My GSA Search Engine Ranker review & tutorial will teach you everything you need to know to get the most out of the software.
GSA Search Engine Ranker was heavily featured in my tiered link building series and has had a bunch of awesome new features added across the past year.
A lot of readers have asked for a more detailed tutorial and how to use it to build links directly to your money site.
Although I highly suggest you download this free link building checklist to make sure you’re only building awesome links that rank.
What Will I Learn?
Hi guys Matthew Woodward here and today we’re going to take a look at GSA search engine ranker that’s come along leaps and bounds in the past year.
I’ll show you to use easily and avoid confusion so you can set things up properly and get the most out of it. You’ll learn how to build high quality links to your site and how to set up tiered link building structures with ease.
I’m also going to show you how to use it to remove links which is a great feature to help protect you against future Google algorithm updates. And this is going to be a long tutorial so let’s just jump right in.
So let’s jump into the GSA search engine ranker software quickly. And first of all, I’m just going to give you a quick overview of the interface and then we’ll drive down into the options and create new projects and things like that.
So here you have your project pane and a list of all your projects will appear here. Right now there’s only one project and that is the sample project.
Up here you have various tools for creating new campaigns and changing options, and making sure everything’s running. Here you have a list of the last verified links that were built and they are colour code in that a green link means it is do follow, yellow means it is no follow and sometimes you get grey links appear which are re-direct links actually you can see here.
Down here you have a log of all of the different things that are going on in the background so you can see lots of pinging there and here we can see where we’re submitting URLs.
At the bottom, you have various stats. Here you can see the current running number of threads which is zero, how many links are being submitted today, how many links were verified today, how many active proxies there are, your number of submitted links per minute, the number of captures sent to capture services and solved, the amount of memory in use and the CPU usage.
So as you can see, a lot of the things are self-explanatory and if you hold your mouse over various things it comes up with various tool tips to explain different options to you as well if you get stuck.
If you right click on a project, you also get lots of different options here. You can change whether the current project is active or inactive and there are various different modes of active so you can have it only verifying links that it submitted, only verifying emails, only searching for links and verifying them but for the most part, you just want the main active tab here.
You can also list by priority and also look at the URLs so we can look at the submitted URLs here and you can export them all or even get some more detailed statistics including some charts and breakdowns and you can control the time frame here.
Or actually here you can also broken down by engine and what type of link it is and what project it belongs to. If you do exactly the same but this time we can see the verified URLs, so the verified URLs are links that have been submitted and are currently live and pointing to your site or target URL whereas submitted means it has not yet been verified that the link is live yet, it’s only been submitted.
So looking at verified URLs again, it’s all broken down, a count of the internal and external links whether it is do follow or not. We can get stats again and also break it down by an anchor text report as well and you can see how that’s all broken down there.
So those stats and these lists of verified URLs are very handy to have and tucked away in this show URLs menu here. You can also choose to select various projects, if you want to make bulk changes to them. You can change the sorting of the projects in this window here.
You can take a look at the overall diagram of links that have been submitted and verified and you can break it down here by engine types, blog comment, trackback, indexer, or actually within the engines themselves so you can see some keywordluv links and whois and some trackback links, etc. there.
Again, there are some other options here. Import target URLs is a handy feature to have. Now if you have scraped your own target list of URLs perhaps with Scrapebox outside of GSA SER and you want it to import them for submission, you would do that here. Import target URLs either from file or from clipboard.
You can also import them from site lists but I will cover that shortly.
And here you can modify the project which in essence offers you a lot of the options when you double click in open other projects but we’ll explore that in a little bit more detail later on.
So let’s take a look at some of the more advanced options quickly. Now by default the threads are set at 50, that’s fine for most people but if you got a more powerful machine and bandwidth to play with, you can increase this. I have a quad core processor and 16 gigs of ram and an 18 meg fibre line so I can easily handle 250 threads but by default this is 50 which will be fine for most people.
Next you want to make sure you are using proxies. Now you have two options when it comes to proxies. You can either use GSA search engine ranker to go out and automatically scrape public proxies from all of these different types of sites and it will test them and verify they are working for you.
And you set that up by telling it to automatically search for new proxies every 60 minutes when it’s only less than 100 active proxies you want to test proxies and test all of the good ones and remove bad proxies when they are older than, I don’t know, perhaps 3 hours.
Now with that set up, GSA will go out and scrape its own proxies for you. The problem with this is the public proxies aren’t that reliable, they’re often pretty slow and you get a much higher level of rate of failure with them which you know, it really just slows things down.
Whereas if you spend perhaps just ten dollars a month on some semi-dedicated proxies from Buyproxies for example, performance is much greatly increased, you get much higher submission and approval rates and it’s just much more efficient. So for the amount of money it costs to get the private proxies it really is worth it.
So to add your own proxies in that manner, you just need to come to add proxy, import from clipboard and I already have them on the clipboard, I think. Yes! And we can mark them as private.
So with your proxies imported, either using private or public, you can then in the options here choose when to use the proxies and whether to use public or private ones.
Now I always use them for the search engine, submissions and PR checking and I always use the private proxies as I’ve just explained the differences. If you’re just using the public ones, you can leave these unticked or just hit the public ones like that.
