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GSA Search Engine Ranker Ultimate Tutorial & Genuine Review – Link Building On Steroids

Sterling King

GSA Search Engine Ranker is one of the top fully automated link building tools at this point in the online marketing history. We all know that link building is, and perhaps will always be a huge part of ranking websites, and GSA SER is here to help. Now, for a beginner, this state-of-the-art link building tool can be really hard to understand. I know it took me a while to fully grasp all of the settings and all of the tricks and tweaks that would put this GSA SEO tool on steroids.

Update: I have created a separate blog post that is updated regularly and always contains the optimal GSA SER configuration that we currently are using – Optimal GSA SER Configuration.

While there are many GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorials you can find, none of them look at absolutely every element and functionality of this GSA software. Trust me, I’ve probably looked at all of them. And that is why I have decided to gather everything I know about GSA SER in one place. Yes, everything. After you are done reading this, you will know the purpose of every pixel in GSA Search Engine Ranker. Go.

The Structure of this Ultimate GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial

Here is how the ultimate GSA SER tutorial is structured:

GSA Search Engine Ranker Features Preview

So what makes GSA Search Engine Ranker so good?

GSA Search Engine Ranker has so many other features, but they are way too much to be grouped in just one set of radio buttons. Before we get into the only GSA SER tutorial you’ll ever need, I want you to know that the software comes with a 5 day, completely free trial, so you can test it our yourself by clicking the following download GSA Search Engine Ranker link.

You can then install it and follow the tutorial on your brand new GSA SER instance. And later, when you see its true potential, you can buy GSA Search Engine Ranker using our godly GSA SER discount at the end of this extensive GSA SER review. Shall we? You bet.

The Ultimate GSA Search Engine Ranker Tutorial – Pixel by Pixel

Before we begin, I want to tell you that this tutorial will be extremely in-depth, so if you are here just for the exclusive GSA SER discount coupon, simply scroll down to the very end of the article or click here. See you on the other side.

Alright then. The screenshots you will see throughout this GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial are taken from one of our VPS-s which takes care of clients’ projects mostly. Take strong notice of how we group our projects. I cannot show you the names, but I will talk about our naming convention as well. If you plan on using GSA SER for hundreds of projects, like we do, I suggest you learn how to group them so that you can easily navigate through them at a later point in time.

How GSA SER Works – A Brief Introduction

I think you will need this basic knowledge in order to more easily understand our GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial. So this is how GSA SER basically works:

I hope this gave you some perspective because it’s time we dug into this GSA SEO tool.

The “Dashboard” Screen

Once you click twice on the link building tool for beasts, you will have to wait a few seconds for the license verification process to pass and you will be greeted by the “Dashboard” screen of GSA SER:

We shall approach this from bottom to top, just like we did in the GSA Captcha Breaker review article.

The “Statistics” Bar

As you can see, the bottom of the “Dashboard” screen is filled with some helpful numbers – from left to right:

If you left-click anywhere on the “Statistics” bar, you will be asked whether you want to reset the stats. GSA Search Engine Ranker automatically resets the stats at 00:00. Keep in mind that the captcha stats do not actually get reset until you restart GSA SER itself.

Moving on with our GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial

The “Log” Table

Just above the “Statistics” tab, you can see the “Log” table. If you right-click on it, you will see the following context menu:

As you can see, I have activated the log just for a second to show you how it looks. We usually have it disabled unless we are debugging something, because with hundreds of projects, it can impact performance. Anyway, the context menu is more than self-explanatory, however, there are other things I’d like you to know about the log.

Common GSA Search Engine Ranker Log Messages and their Meaning

That’s it pretty much for the GSA Search Engine Ranker “Log”. Oh, you can also select only one project for debugging, but we will see how to do that later – by default, the log displays messages from all active projects. Next in the only GSA SER tutorial you’ll ever need is…

The “Live Links” Table

I will now divert your attention to the right-hand side. You see the table with all of the live links and the opened context menu right?

So this is where your verified links will appear. There is a default limit of 1000 links for the table, however, if you click on the text “Last verified URLs (max. 1000)” above the “Live Links” table, you will be prompted to enter a custom number that fits your needs. As you can see, there is nothing much to explain about the “Live Links” table columns – time of verification, icon of engine, PR, and the URL to the verified link itself. The context menu:

Below the “Live Links” table, you can also see the distribution between the NoFollow links and DoFollow links. So that’s it pretty much for this section of GSA Search Engine Ranker. I would suggest you not allowing way too much live links to be stored in the table so as to not hurt performance and resources.

The “Main Menu”

Above the “Live Links” table, you can see the “Main Menu” of GSA Search Engine Ranker. Let’s look at each of the menus from left to right.

The “New” Menu

If you click on the button itself, it will simply open the “New Project” window, which we will look at later, however if you click the small arrow which is a little to the right of the button, you will see the following sub-menu drop down:

The “Edit” Menu

Clicking the button will open the “Edit Project” window for the selected project from the “Projects” table (the big area to the left of the “Live Links” table with all your GSA SER projects. Clicking the small arrow next to the “Edit” menu icon will show the “Projects Context Menu” which we will look at later.

The “Delete” Menu

This will simply delete the selected project(s). Don’t worry, it will first ask you if you are sure. This GSA link building tool will not allow you to delete projects by mistake. You can sleep relaxed now.

The “Options” Menu

This is where it gets interesting. You will see 5 tabs (on the left-hand side) once you open the “Options” menu – “Submission”, “Captcha”, “Indexing”, “Filter”, and “Advanced”.

