GSA SER rose to power after it’s initial launch in 2012 as one of the cheapest options in a market flooded with monthly subscription software (mainly dominated by the likes of SENuke, Licorne & Magic Submitter) that used a ton of resources to run and were aimed at people wanting an easy link building software that had a budget.. Whereas GSA came along, with a ton more link building opportunities, for a one time $99 fee and an interface that wasn’t pretty, to say the least.. but was more for those hardcore users who wanted to build links into the millions, on a weekly basis. Accumulating nearly 600 pages of posts on Black Hat World, getting in excess of 50,000 sales and releasing a host of addon SEO softwares has placed GSA as one of the biggest link building tools of all time..
In Summer of 2013 I made a video on how I was using the tool to get niche relevant backlinks for my sites using it’s built-in scraper, rather than scraping a niche relevant list as a lot of people who picked it up didn’t want to do imports or use other tools aside from GSA, such as ScrapeBox:
Since putting the video out, it’s been viewed over 10,000 times and featured in multiple guides – Even being the first intro video (for a number of years) on SERTips.com, which has been the go to resource for learning this link building software, and still is.
Will all this being said, my question (and hopefully answer) today.. Is can you still use this software for anything? And if so, how can you use it in the modern day, animal filled virtual world we live in?
Table of Contents
Introduction
Due to all the updates, Penguin and the problems disavow files have caused.. You can’t legitimately build links from GSA (to an extent) to your site without normally causing a lot of damage. Of course, there are going to be exceptions to this rule with people who have scraped extremely targeted lists and done some settings configurations, but 99% of you won’t be able to pull that shit off without getting slapped into the oblivion of pages 10 – 30.
That being said, you can still use a large amount of spammy links to rank several other properties, as well as use it for tiered link building.. However the latter requires a bit of setup to do so, so if you aren’t proficient with GSA already, then I don’t really suggest learning how to use it, as you likely will spend the next 100 hours learning, setting up your GSA VPS and not see too much return on that massive amount of time investment. If you want to still use GSA in your campaigns, then you can always consult an expert or use a service like Paul Steels’ or Peter Rotas’ – Both are highly recommended.
Parasite SEO
One of my most talked about topics, and something that I’m extremely well known for because of it.. Parasites are the biggest opportunity when it comes to using GSA, as they’re pretty much the only way to send traffic direct at a site now-a-days, because authority sites can take a lot higher link velocity as Google assigns a lot more trust to those sites, and even a million links is often not that much in the grand scale of a large sites link profile.
The trick is to find parasites that Google hasn’t hunted down and killed off.. Things like Pinterest, Buzzfeed, Storify and a load of others have all been the target of Google after SEOs spent months abusing the sites authority.
With that being said, there’s an abundance of parasites out there and the people who’re making the most money exploiting this tactic are those that use creativity to find new parasites, and even parasites in specific niches.
Personally I’m a fan of using Google’s own properties (YouTube, Blogspot etc) as they tend to favour them in the SERPs and give them a lot more trust..
Pro Tip: Look into what Google ventures has been backing recently and you may see some nice SEMRush spikes and an ability to create a page on the site.
I’m also a fan of using niche forums, there are plenty of them out there and in some of the bigger niches you’ll have HUGE forums with crazy metrics that can take a real beating when it comes to spamming a page, and rank well on it’s own accord due to Google favouring forums in the SERPs more over the last 12 months – Anyone else noticed a spike in forum threads displaying in the SERPs? Though that may be down to the amount of content that forums can put out due to users creating it on their behalf.
YouTube Videos
YouTube has been a particularly good platform to parasite for the last few years now, and I know a lot of people who’re making an absolute killing spam uploading videos and spamming them with links all day long.. Even if only 1/10 videos rank, 90% of the work is automated and you can make a serious killing if just 1 video ranks for a solid term.
It’s also got it’s place in local SEO, with a lot of people making videos to generate leads for pay per call services & local clients who perhaps don’t have the biggest of budgets.
I’m not going to get into a massive parasite SEO tutorial here, if you want to learn more about it check out my introduction page here.
Online Reputation Management
Using the same concept of Parasite SEO, you can use GSA Spam to help keep your branded terms clean of negativity. Spamming your social profiles, citations and any positive listing on a decently authoritative site (If they link to you, only go with nofollow profiles/listings, so to not risk your site) for your own branded terms means anyone doing research into your brand (and modern day researching is Googleing things) will be met with a positive image.
I normally do this mainly with all of the main social profiles, but you can also do it with any Yelp or company listings (as long as you don’t have a bad credit/revenue history) as well.
Tiered Link Building
I only suggest using this if you’re completely familiar with GSA, if you aren’t then consult one of the experts I mentioned above.
GSA Web 2.0s
GSA has a range of link types you can build, I like using an addon called SER Engines ($14.95/mo) which allows you to create and then post to Web 2.0s like WordPress, Edu Blogs, Tumblr and a ton more too.
You can use these as Tier 2s, building them to your tier 1 dofollow backlinks using manually spun content and then hit a large blast of things like comments, social bookmarks and document sharing just to help get the Web 2.0s you created indexed and some authority – Though make sure you’re configuring this to be as niche relevant as possible, and using high quality spun comments, PDFs etc or you’ll end up getting a high amount of link rot or a high failure rate.. The higher quality you can get for each link, the better the link will be and less likely it’ll be to get deleted.
Powering Up Authority Links
Similar to the parasite SEO strategy above, if you have any dofollow links from large authority sites that won’t notice a large amount of incoming links, then you can hit it with a pretty good GSA blast to get more authority passing through. Though I generally only suggest going with a manually spun article and the contextual options GSA has to offer.
If you’re doing this, don’t do it to placement links that have cost you a large amount of money, go with authority sites where it’s easier to get a dofollow on, such as profile links.
Thanks For Reading
I hope you enjoyed this post and it gave you an insight into using GSA in the modern day, as I know a lot of people get quite confused with this tool when they see tutorials from a few years back still floating around.
If you’d like to learn more SEO awesome-ness, then join my free 7 day SEO course, or if you have any questions/feedback about this post, drop a comment below!
P.S. Ignore the featured image, my normal designer who makes all my badass featured images is away enjoying some vacation time.. I’ll have him create a new one once back!