But seriously, invest in some semi-dedicated or private proxies from somebody like BuyProxies, it is such a lifesaver.
Next you will need to set up captcha solving services. Now GSA supports a huge range of different captcha solving services but you need to understand there are really two types of captcha solving services going on here.
You can either use something software based like captcha sniper or GSA captcha breaker and this will for a one time fee, a piece of GSA SEO software that tries to automatically solve captchas for you.
Now these do work pretty well, however they do also fail quite often. So the best way to set up your captcha service is to use first of all, GSA captcha breaker as your first and primary service because it will help you reduce captcha costs. But then use a human based solving service like death by capture or decaptcha where any that fail from captcha breaker get passed on to these services and they’re solved by an actual human and these are like, 2 dollars for a thousand capture solves or something like that, it’s really really cheap.
Setting them up is easy, that’s GSA capture set up here. If you got the GSA SEO software running locally, that will automatically work for you. And then I’m going to add Death by Capture as my secondary service, it’s one of the cheaper human based solving ones and you just need to enter your login details here and you can hit test and see your balance.
So this is what you should set up and you can also set them up for retries here and also some other options of when to use different capture services. With capture set up you can move on to indexing, that will it will automatically ping every back link it creates and if you want to, you can also integrate one of the many indexing services that GSA supports.
We have the GSA SEO indexer is a native support and other things like you know Linklicious that’s a popular one, Nuclear Link Indexer, Back Links Indexer, Link pipeline, Lindexed. They’re all really easy to integrate, tick the box, add the API key and that is it.
Now I don’t really see the need for the use of these indexing services. I know some people like to use them and if you’ve got them, by all means use them but really, you can avoid having to pay the extra money for these. We can get links indexed just by building more links to them with GSA and save ourselves on these costs.
The filter, you can choose to skip submissions if certain to URLs or are present and add to your backlist, you can leave this at default. You don’t need to drill down this when you’re just getting started.
And the advanced section now you can build site lists that can be used globally by each project. So what that means is if you have three projects here, each projects would create a list of identified sites it could post to, successful sites it did actually post to, verified links that it was actually able to create after successfully submitting them and the ones that failed and never became live or verified after they were successful.
Now I would suggest that you actually keep a list of your successful and verified submissions. And then you can use these later on in other projects, so if this project here we can see it’s got 189 verified URLs, we can easily and I will show you how to do that quickly, if we created a new project we could say to import the target URLs from site lists, submitted and verified.
So you can imagine after using GSA search engine ranker for a few months you will have a huge database of submitted and verified links that you can then use across other projects really easily. So I encourage you in the advanced settings here to make sure that these options are ticked.
And you can also choose a different formats here and other bits where this is stored but the default settings are fine, just tick these two boxes and hit oK.
Last but not least, once you have things set up and as a sample project here, you want things to begin, just click the start button and you’ll see GSA fire up and it’s going out right now finding new targets to post links to. As it finds them, it submits the links and later on it will actually verify if the links are live or not. And you can see more verified links here and you’ll see this list change as it finds new links.
Now you sometimes get pop ups like this appear and what this is is when it’s trying to submit a link, sometimes there are other fields that need filling out and GSA doesn’t know which options to pick so it asks you.
But this can actually become quite annoying because really we want GSA to be completely hands off and not bother us with those messages and a lot of people get stuck with this and wonder how to disable these pop ups like we can see here, we got another one coming up here so how you do that if we just hit stop here.
Come into the project and in options you can say if a form field can’t be filled, choose random. And also make sure ask all services/users to fill captures, so next time GSA gets offered a choice like that instead of asking you, it will just choose a random.
And that is for that specific project only. You’ll need to do that in each project.
Also in options, in capture here you need to untick this box so what happens if the capture services if neither of them work as a last ditch attempt, GSA will ask you. But we don’t really want that to happen, in my personal preference is that it just skips over submission and moves on to the next one and just forget about it. So make sure that is unticked.
And that’s how to avoid those popups. If we were to run start now, we won’t see those popups appear.
So that is a general overview of the interface, how to start and stop projects, different options that you need to set up along with the different campaign specific options. So let’s actually take a look at creating a sample project.
Before we do that though, let me give you a quick tour of the sample project. If you double click on it you can open it up like this. And it might look pretty confusing at first but don’t worry it’s very easy to familiarize yourself with.
First of all, on the left hand side here you can choose what type of links you want to submit. So here we can see blog comments, and if you click the plus here, these are all the different blog comment platforms it supports. And if you hold your mouse over it, you can get some more details of whether you can get a do follow link or not, whether the link has anchor text, if it creates its own page, etc. etc.
You can see there’s loads of different types here. We got articles, blog comments, directories, documents, different exploits, forums, guestbooks, image comments, indexer, microblogs, pingbacks, referrers, social bookmarks, social networks, track backs, URl shorteners, video, video-adult, web 2 and wikis.
Now a lot of people when they first come into here, they’ll look at something like, let’s have a look. Like the article section and here it kind of looks like that GSA doesn’t really post to that many different article sites if you have software like SENuke XCR for example, and look at the articles, you’ll have a list of hundreds of them, maybe even thousands of different articles sites to post to.
But when you come to GSA it kind of looks a bit underwhelming, there’s not many sites to post to. But GSA actually works differently in that each of these is a platform and a platform can be used by thousands of different sites.