The “Submission” Tab

The “Submission” tab is where you will setup your proxies and other relevant settings:

Let’s look at each of these from top to bottom. So, threads to use? There is a lot of debate about the number of threads you should use with GSA Search Engine Ranker. As you can see, there is a warning to the right which says we should not be using more than 100 threads. That is actually true, but only in the case when you are actually using GSA SER to scrape target URLs from Google (or other search engines), and then post to them. Our case is not of that nature – we have already built humongous lists with verified URLs, so there is no need for our projects to scrape target URLs from search engines. In such a case, you can go as high as 10 threads per proxy. If you noticed in the “Statistics” bar, we have setup 50 private proxies for the GSA Search Engine Ranker on this VPS, and we are running it at 400 threads, so 8 threads per proxy. I have personally found that 7 – 8 threads per private proxy is the sweet spot, again, if you are not scraping target URLs from search engines.

The checkboxes “Automatically decrease threads on a CPU usage above” and “Automatically decrease threads on a Memory usage above” are self-explanatory. I don’t set these ones up, because I have tested out GSA SER a lot and I know what resources it needs at the configuration we are running it at.

The “HTML timeout” option is extremely important. If my memory does not lie to me, I think the default value, right after you get GSA Search Engine Ranker is 30 (number is in seconds). However, there are websites out there for which GSA SER will need much more than 30 seconds to complete the account creation process. Through various forums and testing, I have found that 120 seconds is perfect.

The “Bandwidth limit” is useful for people who have, well, limited bandwidth on their VPS or personal computer. However, I don’t know how far you can get with a limited bandwidth using GSA Search Engine Ranker. This link building beast will eat it up in a day.

Now we are at the proxies section. Apparently, you want to use proxies otherwise this software will do almost nothing for you. Tick the “Use proxies” checkbox. We shall get back to the “Configure” button in a second. Now, I recommend using private proxies, especially if you will be scraping target URLs from Google. If you use public proxies, you will be wasting the talent of the king of automatic link building software which is illegal. Beware the GSA SER police.

So anyway, tick the “Private” checkbox to the right of the “Search Engines” checkbox. I have it ticked as well, although we do not scrape target URLs from Google, however, in rare cases, we do, so there’s no harm in the configuration of our GSA SER to be ready for this scenario.

The “Custom time to wait between search queries” checkbox is useful if you do not want your proxies to burn out very quickly, and especially if you are not using private proxies. 60 – 120 seconds depending on the number of proxies you have will do just fine, however, this will slow GSA SER’s work a lot. Just FYI.

The “Disable banned proxies” checkbox allows GSA Search Engine Ranker to automatically disable banned proxies, and you will most definitely need this if, again, you are not using private proxies. If you are, do not check it, because they do die from time to time, but they quickly get reincarnated from the proxies graveyard.

The “Submission” checkbox should always be ticked. This means that GSA SER will use the proxies you setup to post backlinks on target websites. Again, you’d want private proxies to post to websites, however, if you are not scraping target URLs from Google, semi-dedicated ones will give you good results as well. We rarely scrape target URLs with GSA SER, however we always use private proxies as they are far more efficient and you can go higher threads per proxy with them. After all, you are the only one using them. God knows what the semi-dedicated ones are being used for.

I have found that there is no need to use proxies for the “PR checking”, “Verification”, or “E-Mail checking”. And finally, we have the “Stop projects on no active proxies” and “Restart projects on active proxies” ticked just in case something goes wrong with the proxies and they die. We wouldn’t want the projects to continue trying to create backlinks, because all we will see in the log is “download failed” messages.

Now, let’s click the “Configure” button:

You see the “Proxy List” window with the “List” tab selected? This is where you will actually add your proxies. I strongly recommend using private proxies from BuyProxies (check out our honest review), but hey, that’s your choice. If you want to expose your GSA Search Engine Ranker to some gamma rays, private proxies are mandatory. Now, from bottom to top.

The “List” Tab

The “Checked” and “Unchecked” numbers indicate how many of the proxies which you have imported into GSA SER are actually checked (the 1st column in the proxies table above with the little “tick”). Now, you can check/uncheck proxies manually, or you can allow GSA SER to do this automatically when certain conditions are met (like with the “Disable banned proxies” checkbox a little bit above).

Adding New Proxies

Clicking the “Add Proxy” button will show the following menu:

Testing Proxies

The “Test Proxies” button has two menus:

Both of these menus can check the proxies:

Just a quick note here. If you have private proxies setup, and you test them and some of them fail, do not uncheck them (by default GSA SER will uncheck failed proxies). As I said earlier, private proxies might die from time to time (if you have bad ones), but they will come back. We have never had any problems with the proxies from BuyProxies, ever. They have always changed our proxies whenever we needed and also change the proxies automatically every month on the day you pay.

Deleting Proxies

The “Delete” button has 4 sub-menus:

Keep in mind that it will not ask for confirmation. It will delete the proxies immediately after you click, so think twice – cut once.

Adding or Editing Proxy Sites

Clicking the “Add/Edit ProxySites” button will show the “Proxy Finder” window where you will simply have the power to select from the pre-define proxy sources, add new ones, delete old ones, find new proxy sites using GSA SER, and tweak various settings for each of the proxy sites:

As I have stated a lot of times, we use private proxies, because I like to juice this puppy up a bit. So, there aren’t many tricks I can teach you in finding proxies from sources that would actually work. Maybe there is such a strategy, maybe there isn’t. The point is, that this will take way too much time to tweak everyday, and add and test new proxies constantly. The link building beast likes to build links, not check proxies you know?

There is also a context menu that pops up when you right click any of the proxies from the table, and has the following options:

And that’s all for the “List” tab in the “Proxy List” window. Continuing with our ultimate GSA SER tutorial.

