive design trigger – that’s why Google eats them up) in the content.
Getting these links are downright risky. You have to pay someone (typically in Russia, which means you need a passport and will have to prove yourself a few ways and jump through hoops). If you go through an English service to buy the links for you, you are giving them keys to enter your market. You are essentially paying them to test if their method works for you. If it does, they can just cancel you and push their own sites to the top and cut you out entirely.
Because of this, we gave up on hacked links. Some markets just aren’t cut out for us, we feel that there is easier money to be made. It’s for you to decide, really.
Hacking Links Yourself
Read the security section and reverse engineer it to learn how to hack links yourself. It’s illegal. We don’t advise it. Just know it exists.
ZennoPoster
We are testing this one, but it is very cool for automating repetitive tasks. We almost want to turn this into a NSEO tool or a Panda CP automation tool.
Scrapebox? SENuke? ScrapeJet? XRumer? Etc, etc.?
There are a ton of programs you can learn. These tools are more “old school” but powerful if you know how to use them. The reason why we are suggesting GSA-SER is because it’s so easy and it works. The time to learn XRumer is so much greater, the cost is so much higher, and the information is so much harder to find, that you almost want to avoid it.
“But some guy on a forum is awesome at it and makes $5,000 a day?” And he will never share with you how he does it. Chances are he forgot more about how the program worked than he could teach you. Some of these guys are just great programmers, which is why the software is so hard to use. Only they know how to use it.
Do you really want to spend 30 hours learning a software, to only have to learn how to adapt and build upon it to keep up with the algorithm? Or do you want to spend 5 hours learning GSA, then the rest finding what works with Google this month?