For example, wordpress is a blogging platform which is used by millions of sites across the Internet and we can see here if people using the wordpress article director plugin, this will post to that platform.
So each one of these platforms actually has thousands of different URLs and sites behind it that you can get links from. So it might look underwhelming but there is an awful lot there, an awful lot of different backlink variety for you to choose from.
You know each of these are broken down real easily, like social bookmarks and other different information about each different type of link.
So that is choosing which link you want to use. In this window here we have to import various data and information and this actually updates based on what we select here. So if we add social bookmarks for example, you’ll see it’s asking us for some additional details like log in to use passwords and catch words and descriptions.
If we untick that again you can see it’s only providing the options needed for the trackbacks, indexes and blog comments.
In here you have also lots of other different options, we’ll go through these in detail when we set up our campaign but this allows you to really fine tune things and take some real control over your campaign. There are lots of new options being added to GSA in the past year that gives you much more granular control over the links you create than it used to.
So that is what the actual project campaign and editing looks like. Let’s move on to creating our own.
If you just come to new here, this will create a new project and first thing that we want to do is select the types of links we’re going to use in our project. Now there’s not a one size fits all answer for this, depending on the goals of your campaign and what you’re building links to is going to change what settings you use here.
But as a general rule of thumb, if you are building links to you money site, you want to make sure you’re using contextual high quality links. And the contextual link is a link with relevant content surrounding it.
So examples of these might be if we just come tick the default options here to avoid any confusion, that may be articles, social networks, and wikis and web 2s and then you may also choose to add perhaps videos, social bookmarks, and document sharing and directories for example.
But in this example, we’re just going to keep it pretty simple and we are going to set up something with article directories, social bookmarks, social networks, web 2s and wikis all of which will provide contextual links to your site.
Once you have set these up, we need to move into these settings.
The first thing you’re going to add is the URL to your money site. It’s also worth nothing if you get stuck in any of these fields, just mousing over provides much more detailed explanations throughout. So if you do get stuck and you’re not sure, everything is well explained as you can see.
So the URL. This is the URL or URLs you can have more than one that you want to build links to. And if you have more than one URL in this field, GSA will automatically rotate through them and pick a random URL each time.
You can also choose to use a URL variations when it is building the links and you can see the different samples there and that basically just changes whether it is using capital letters or not. This is actually quite a good option and mixes things up really nicely.
So you could perhaps drop that to 10% just to keep things not blatantly manipulated but show that variation.
In the keywords field, these are the keywords that it will use to go out and find relevant sites to post your links to. So really here you want a longer list of keywords as you can that’s relevant to your campaign, separated by a comma. And I already have them prepared, so I can paste them in here.
That looks like I haven’t got many in there but I actually have. One minute, let me just re-add to that, there we go.
You can also choose to collect more of these keywords and target sites as it goes and use those keywords to find new targets. So they are handy options to have and I’m not going to use them in this example.
And when searching for sites to post to, you can tell it to search in quotes and get more lasertargeted matches and that’s quite handy option to have, especially when building links to your money site.
Now the anchor text setting, these are the anchor text that will be used and should be the keywords you are actually trying to rank for in here. So I have some of those ready and we can drop them in there. And it’s important to note this must be in spin text whereas that one’s comma separated.
You can, if you want you can use these keywords as your anchor text instead of these. If you want to do that, tick that box but I like to keep the control over the anchor text here and leave that unticked.
Now where this becomes really interesting is how GSA can automatically build out a natural looking link profile that isn’t over optimized and going to get hit by Penguin. So you can actually tell it OK I want, maybe I don’t know 25% of my links to be a partial match anchor and a partial match anchor is if we have pay day loan here, that is an exact match anchor.
But if we had cheap pay day loan, that would be a partial match anchor because it still includes our main phrase pay day loan but it’s actually cheap pay day loan so it only partially matches the anchor text.
So you should prepare a list of partially matching anchor text and we can see we’ve done that there. And you can also choose to include branded anchor text which is also quite important. Again you can tweak with the percentage, but a branded anchor in our example our site is your domain.com so our brand name might be yourdomain, your domain, your domain.
You know if this was the Matthewwoodward.co.uk blog for example you might write, Matthew Woodward without a space and then with the .co.uk that would be my branded anchor.
So you can choose to use branded anchors as well. I suggest that you do so and you can just give that a tick there. And you can also use LSI anchor text so you can tick your anchor text here, use the Google wonderwheel or scrapebox for example to pull in some more related terms and drop that in here.
The other two options that I always tick is generic anchor text. These are the anchor text like click here, view more, get more information and you can see a list of the default generic anchors it comes with, pretty extensive here. But I always like to tick that and try and boost that up as much as possible here.
Down here, well actually I’m going explain to you citation option. If you have branded anchor text defined, using a citation it will instead of creating a link, it will create just a naked text URL, just mentioning your brand name. Now this really helps make your profile look natural because not everyone when they write about you or publish something includes an actual link, sometimes it’s just a raw HTMl anchor or just talking about a company and they don’t link back to it.
So using this citation means a portion of your links will be created without a link but will actually mention your name and this indirectly helps with the naturalness of your profile. So using citations a very low percentage really does help you out and I suggest that you do that.