The “Options” Tab

The second tab in the “Proxy List” window looks like this:

As you can see, there are two section here.

The Left Section

On the left side you can setup various settings which will allow GSA Search Engine Ranker to automatically maintain working public/private proxies. Ticking the “Automatically search for new proxies every” checkbox will simply tell GSA SER to go out and find proxies from the proxy sources you have configured, test them (it is recommended that you tick the “Test proxies” checkbox), and use them for your projects. As you see there are two buttons to the right of the “Test proxies” checkbox:

The rest of the checkboxes in the left section of the “Options” tab:

The Right Section

You have a few general settings here:

Overall, using public proxies for GSA SER, especially if you will be scraping target URLs from Google is not something you want. I have tested this strategy and let me tell you this – it does not work well. When I tried using the automatically scraped proxies which GSA Search Engine Ranker found for me every one hour, the VpM barely reached 3. The proxies were getting tested and came out successful, but just a few minutes later, most of them were already dead.

Maybe there is some unstoppable public proxy source which can be added to make this actually work (I always know there is a way), however, this would require a lot of time for tweaking, always checking, and you can never be sure that GSA SER is actually utilized to its maximum potential. So if you can afford private proxies, or at least semi-dedicated ones, go for it – you won’t go wrong with BuyProxies.

And that wraps it up for the “Proxy List” window. The next stop in our GSA Search Engine Ranker tour is…

The “Captcha” Tab

Okay, we are back to the “Options” menu screen and now, we will look at the “Captcha” tab:

So, the “Captchas” table that you see (with the “AntiGate” captcha type in it) is the table where all of your captcha solving services will show up. Now, in this scenario, we have setup AntiGate, but we are not actually using the captcha solving services of AntiGate. No, no. We are actually using GSA Captcha Breaker which is emulating AntiGate. If you want to know why we are doing it like this, check out our GSA Captcha Breaker Ultimate Tutorial, but in short, it is more efficient that way.

Let’s look at the buttons on the right-hand side of the “Captchas” table:

Below the buttons you can see the configuration of the selected captcha service – for each captcha, these fields might differ: some have logins, some keys, some API keys, etc. However, there are a few settings which apply to all captchas:

At the bottom of the “Captcha” tab we have several API key input fields, again for services which solve captchas. I haven’t used any of these so I really can’t comment on them. All I know is that GSA Captcha Breaker combined with ReverseProxies OCR is the shit.

The “Use SpamVilla text captcha solver” is ticked by default, but we have not added this service, so it doesn’t matter anyway. However, if you have SpamVilla added, this checkbox will force captchas which are simple questions (not images) to be answered by SpamVilla’s text captcha solver.

That’s it for the “Captcha” tab. Moving along the waves of this GSA SER tutorial.

The “Indexing” Tab

Next stop – the “Indexing” tab:

This tab doesn’t need much explanation. As you can see, you have a general checkbox – “Submit backlink URLs to blog search engines”, which if ticked, will send all verified backlinks to the selected blog search engines from the list you see below the checkbox. Now, the way this works is, when a project gets a new verified URL, it is simply pinged by all the selected blog engines. We have disabled this function because pinging links may or may not speed up their indexation (and if it does something it will be minor), which is why it is not worth the time GSA Search Engine Ranker will invest in running this functionality. Just my humbled opinion. Beside the list, as you can see, you can add, edit, delete, import, or reset blog search engines. Simple as that.

The next part of the “Indexing” tab is where you can configure various indexing services. Supported ones are:

When you choose your indexing service (if you choose to use one at all), you can then select from a few settings below the list of supported indexing softwares:

And you are ready with the “Indexing” configuration of your GSA SER.

The “Filter” Tab

Next we move onto the “Filter” tab:

You can use this tab to filter out some potentially spammy and dangerous websites which appear on the blacklists you have marked from the “Blacklists” table. We have disabled this because, I can’t remember where I read it (I think it was a post by a SERengines developer), but enabling this might interfere with the Web 2.0 engines supported by SERengines. And we really need those. And besides, we setup each of our projects with filters configured from its project settings, so no worries there. And we also save GSA SER some time by avoiding this blacklist check.

If you do choose to use this functionality:

The final setting in the “Filter” tab is separate from the blacklists settings. The “Maximum size of a website to download” option simply sets the limit (in megabytes) which a website’s HTML code can be in order for GSA Search Engine Ranker to download it and parse it using one of its engines. So, for example, if you have a target URL which GSA SER is going to download, but it is some guestbook which has tens of thousands of comments on it, making its HTML way too fucking big (maybe 1.1 MB), SER will simply ignore it because of this filter.

And now you know how to use the “Filter” tab of GSA SER. Moving on with the ultimate tutorial of this link building beast.

The “Advanced” Tab

Finally. This is where a lot of the magic happens. Read this section thoroughly, because it is of vital importance! The “Advanced” tab:

Let’s begin with the first 4 rows of this tab i.e. the ones with the input fields filled in with paths to directories.

Understanding GSA Search Engine Ranker Lists

This is a screenshot of some of the files inside the “Identified” lists folder. Each of the .txt files you see is full of possible target URLs which you can later use in your projects to try and post a backlink on each of them (we will see how in a moment). As you see, there is a file for each of the GSA SER engines – Drupal, esoTalk, Joomla, etc. This means that in each of these files, you will find all URLs that were identified by SER as websites using that certain engine. Makes sense right?

 

Now, as you can see from the “Advanced” tab, we have 4 lists:

Now, as you can see, we have ticked only the “Verified” site lists, which means that our GSA SER will only store verified links (this increases performance of the software as well, because it will not waste time to store links at almost every action, only when a verification process was successful). If you open the other list folders on our GSA SER, there will be nothing inside, except for the “Identified” folder. Why? We will get back to this later on in the section where you will learn how to build huge lists with verified URLs in no time – just as we do it.