Last but not least, anchor text variations and it explains it here. But like the URL variation up here that changes the http sometimes it’s capital, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s the first letter in domain is capital, sometimes it’s not. Exactly the same but for anchor text.
Sometimes the first letter is capitalized and the second letter’s not and it really helps mix it up. I like to tick that and this variation applies to all of these settings here.
So as you can see the amount of control you have over the anchor text is built to your site, the partial matches, the branding whether you’re using generic terms, blank citations and the anchor text variations really does allow you to have control over natural looking profile.
So I suggest you spend time setting this section up and not skimping over it.
Here I’ve just used some sample content, there’s not been a major amount of thought put into that. It’s just to show you how it all plugs in.
But once that’s set up, we can move onto the other fields.
Next, you want to move onto filling out the about yourself section. Now this includes some default content that you can use, or you can use something like Kontent machine, come to tools and the about me builder and generate as many as you need really easily. And just paste it into this box here.
In fact, you can use Kontent machine to automatically fill all of these fields out for you in one go and I’ll show you that later on in the tutorial.
But you can grab some about me content here, drop that in.
Coming down, you can define log ins and passwords that you use but by default the randomize box it ticked so it will automatically create them for you.
Website title, this is used in the bookmarks submissions and it is the title of your website. So I have some content prepared, I can drop that in and category you need to come to edit. And you can either use a list of suggested categories here and which I might do.
Hit OK. Or you can add some root categories here and if you use a star or wild card, it will try and match any category close to that so I’m just going to add Finance and money and loan.
Once that’s done, you can hit OK and what this will actually do is when there are categories that it needs to choose, it’ll go through and these and try to find the best match based on what you’ve already put in.
So you can hit OK there. The description if you’re submitting bookmarks, this is the bookmark description which we can put in here. The forum comment this sometimes gets used in the wikis we have set up. We can leave it at default or create your own content to go in there, just some general facts information kind of type of thing.
In here, along the description for bookmark sites that use a long description, I tend to just use the same 250 description here. This may sometimes lead to a higher failure rate but for the amount of time it takes to write two different descriptions, the time invested versus the reward ratio just isn’t there.
Coming down, forum nickname, forum password, again its randomized this will automatically create user passwords and also a forum subject but we won’t be using that. You can leave it at default.
Once this all of that is ready, we just have a few more tabs to work through to set up our campaign. First of all, we have the article manager which allows us to import articles to use for the submissions. I’m going to come back to this in a minute because there’s quite a little bit I want to discuss here.
So let’s jump to the options. Now we have lots of options to work through here which can be quite confusing but trust me, it’s pretty simple.
So first of all, you can choose to pause the project after a certain amount of submissions or verifications so you could say I want to pause a project after 100 submissions for 1 day. So after it’s submitted 100 links, it won’t submit any more links until the next day and it’ll submit a 100.
Or you can say actually I want it to pause after it’s successfully verified 100 live links and you get different options here as you click through them.
So that’s how you control the drip feed of the links being built.
If you set up the captcha solving services, in the options you need to make sure that this box is ticked and you want to make sure to ask all services to fill captures. You can also get it to override the global retry option we set earlier but you can just leave this for the most part.
If a form can’t be filled, remember those annoying pop ups we were getting before asking us for information? Change this to choose random and then you won’t get those pop ups and GSA will just pick something at random and move through. Enable custom mode, you don’t need to know anything about.
These verify link options you can leave at default if you want to. There’s not really any need to change them. Send verified links to indexing services so this includes the pingers and if you have the other options set up you need to make sure they’re ticked.
Use character spinning when possible, avoid this option. If you’re building links to your money site, we don’t want to be using that.
And you can randomly use typos and spelling errors in descriptions to help fight duplicate content. This actually is a pretty cool option and it makes things look much more human like it’s being done by a human and made a little mistake. So tick that box and play with the percentage.
Try to always place URL with anchor text I always leave that unticked and continuously try to post to a site even if it failed before, I leave that unticked.
If you need to use tags, you can choose to use just anchor texts or keywords so sometimes when you submit a bookmark, it’ll ask you to tag, add tag. Here you can choose whether to use anchor text as the source here or the keywords as a source here.
Anchor text is generally fine.
Now here we get to choose, in fact I’m just going to minimize that to make it a little bit less confusing. How to get target URLs.
So what GSA SER does is it looks at all of these different types of platforms and combines with your keywords here to find target sites to post to. And to do that it uses search engines so we have lots of different search engines here it can use as the source. But if you right click and you can just say check by country for example.
And I tend to always just check by country and United States. But if you were trying to rank as a site in the Spanish market for example you might choose Spain here and United States, OK.
And that will, if we scroll through, you’ll see that it’s ticked various American based search engines for us.
I like to always use keywords to find target sites. This does return less results but it returns more relevant and accurate results which is what you really want when you’re building links to your money site.
Remember before we were talking about in the options the global site list where you could collect URLs that have been submitted and verified from other projects, if you want to use those lists, tick this box. If not, untick it.
And you can also choose to analyze and post to competitor backlinks. Now this is a pretty good feature but it does have some flaws. What it does is it will look at the current sites that are ranking for a given keyword and try to replicate their backlink profile. Now it doesn’t work amazingly well but it does work to some degree.
The drawback with it though is if you have say down here said I only want to get links from domains PR 3 and above and your competitor has a really low quality spammy link, if this box is ticked it will try and replicate that spammy link and ignore these settings.
It will also if down here you said I don’t want to use micro blogs but your competitors has a micro blog link, it will create it. It will ignore the fact that you haven’t got it ticked here. So this option is handy but it also introduces an uncontrolled risk.
So use that at your own will.
Here once we have set up how to get our target URLs, we can set up scheduled posting, I generally don’t use this. But if you want it to get more than one link from the same site you can tick that and you can change these options here to limit how many times you hit that site so your account doesn’t get banned and your links deleted, etc.
The filter URLs options which is the last set of options on this screen is very important especially if you’re building links to your money site. Lots of options here, first of all you can choose to skip sites with more than X amount of outgoing links on one page.
So if GSA SER says right I’m going to build a link from this page but it’s got too many outbound links already, it’ll skip it but if it falls under that number, it’ll build the link.
Now there’s been lots of studies and reviews of data and things and it tends to be on average sites have around 125 links on them in a page. So you can actually increase this quite safely to 100.
You can also choose to skip building sites that if the PR is below a certain number or not. Now the argument here is you’re only building links from domains that have page rank 3-6, that doesn’t create a very natural profile.
But if you build lots of links from very low quality sites, that also doesn’t build a natural profile. So I like to skip sites with a PR below 0. Now remember with PR you have NA which means Google’s giving it no PR value at all, it doesn’t really care. Or you can have PR 0 which means Google has looked at it and has assigned a PR value of 0.
So I like to go from 0 and anything below 0, anything that is NA gets skipped and anything 0 and above is fine. This helps create something natural.
You might want also want to create a secondary project that only builds high PR links for example. So you can get that real mix of links.
You can also choose to skip unknown PR if you want to retain as much control as possible, you should keep this ticked. And then you can say, well am I checking against the PR of the actual domain or the actual page? Now if you use PR of actual page you’re going to get a lot less results so use PR of domain.
Here you can choose what type of backlinks to create. Now I know we have these options ticked here, but if you have the competitor’s backlinks ticked, you can have a little bit more control here. And also within each of these link types are different types of links types if that makes sense.
So for example, if, which is a good example here. Sometimes you can create… if you were creating a profile, sometimes you might create a profile that has a URL link, or sometimes you might create a profile that has an anchor text link or sometimes you might create a profile that’s got some contextual content on it here. If you didn’t want to create those types, you can untick them.
Here as well, you can try to skip creating no follow links. And remember, if you mouse over these you can see if this creates a do follow link or not. Ticking this option it will try and skip creating no follow links.
The problem with this is and I know a lot of people like no follow and do follow links and etc is a natural link profile does have an element of no follow links and no follow links. So to say only create do follow links is unnatural. So I leave this unticked because we would try to fly under the radar here.
You can also skip sites where bad words appear and you can see this so you might even learn some new swear words going through this list. Use it at your own indiscretion. But you can add it and import and delete words that are bad and you don’t want to build links from.
This is generally a good option to tick if you’re building links to your money site. And you can also do the same thing whether words appear in the URL or domain.
You can also choose to tick to skip sites from different countries and are in different languages. Again, use this at your own indiscretion.
Next come up to the email verification tab. As you can see here there’s already an email address in place for us but we don’t really want to use this. Really there’s three different types of email address.
You get what this is, which is a disposable email address that doesn’t require you to create an account and there’s loads of disposable ones for you to choose from here.
The problem is if you have use a disposable email address a lot of these sites you’re going to be posting to have anti-spam measures and actually block these domains from signing up entirely so you’re going to get really high fail rate.
The next one is web mail based services like hotmail, gmail, AOL, mail.com for example. These require you to sign up for an account and you can actually create an account here in hotmail, google mail, yahoo for example.
These are not as widely blocked as the disposable emails although you will find that some sites do still block webmail based signs up to help protect against spam. Not many, but some of them do so you do get a bit of a failure rate using hotmail address for example.
The final type of email address is a self-hosted one at your own domain name.com and you can use a catch all cpanel email for example and that will get you the highest success rate. But 99% of people are going to be fine using a hotmail or gmail account. You can either create them down here or do what I do and buy them a couple hundred of them from Fiverr that work really well.
So let’s add our hotmail account, you just click Add. Let me grab the email address and you can see it’s automatically worked out these server settings for us which is a handy feature. All you need to do is drop the password in down there.
Delete the temporary email, we don’t have to use that. Delete the selected and down here you have some options. I like to tick wait at least 15 minutes between two logins and you can leave the rest of them at default.
Last but not least, test this because if this doesn’t work, your entire campaign is at risk. So let’s just test that login works, OK and we can see everything is successful.
So the last thing that we need to do is add some articles with the article manager. Now the article manager you need to put some additional thought into this.
If you’re building links directly to your money site, it’s important that you prepare hand spun high quality content and I recommend you to check out the advanced spinning tutorial to learn how to do this properly.
Now the article manager has quite a few different options so I’m just going to take you through general set up quickly and the variations.
So assuming you got article or articles prepared, all you need to do is click on add, enter manually and you can add the title in there, along with the actual article body into there.