Below the lists settings, you can see a few options:

The “Tools” Button

This one deserves its own section, because there is a lot to tell about it (this is the menu you will see once you click on the “Tools” button):

All of the menus you see perform some sort of tasks with the site lists in GSA Search Engine Ranker. So, from top to bottom:

And so ends the tale of how you learned to work with GSA Search Engine Ranker’s site lists. Moving on.

Debugging in GSA Search Engine Ranker

In the next section, you can see 3 options:

General GSA SER Settings

The rest of the options in the “Advanced” tab are more of a general type of settings:

What’s left are the two API keys – for SERPCloud.com and for SERengines.com. If you will be using GSA SER for some quality link building, I strongly recommend subscribing to SERengines. This will allow your projects to create some really nice Web 2.0 posts and profiles on high PR and DA sites. Keep in mind that if you want to post to most of the engines which come with SERengines, you will need ReverseProxies OCR or some other third-party captcha solving service which has high success rate with difficult captchas such as ReCaptcha (Death by Captcha is also an option, but a more expensive solution than ReverseProxies OCR).

And now, we are almost done with the “Advanced” tab, and with the “Options” menu as a whole. All that’s left are these two options:

These two are useful if you have more than one instance of GSA SER, or you have a brand new GSA Search Engine Ranker, and you don’t want to waste time configuring everything manually. Simply export the settings from your old GSA SER instance and import them into your brand new one.

The “Start/Stop” Menu

Clicking on the button will simply start/stop all of the projects which have a status “Active” or any of the similar active statuses. Now, if you click on the arrow next to the button, you will see the following menu:

Once you click any of the last 3 options, and you have the projects you want to run the scheduler for selected, you will see the GSA SER Scheduler itself:

By choosing the appropriate settings, you can run only a selection of your projects, or the projects you selected at a time, allowing GSA SER to apply extra focus only on the currently running projects. So for example, if you have 100 active projects and you want to run only 10 at a time, you would simply click the “Scheduler (All with Status Active)” option and then allow it to run only 10 projects at a time, select the number of minutes which would have to pass before the next batch of these 100 projects will be started and the previous one stopped, set a start and an end date, and you are good to go.

We do not use this GSA SER functionality simply because all of our VPS-s have more than enough proxies and resources to handle probably about a thousand projects each. At 100 private proxies, 700 threads, 4 GB RAM, 4 CPU-s, and a 20GB SSD, you can understand why we do not need any schedulers. All projects can run at the same time and still build tens of thousands of links every day. And because we clean and keep our “Verified” site lists clean all the time, we get an incredibly high score on the submitted/verified links ratio.

The “Start/Stop” Menu is wrapped up as well. The GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial continues after the paragraph break.

The “Help” Menu

The “Help” menu has the following drop-down menus show up when you click the button:

The ones I didn’t write an explanation for really don’t need one in my opinion. And that means, that we are done with GSA Search Engine Ranker’s “Main Menu”. Now it’s time for the real party.

The “Projects” Table

Finally, we got to the section where most of GSA Search Engine Ranker’s magic happens:

Each row is a single GSA SER project except for the project group rows i.e. “TEMPLATES”, “TESTING”, etc, which simply help group a set of projects for an easier navigation and a few other things we’ll talk about later. So, the “Projects” table has 5 columns:

The “Projects Context Menu”

Now let’s look at the context menu for each project. You saw from the snapshot a little bit above that it has the following options:

Wow, that was a big menu. I hope you remembered most of the useful functions in it, because they can save you a lot of time. Next stop in our GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial is the “Edit Project” window. Now you will see all of the data and settings which you can configure when you setup a new GSA SER project. Let’s get it on.

The “Edit Project” Window

This is the same window which opens up when you are about to create a new GSA SER project as well, with the only difference that the fields are filled in for edition. The example screenshots we will use are also filled in for a better understanding of each of the options of GSA Search Engine Ranker’s projects. Here you go:

I want yo to first notice the 6 tabs – “Data”, “Article Manager”, “Options”, “E-Mail verification”, “Notes”, and “External APIs”. We will look into each of them in a minute, but I just want you to know that the “Article Manager” tab can sometimes be non-existent depending on the engines you have selected for the project. Now, divert your attention to the section on the left-hand side i.e. the “Where to Submit” section.

The “Where to Submit” Section

The collapsed sections you see are the engine types. Each of these when expanded has a bunch of engines which are grouped under it. Here are all of the supported GSA Search Engine Ranker engines:

GSA SER Supported Engines

Not too shabby huh? With the right GSA Search Engine Ranker configuration, you will be able to post to all of these. And I will tell you the right configuration a little later. Remember, this is the only GSA SER tutorial you will ever need to read.

Now, you can either manually select engines, or you can use the “Engines Context Menu” (shows up when you right-click anywhere in the “Where to Submit” section) which has the following options:

Now that you have your engines chosen, let’s dive into the “Settings” section and each one of its tabs. I just want you to know that all of the best practices and configurations for GSA Search Engine Ranker will be gathered in a section right after we have covered each and every element of this GSA SEO tool.

The “Data” Tab

This is where you will be filling in most of the content for your GSA SER project (We use Kontent Machine to generate the content for our campaigns) . Let’s look at each of the elements on this tab:

Now that we have configured the client data of our project, it is time to fill in the content. The rest of the “Data” tab simply contains various fields which you will rarely need to manipulate if you are using a content creation software such as Kontent Machine 3. You will simply generate the content from KM, import it into your GSA Search Engine Ranker project, and let it rip. However, if you decide to play with your content, there are a few things you can do in each field. When you right-click on any of the inputs, a context menu pops up;

Most options are self-explanatory, but there are a few ones that deserve some attention:

Next to each of the data fields there is a “Help” label, which when hovered, will show you the engines for which this content will be used. And that wraps it up for the “Data” tab.