The summary box will automatically use the first paragraph of the article and we can have a preview of this here. As you can see it’s added the links in for us.
If you click on OK, that is one article added. If you wanted to add another article, which I have here article 2, you just again click add, enter manually and we can drop the title in and also the actual article body, just grab that and hit OK.
Then down here you have some additional options now. How to insert the link, sometimes it will insert the link into a sentence at the bottom or within the article or just randomly add the link in the middle of the article which makes no sense, or have it add no link at all.
If you have the sentence at the bottom, let’s just preview that and show you what it looks like. It adds it like this at the bottom this sentence here, it’s like a random sentence that it adds in. It lacks control to be honest, you don’t have much control over what is placed here and I think this place is risk if you are building links directly to your money site.
So what you should actually do and I go over this in the advanced spinning tutorial, is actually when you spin the articles you should add the links in directly and there’s a couple of ways you can do this. GSA SER actually provides a handy tag for us which looks like this and it says a href equals percent url percent anchor text and what it will do is replace percent URL with the URLs here and the percent anchor text with the anchor text here.
So what I recommend you actually do is when preparing your content, you actually add the links in at that point and then in GSA, you can select to insert no link. Also following my spinning tutorial I will be adding contextual links which actually help disguise what you’re doing a little bit more and make it look a bit more natural.
Where there’s variation between this and the advanced spinning tutorial, is in the advanced spinning tutorial I teach you to add images and videos at random. You can actually skip over this step as GSA will do that for you and you can choose how many to add here.
That saves you a bit of time and preparation on the spinning of the content. All you actually need to do is create the article, spin the text, add your money site links, add your contextual links, and then it is ready to add into GSA here.
This is assuming you are building links direct to your money site.
You have other options here, do not submit duplicate articles per account, per site/domain, etc. So I choose anywhere because we don’t want duplicate content anywhere.
That is essentially your money site linking campaign set up. Once that is done, you can click on OK and you will see the campaign is here and if you want to rename it, you can do so. Modify project, rename, I don’t know, money site campaign for example.
Anytime you want to change options, just double click and it opens up here. Like before, you have that same right click menu to get all of this submitted and verified URLs and all the different diagrams and charts and everything like that.
That is pretty much how you set up a campaign with GSA search engine ranker. So now you know how to set up a campaign, let’s look at some of the other things we can do.
Way back in May 2012 I asked the GSA team if they could integrate tiered link building into GSA and as you can see, straight away they came back here and said they were adding that feature which is a real testament to the GSA team. A lot of the updates that come out are a new features off the back of user request and tiered link building is one of those that they released, it was like a week after I requested it they built this in.
So to set up a tiered link building campaign it’s pretty much the same as a normal campaign. Here we have the campaign that we just created so let’s say we want to create a second tier of links to that. We just click new and click new campaign and set it up as we have done previously. I’m just going to enter some dummy content in there.
The only difference is though we need to tick this box and it says use verified URLs of another project and if you tick that, you choose the project, your tier one project which is the money site campaign and click on OK.
So what this will do, let’s just create that and click ok and give it a name. So as you can see here, what this campaign will do is build links to the verified links of this campaign. So this is tier 1 to your money site and this is tier 2 to your tier 1 and if you wanted to add a third tier, again you set everything up, use verified URLs of another project, and this time we would pick the tier and hit OK and OK again.
There we go. We have tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3. So using your knowledge of how to set up a campaign now, you can see how easy it is to create a tiered linking structure.
One of the other cool features is the ability to remove links that GSA has created. Now the problem with Google and SEO in general is that it always moving the gold post, so what works now may not work in 12 months and may in fact get you penalized.
If that happens you need to go and clean up your backlink profile which is a very long and drawn out process. But any links created with GSA, if you just right click on the project that created the links and changed the status to active remove links that when you’re running it will go through all the links it’s created, log in and remove them.
There are some types of links that can’t remove like blog comments where you don’t register and have control over the content once it’s submitted but a lot of the links it can log in and remove them for you which is a really really cool feature.
Now if you want to set up campaigns quickly and you’ll certainly want to do this on your tiers. You can actually take advantage of the import function down here, combined with Kontent Machine.
Now Kontent machine there’s a much more detailed tutorial about how to use it but let me show you quickly. It’s already got my content prepared, I can hit build and export, come down to GSA SER, click on export, we can save that somewhere and click save.
That will export out for us. Once that’s done, we just hit OK and come back to GSA, tools, import, data field, GSA and you can choose which fields you want it to fill. Hit OK and you’ll see straight away that it’s populated all of our content and all of our fields for us which is a great time saver when you are working on the lower tiers. If you give it a test here, you can see that content in there.
So that’s the quick way of setting up and generating content. You can also use here we have an article manager and if you click on add you can search online and mix the articles so you can mix either just paragraphs, paragraphs and sentences or just sentences.
You just enter your search term and it will go out and scrape those for you and it will go out and bring back articles.
You do need to set up your spin config settings for that to work though. It supports a range of different spinning software in here like best spinner, word AI, spin chimp, spinner chief and so on.
So there’s just a couple more options you have when it comes to either generating some content or actually completely populating the entire project with these using kontent machine.