The “Article Manager” Tab

This tab is where you will manage all of the articles for the GSA SER project:

Each row in the table is a single article. As you can see, I have added one highly spun article that can probably make millions of unique versions of itself. GSA Search Engine Ranker articles are structured in the following manner – they have a title, a body, and a summary. Let’s look at the buttons on the right:

Below the buttons you can see the number of articles you have imported into the current project. And right below all this is where we will configure the settings for the backlinks, videos, images, and everything else which is required to make your article(s) look natural (the below options will be applied to all of the articles you have imported into your GSA SER project). One by one:

And that wraps it up for the “Article Manager” tab. Now it’s time to configure the main settings of our GSA Search Engine Ranker project.

The “Options” Tab

The “Options” tab consists of 4 separate sections. GSA SER tutorial to the rescue.

The “How to submit/verify” Section

Here is the first section of the “Options” tab:

As you can see, you can minimize the section using the “[-]” symbol to the left of the heading. Anyway, from top to bottom:

The “How to get Target URLs” Section

This is where you will tell the software how it will gather target URLs for this project:

As you can see, the first option you get is to allow GSA Search Engine Ranker to use search engines of your choice to find target URLs for the project. You can choose from pre-defined search engines or you can add new ones and select them instead. You can also edit existing search engines or even delete some which you won’t need in order to more easily navigate through them, because as you can see, there are 852 pre-defined at the moment – GSA SER Supported Search Engines.

However, the good people over at GSA SER have given you the power of filtering. If you right click on the table with the search engines, you will be able to use the power of the following context menu:

Remember that if you will be scraping target URLs from search engines, especially from Google, you will need some really nice private proxies which won’t let you down. For those that are not aware, the way GSA SER scrapes target URLs from search engines is by using pre-defined footprints which are nothing more than a set of strings found on certain sites (each of the GSA SER engines has its own set of footprints). For example, the footprint “Powered by FluxBB” is found on sites created using this platform and will be matched if we search on search engines for this keyword. So you see, SER simply does searches on search engines using these footprints as keywords, and saves the returned SERPs as target URLs.

Below the “Search Engines Selection” table, there are several GSA SER options which will further configure the way this project will gather target URLs:

The “Scheduled Posting” Section

First of all, you need to have the “Allow posting on same site again” checkbox enable in order for this section to work at all. Basically, this is where you will setup your scheduled posting on sites. If unique domains is not your thing, this is where you will be applying your evil powers:

The “Filter URLs” Section

GSA Search Engine Ranker is a blaster by nature. That’s what it is – a link building beast. However, you really can filter out the more quality backlinks using this section, of course depending on the type of campaign you are about to run:

From top to bottom:

From the snapshot above you cannot see, but there are 2 other sub-sections in the “Filter URLs” section.

In the first one you can filter out target URLs from countries you do not want. Basically, it is a checklist with all the countries in the world and you can simply tick the ones you do not want the project to be backlinking on.

In the second one you can skip sites from selected languages. Again, like the skip sites from countries sub-section, this is a checklist of all the languages and GSA SER will skip sites containing words from the languages you have selected.

And that wraps it up for the “Options” tab.

The “E-Mail verification” Tab

This is where you will manage all of the email accounts of your project:

You need emails in order to allow GSA SER to register on target sites that require registration, and then login to that email and verify the account, if the site requires verification at all. We use Yahoo emails mostly because I have found them to be the most stable and they never get deleted either. Keep in mind that the accounts must have POP3 enabled otherwise SER won’t be able to use them properly. The buttons to the right of the “Emails” table:

Below the “Emails” table you can see an important note, so read that. Then there’s the login details of the selected email account with a few options to the side:

The last section of this tab consists of various settings which will tweak the way GSA Search Engine Ranker handles your email accounts:

And the “E-Mail verification” tab has been covered as will in this GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial.

The “Notes” Tab

Quite simply, you can type in some notes about the project here. We use it to write in the creation time of the project (which SER does by default), and also other stuff which is used for our automated reporting system. The note you write here will show up when you hover over the project in the “Projects” table which is quite useful. You can write reminders what this project is about, when it should be stopped, etc, and then you can simply hover it if you are wondering what the fuck that is.

You can also change the color of the project i.e. the color which appears in the “Log” of GSA Search Engine Ranker so that you can easily see which messages are for that project. The alternative would be to simply use the “Filter log by selected project” option from the “Projects Context Menu”.

The “External APIs” Tab

Search Engine Ranker can take advantage of two third-party internet marketing tools in this tab. The first one is serpcloud.com which can be used to track the rankings of a certain URL for certain keyword(s).

The second one is the FCS Networker high quality link building software. You can use links build by FCSN projects by simply adding your FCS Networker API key, and then adding the project ID(s). Once you enter your FCSN project ID(s), the current GSA SER project will extract all verified URLs from the FCS Networker projects with the selected project ID(s) and add them to the verified URLs of the current project. I say it again, it adds them to the verified URLs of the current project, not to the client URLs of the project. So now, you can simply add a tiered project to this one, and it will build backlinks to all of the verified URLs of this project including the FCS Networker project(s)’ backlinks.