By now you should know your way around GSA search engine ranker very well and be familiar with all of the different options and how to use it. Once you’ve got all your campaigns set up to kick everything off all you need to do is hit start and that will go out and begin building everything out for you as you’ve set it up.
So there we have it, GSA search engine ranker really has come a long way the past year and has been updated nearly every single day with book fixes, minor features and major features.
It can post to a huge range of link platforms and includes a bunch of advanced features such as the anchor text control. One of the features I really like though is the ability to remove links GSA has created in one click. Who knows what Google will penalize next and that is a handy feature to have.
You can also pick it up for a one time fee rather than an expensive monthly subscription like SENuke XCR and you’ll be surprised at just how cheap it actually is.
All in all, GSA search engine ranker is an essential tool to have in your arsenal. See ya!
GSA Search Engine Ranker – A very diverse link building tool.
GSA Captcha Breaker – The best captcha solving software.
BuyProxies – I use the semi-dedicated proxies.
Kontent Machine – Check out my full review to learn how to use it properly.
GSA Search Engine Ranker is a tool that’s come to be one of the most powerful in the link building world. Last year it went through several updates and transformations to make it easier and faster.
I will teach you to:
This tutorial is pretty detailed so let’s just get into it!
First let’s look at the interface before we get into the nitty gritty stuff.
On your main GSA Search Engine Ranker panel, you can see your list of projects created, tools, colour coded verified links and a real time log with statistics.
The stats along the bottom tell you-
If you ever need a reminder of what they mean, hover over with your mouse for an explanation to pop up.
To see more options, right click the project and you have lots of things to change here such as status, priority, type of active mode and modifying the project.
Show URLs will allow you to look at both submitted and verified links which you can export or look at more specific statistics about them in charts and graphs.
You can even sort them out by engine, internal/external, follow or no follow and link type.
Remember, a submitted link is one that has not been verified if it is live and a verified link is one that is submitted and currently live.
Other project options include making changes in bulk and importing target URLs. You can import your own URLs that you’ve scraped or you can import from a site list.
On top of the last verified URL list, there is an option button to change the settings for your project. The setting options you have are thread count, proxies, and various other things.
The thread count defaults at 50 which is fine unless you have a more powerful computer. Mine is quad core with 16 gigs of rams so I can set it up to 250 threads.
If you don’t, 50 will work just fine.
Make sure you have checked the box to use proxies and GSA SER will scrape public proxies for you. Set it to search for new ones every 60 minutes if there are less than one hundred active.
Test all of them and take out the failed proxies if they’re older than a few hours.
The problem with public proxies is that they aren’t 100% reliable and you normally receive a high failure rate which ends up wasting your time.
If you spend a few dollars on Buyproxies and buy semi-dedicated proxies, the success rate is much greater and is really worth your money.
To input your own proxy list, click Add proxy, import them from clipboard and set them to private. After you add them, go back to settings and decide which proxies to use, private or public and when.
I use my private proxies for search engines, PR checking and submissions.
Interested in proxies? Check out my list of SEO proxies and residential proxies.
Although GSA can support a large range of captcha solving services, there are two types that you really need to know.
The first is a software based solution such as GSA Captcha Breaker. It will try to automatically solve them for you which saves on human based captcha services.
The second one is a human based solver like Death By Captcha and these are really cheap, around $1.39 for a thousand solves.
The best way to set it up is to select a software based service as your primary and then a human based as your secondary.
That way your primary will help reduce the captcha costs and your secondary can pick up any failed ones and is much cheaper.
To set it up click Add and select the services of your choice. Test to check your balance, set up your retry limit and the rest of the options.
If you don’t want GSA to ask you when solves aren’t successful, untick the box that says to ask the user if everything else fails.
GSA Search Engine Ranker will automatically ping all the backlinks it makes but you can integrate them into the supported indexing services if you want.
Although some people like using the indexer services, I don’t believe they’re really all that necessary. Instead you can build more links to them with GSA SER but if you’ve got them and want to use them, then feel free to integrate them.
Some of the indexers are GSA SEO indexer, Linklicious, Nuclear Link Indexer, Link Pipeline, Lindexed and Back Links Indexer. Just select the ones you want and enter the API key for each one.
Another option is the filter which allows you to skip submissions if the URL if appearing in your blacklist. You can leave all these at defaults.
Sites lists allow you to keep a log of different types of links GSA Search Engine Ranker discovers and submits to.
You can then reuse these lists in other projects to speed up the overall submission process.
There are 4 types of site lists-
I recommend keeping a record of successful and verified submissions so you can use them later on in future projects.
One of the options for a new project is to import target URLS and you can do that from a previous site list.
After a few months of using GSA Search Engine Ranker, you’ll end up having a huge site list of verified and successful links that you can save and import quickly in various projects. So tick verified and successful to save these two lists.
When you’re done setting everything up and all the options are how you want them, click Start to get your project going.
As soon as you do that, GSA Search Engine Ranker will start going out and finding targets and submitting and verifying links.
During the process, you might get pop ups from GSA that needs you to answer random questions. To prevent these pop ups which can get annoying, hit Stop and double click the project.
Select Options tab and you’ll see a line that says if a form can’t be filled to Ask User or Choose Random. To stop pop ups, change it to Random.
You’ll have to change this for every project so remember to do that before you start a new one!