And with that we are done with the 6 tabs of the “Edit Project” window. However, there are two things left which we have not covered – 2 buttons at the bottom:

And with that, our ultimate GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial ends. Now it’s time for the GSA SER best practices and optimal configuration, after which you will learn how to build huge lists with verified URLs quickly and easily, how we use the link building tool for beasts, a battle of the top notch automated link building softwares, and our final verdict for this GSA SEO tool.

GSA Search Engine Ranker Best Practices and Optimal Configuration

In the tutorial, we explained absolutely every element of GSA SER, and now, we will look at the best practices for each of the software’s components.

For each of them there will be a list of radio buttons with all of the Search Engine Ranker tricks we use to inject some steroids into this internet marketing tool. Knowing these is absolutely vital if you ever wish to utilize the full potential of this software. Here we go.

The “Statistics Bar”

The “Log” Table

The “Live Links” Table

The “Options” Menu

Each tab as a separate section.

The “Submission” Tab

The “Captcha” Tab

The “Indexing” Tab

The “Filter” Tab

The “Advanced” Tab

The “Start/Stop” Menu

The “Help” Menu

The “Projects” Table

The “Edit Projects” Window

We will look at Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3+ optimal configurations for your GSA SER projects.

GSA Search Engine Ranker Tier 1 Optimal Configuration

GSA Search Engine Ranker Tier 2 Optimal Configuration

GSA Search Engine Ranker Tier 3 Optimal Configuration

Common Settings for all the Tiers

You can check the example link pyramids we have come up with, that are optimized for GSA SER by going to our Services page.

Another very important thing you should do is go to the “Engines” folder inside your GSA Search Engine Ranker installation folder, and edit the following .dat files (these are default texts which GSA SER will use if you do not explicitly specify your own content for your projects):

Generate your own highly spun content and replace the one already existing inside of these files. Be careful because in some of them, there are macros used, so first, take a look at this and become aware of the approach GSA SER uses by default, and only then exchange them with your own content. This takes time, but will do a lot for you in the future. Change these on a weekly or monthly basis to leave no footprints on search engines. This is extremely important otherwise you risk leaving content the same as thousands of other unaware GSA SER users, which will one day come back and bite you on the ass. Not the other SER users, but the consequences. Just wanted to be clear on that one.

How to Quickly Create Huge GSA SER Lists with Verified URLs

First of all, I want you to know that if you really don’t have the time to build your own lists and filter them the right way, you will have to take advantage of the services of some GSA SER site lists provider – check out this case study of the top 4 GSA SER site lists providers which will help you make an informed decision or take a look at our site lists.

But if you do have the time, I’d suggest you stick with building your own lists. Now, when you first iopnstall GSA Search Engine Ranker, the folder with the “Verified” site lists is completely empty. Not for long though. In this section I will teach you how you can build tens of thousands of verified backlinks in a matter of days, and then grow them exponentially. Within a few weeks you will probably have upwards of a million verified URLs in your GSA SER. Without a further a due, here’s how you will do it.

First of all, you will need Scrapebox. GScraper will also work, but we use Scrapebox. Now, since you have no verified URLs in your GSA SER yet, you will need some head start, after which the lists will grow exponentially. First you will start by selecting some target keywords. For example, you can use all of the article categories from ezinearticles.com – Arts and Entertainment, Business, etc. Copy all of them and paste them into a file called “keywords.txt”.

Now open Scrapebox and import the “keywords.txt” file into the Harvester section. Select “Custom Footprint”, and leave it at that for now, because it’s time to get the engines footprints from GSA SER.

Go to your GSA Search Engine Ranker -> “Options” -> “Advanced” -> “Tools” -> “Search Online for URLs”. Once the window opens, click on the “Add predefined Footprints” button, and add all footprints from the following engines:

  • Article
  • Blog Comment
  • Directory
  • Forum
  • Guestbook
  • Image Comment
  • Microblog
  • Social Bookmark
  • Social Network
  • Trackback
  • URL Shortener
  • Wiki

All of the footprints should appear in the textarea above.

Right click on the “Footprints” textarea and select all. Copy and paste them into a file called “footprints.txt”. So far so good. Now go back to Scrapebox and click the “M” button above the “Custom Footprint” radio button. This will simply add each of your keywords to each of the entries in the “footprints.txt” file:

Now, select all the 48540 keywords (you will have much more because I just added footprints from one engine), and copy and paste them into a new file called “footprints and keywords.txt”. Now open Scrapebox’s DupRemove tool (you can install it for free from the “Addons” menu), and look at the last section where it says “Randomize url list”. Simply select the “footprints and keywords.txt” file as the source file, and name the target file “footprints and keywords rand.txt”. Then click “Randomize”.

This will simply randomize each line from the source file, so as to not tip off search engine of any search patterns. As you can see from the above snapshot, it will search numerous times for the same footprint, and only changes the keyword. However, after the randomization:

I have found that the proxies tend to burn out more slowly when I randomize the keywords in the harvester. At this point we are ready to scrape our target URLs. Make sure you have some nice and juice private proxies (BuyProxies are the ones I recommend for this purpose as well), and let it roll. At 50 private proxies, I let Scrapebox run at 7 connections. At this rate, my proxies have never died, and have always scraped till the very end of the list of keywords. Now, just click “Start Harvesting”, and watch the show. Keep in mind that this may take quite a while. At the end, considering you got yourself some nice proxies, you will be looking at millions of target URLs. And now it’s time to create verified URLs from them.

Go back to GSA Search Engine Ranker, and create a new project selecting the engines for which you exported footprints. Generate some content for it using Kontent Machine 3, and then spin it with some spinner – the content doesn’t have to be highly spun and human readable, this campaign will just be, what I call it, a “verified links builder”. Okay so far so good. Now these are the rest of the steps to take in order to start the verified links building process:

  • Select some client URL – might be https://google.com or something else you will blast with pointless links.
  • Choose some random anchor texts, ratios, etc.
  • Again, random config for the articles, just do not tick the “Do not submit same article more than x times”, because we will be submitting a lot of articles, a lot of times.
  • Tick the “Continuously try to post to a site even if failed before” option.
  • Deselect all search engines.
  • Uncheck the “Use URLs from global site lists if enabled” checkbox. We will only be using manually imported target URLs.
  • Leave the “Use URLs linking on same verified URL” which will give some bonus target URLs.
  • Allow scheduled posting at its default values – 5 accounts and 5 posts per account.
  • Remove all filters and select all types of backlinks to create.
  • Add 5 – 10 emails (preferably Yahoo) to the campaign and tick the “time to wait between two logins” (the default 900 seconds is good).
  • Click “OK” and watch your new creation spur into existence.
  • Right-click it, and rename it accordingly – “verified links builder 0”. Yes, this will not be the only one.
  • Right-click it again -> “Modify Project” -> “Duplicate” -> “Everything”, and duplicate the project 6 times for a total of 7 verified link builders.
  • Select the 6 new duplicated projects, copy 30 – 60 new email accounts, and then: right-click -> “Modify Project” -> “Import” -> “E-Mail Accounts” -> “From Clipboard”. Delete all existing emails and split the new ones equally.
  • Now, select all of the 7 projects, right-click, “Import Target URLs” -> “From File”, and select the batch file which Scrapebox generated containing all of the scraped URLs. Randomize the links, and split them to each of the projects.
  • Put all of the projects into a project group – from our GSA SER – “VERIFIED LINKS BUILDERS”. I always use caps-lock on the project group names as it is much easier to spot them that way.

At this point, you are ready to let it roll. Set your threads at 6 – 10 per proxy, set the projects to “Active” status, and click the “Start” button. Leave the projects running until there are no more target URLs left to try and post to. You can check remaining target URLs for all of the 7 projects by right-clicking on the project group -> “Show URLs” -> “Show remaining Target URLs”. Now, all you have to do is wait. Once all of the target URLs are extinct, you will have a nice starting amount of “Verified” site lists. Now it’s time to grow them exponentially.

The next process I will teach you has helped me make around 50,000 verified backlinks in just a single day:

In just a single day while writing this, I scraped some new target URLs using the next simple method I’m about to share with you, and this is the number of backlinks it added to our “Verified” site lists. Don’t focus that much on the number of backlinks, but rather, on the number of unique domains. Close to 12k for a day – not too shabby, not too shabby at all.

First of all I want you to understand the concept of this strategy. We already explained this one a little in a similar GSA SER functionality, but that’s cool. Let’s say you have created a link pyramid campaign in GSA SER consisting of 3 tiers. Now, let’s say you used the configurations we suggested in the GSA Search Engine Ranker Best Practices and Optimal Configuration section. Your Tier 3 backlinks point to your Tier 2 backlinks right? Okay.

Now, there are probably thousands of other users out there who are using GSA SER and also have created similar link pyramids. Their Tier 3 backlinks will point to their Tier 2 backlinks as well right? Good. However, their Tier 3 backlinks and your Tier 3 backlinks might overlap and be on the same sites i.e. blog comments on the same blog posts, guestbook comments, etc. What you will do is simply take all the outbound links on your Tier 3 URLs i.e. the URL of the blog post you left a comment on. These outbound links have a very, very high chance to be pointing towards the Tier 2 of some other GSA SER user. You with me still? Good.

So you see, these outbound links have a good chance of being matched by a GSA SER engine. Now, let’s say that your Tier 3 managed to create 3,000 blog comments. Scraping the outbound links of all these 3k URLs will leave you with millions of new target URLs, quite simply, because Tier 3 projects are mostly spam and there are a lot of these links. So basically, you will be posting to websites where other GSA SER users have posted. Hope you got the concept.

Now here’s how you do that. First you export all of the verified blog comments and guestbooks from all of the 7 verified link builders. Here’s how you do that:

  • Select all the 7 projects and right-click on them -> “Show URLs” -> “Verified”.
  • Right-click on the table of verified backlinks -> “Select” -> “Engine Type”. Then simply select “Blog Comment” and “Guestbook”.

Name the file “verified blog comments and guestbooks.txt”. Now open Scrapebox again. Go to “Addons” -> “ScrapeBox Link Extractor” (if you don’t see it, install it, it’s free):

Load the “verified blog comments and guestbooks.txt” file into the Link Extractor. Then click “Tools” -> “Randomize the loaded urls in the grid”. Make sure you have selected the “External” radio button which means that the addon will extract the outbound links on the loaded URLs. 50 – 100 connections should suffice, then simply click the “Start” button and watch the show.

Once this is done, you must import the file with all of the outbound links into the 7 verified link builders projects, and let them ride again. Your VpM will skyrocket, because a huge percentage of these target URLs will be eligible for GSA SER to post on. Yesterday, the VpM on one of our VPS-s reached 240+ for a few minutes. That’s 4 links per second. Yep, my math is amazing as well.

The third and final strategy you can employ is simply using all of the target URLs from the second strategy as keywords in Scrapebox’s Harvester. The concept is simple. Since these are most probably Tier 2 or even Tier 1 backlinks, they will be linked to by other backlinks as well. This time, we will be targeting the upper tiers of other GSA SER users. Hope you understood this one as well. Then you simply scrape for these target URLs on search engines (you have to put each of them in quotes to make sure the target URLs which you scrape actually contain this URL), and import the new found target URLs into your 7 verified link builders again.

You do strategy 2 and 3 over and over again, until you get millions of verified URLs into your “Verified” site lists. Now, you can use GSA Search Engine Ranker as it was meant to be used. I can’t tell you how calming and awesome the feeling is of just watching the links get verified by the dozens. I don’t know, there’s just something about it.

GSA Search Engine Ranker vs SEnuke XCr vs Ultimate Demon

Let’s start with GSA SER vs SEnuke XCr. While in the past, SEnuke had some advantage over SER, nowadays that’s not the case. With SERengines supporting more and more Web 2.0 platforms and the level of customization, GSA Search Engine Ranker has long surpassed XCr. But, hey, if that doesn’t convince you, this will – while GSA SER is a one-time payment (don’t forget about the upcoming godly GSA SER discount), SEnuke XCr costs $147. Nope, not a one-time – per month! And really, I think that while it really is good, it’s not a bad link building tool at all, GSA SER is so much more cost-effective, and you can do pretty much anything with it. Plus, it’s much more noob friendly, and with this ultimate GSA Search Engine Ranker tutorial, there will be no more GSA SER noobs out there.

Then there’s Ultimate Demon. Again, great link building tool, but it comes with a price once more – $47 monthly fee or a one-time payment of $397 – while you can get SER which is light years ahead in cost-effectiveness. Just take a quick look around through forums for battles between these great internet marketing tools. You will see that 90% of the people recommend SER. And it’s for a reason guys. It really is the crown jewel of automated link building at this point.

How we Use GSA Search Engine Ranker and its Gamma Rays

We have been using GSA SER since the very launch of the software and simply love it. Sure it was much more buggy back then, but it has come a long way. Basically, if you know how to use it, you can create all types of campaigns and rank almost anything. How do we use the link building beast?

Well, we have come up with a few optimized link building campaigns for different purposes which you can check out in full detail on our Services page.

We have several VPS-s each one with a different purpose – personal projects, client projects, custom projects, etc. We use Power Up Hosting as a VPS provider, and I can confidently say that we have not had any problems at all, and we use up a ton of bandwidth each month. Their support is lightning fast as well, so if there are any questions, the guys quickly let me know. And since GSA SER plays a lot with files, the SSD’s which our VPS-s use come in real handy.

In short, we use GSA Search Engine Ranker to rank our own websites, and the websites of our clients.

Honest GSA Search Engine Ranker Review and Final Verdict

Watching how GSA SER has improved over the years really makes me trust in this software’s developers. Constantly, there are new updates adding new features, new engines, and improving already existing functionality. With more and more platforms being added to SEREngines, and with the already existing pre-defined engines in GSA SER being improved constantly, this link building beast is steadily becoming an all-in-one link building solution.

If the GSA guys keep this tempo up, I wouldn’t be surprised if in 2 – 3 years, GSA Search Engine Ranker becomes the only link building software internet marketing warriors will use for website ranking. And on the other side, GSA Captcha Breaker is also constantly getting better and better, so it is striving to become an all-in-one captcha solving solution. The GSA SER and GSA CB combo might just completely dominate the stage of link building one day. But hey, those are just predictions coming from the assessment of the current situation in the online marketing world. It only takes into account smart presumptions of the future changes in SEO. But, who really knows what actually will happen?

Back to the present, and in the present, GSA Search Engine Ranker is the shit. I mean, just look at all of the functionality we have covered in this tutorial. You will get access to that with a one time payment. That really sold the software for me. Most of the link building tools of this level are still monthly payments, or have one-time payments which are much, much more expensive.

But let’s get to the point – does it really help in ranking websites. You fucking bet! When you become a master of GSA SER, you will be able to create such specific and quality campaigns, which will finally make you believe that automated link building software really can be used for Tier 1, if you first, use your brain, and understand the software completely. But, if you have other plans for your Tier 1 campaigns, that’s cool. Search Engine Ranker can easily take care of the lower tiers and will pass on a ton of link juice to your Tier 1 links, and ultimately, to your main site.

You can also use this GSA SEO tool to run churn and burn campaigns, campaigns for ranking YouTube videos not only on Google, but on YouTube itself, rank parasite sites, and pretty much any type of campaign due to the level of customization provided by Search Engine Ranker.

Bottom line is, GSA Search Engine Ranker is one of the top automated link building tools on the market (the best one balance-wise if you ask me), and it looks like it will remain there for the times to come, even after winter comes.

An Exclusive GSA Search Engine Ranker Discount

How much will this software with all of its functionality cost you? Probably not even close to what you think, because of our GSA SER discount. The software also comes with a 5-day completely free trial with access to all of the functionality. You can download GSA Search Engine Ranker by clicking here. Test it out and make an informed decision.

However, if the ultimate GSA SER tutorial was enough for you, you can instantly take advantage of our GSA Search Engine Ranker discount by either entering our GSA SER discount coupon code manually (“inetsolutions“, without the quotes), or clicking on the button below:

  • GSA Search Engine Ranker Lifetime License
  • $99
  • $84.15
  • Grab your own copy of this innovative internet marketing tool and put your link building process on auto-pilot. GSA Search Engine Ranker is steadily becoming the only link building beast you will ever need to tame. The question is – will you miss the train?
  • I Want the Beast!

If you purchase GSA SER you will most certainly need to buy GSA Captcha Breaker as well, because without it, Search Engine Ranker will never reach its full potential – click here to take advantage of our special GSA CB discount.

Anyway, once you have GSA Search Engine Ranker, and you become fully aware of all of the different possibilities it gives you, your link building skills will get to a whole new level. You will be able to do so much more in so much less time. And one day, I will share with you our GSA SER projects generator software, which will allow you to create new projects in just a few seconds. No bullshit. Until then, remember – in the game of rankings you either win, or you try harder.