So that is an overview of the GSA interface and the specific features and options it has.
Now let’s look at a sample project!
I’m going to show you around a sample project quickly so you get an idea of how everything fits together.
Then we are going to create a project together 🙂
The left side column is a list of links to where you want to submit to such as:
Compared to SENuke XCR, this list may not look like a lot. Even when you click on the plus, you’ll see all the options underneath but it still doesn’t look like there’s many places GSA Search Engine Ranker posts to.
This is because all of these are platforms used by thousands of different sites. Wordpress for example is a widely used platform so if you choose Wordpress article, GSA Search Engine Ranker will post to all sites using that platform which is in thousands.
Don’t be fooled by your first impression, there’s endless supplies of sites to post to behind the scenes!
In the main window you have to input all the data for your campaign. The options panel gives you great control over how links are built which has gotten a lot better in recent times.
So now you know what you are looking for let me take you through creating your first project.
To start a new project, click New and a new project will pop up. First you have to choose which link types to use which will depend on the type of campaign your running.
A good rule to stand by is that if you’re making your money site central to your link building structure, you have to use high quality contextual links which are links surrounded by relevant content.
We can tick some of these options here such as Article, Wikis, Web 2.0’s, and Social networks. I’m going to leave it fairly simple for this example.
After you’ve selected your link types, you can start on the rest of the settings.
You can enter multiple URLs which GSA Search Engine Ranker will just rotate through at random and make variations of capital and lower case letters.
For keywords, there is the option to collect more from target sites and to use those collected words to find new target sites.
The anchor text should be based on your main keywords and must be in spintax format.
Your keywords (used to find sites to submit links to) can be the same as your anchor text if you want, just tick the box that says use keywords as anchor text.
Now the next few options are important for building a natural looking profile in GSA Search Engine Ranker so you reduce the risk of being penalized by Google Penguin.
Please see the main tutorial video if you get confused here.
Partial match: A partial match is one that includes the main keyword with something else. I really recommend keeping a list of partial anchor text.
Branding anchor text: Some examples of branded anchor text for my blog, matthewwoodward.co.uk would be Matthew Woodward, Matthewwoodward and Matthewwoodward.co.uk.
LSI anchor text: Use scrapebox or Google wonderwheel to get some new words and paste that into here.
Generic anchor text: words like “click here” or “see more”.
Citation: Creates a naked URL of your site which makes your profile look much more natural.
Anchor text variation: varies the uppercase and lowercase letters of anchor text
Combined, these settings will help you build a very natural looking profile.
For your About Me, you either drop in a default profile or use Kontent Machine to generate several about me’s.
For the log in and passwords just tick the randomization box and GSA Search Engine Ranker will generate them for you. Enter the website title, categories, either suggested or root, forum comment and a description.
I keep my descriptions the same as the 250 description and leave the forum comment at default. Forum nickname and forum password will be randomized if the box is ticked.
Don’t forget to properly spin any content with my The Best Spinner tutorial before adding to your campaign.
Don’t think we’re done yet! Under the options tab, we have even more stuff to fill out.
The options you have are:
To avoid pop ups like before, remember we have to select the box to randomly choose a selection. Have all services fill captchas if you set up captcha solving services.
To use tags, you have a choice between keywords or anchor text.
To tell GSA Search Engine Ranker how to get target URLs, you’ll need to tell it where to look.
First, pick the search engines. Right click to search by country which I usually do and this will depend on your target audience and language so I’m going to pick UK and United states.
I also like to use keywords to find target sites. Even though it comes back with less, the results are usually more accurate and relevant which is what you want when building links.
Quality over quantity!
Tick the box to use URLs from your global sites list if you have one and you can also choose to analyze and post to competitor’s backlinks.
This option will try to replicate the backlinks for sites that rank for your target keywords. It’s not perfect but you are able to get some substantial value from it.
It doesn’t differentiate between good links and spam links so the risk is if the link profile is pretty spammy, then GSA SER will try to grab those links for your own as well.
GSA Search Engine Ranker allows lets you set up a posting schedule so you don’t get banned if you’re building multiple links from the same site. Try to space it out so your links don’t get deleted or anything like that.
I don’t normally use it but it can be handy.
Under the Filter URLs tab, it’s important to set these options up.
Consider creating multiple projects to get a variation of PRs to look more natural. Try to skip sites with a PR less than 0 and unknown PR.
There’s three types of email addresses that we can use.
Disposable sites are widely available but many sites will block those so you’ll end up with a high failure rate.
Webmail based emails don’t fail as much but there are still some sites out there that block web mail based accounts.
Self hosted email is something like name@yourdomain.com but using a gmail or hotmail account will be fine for most. You can take the time to make your own or buy a bunch on Fiverr.
Enter your email of choice and at the bottom are several more options to choose from. I want to wait fifteen minutes between two different log ins but the rest is left at default.
Make sure you test this!
If anything doesn’t work here, your campaign is in danger of failing as it’s running.
Now let’s choose some articles to add but make sure you spend time creating quality content to use in your link building.
If you don’t know how, I suggest you check out my advanced spinning tutorial with The Best Spinner because you need have to have some high quality hand spun content.
If you already have articles ready, just click Add and paste your content directly into there with a title. It’ll grab the first paragraph automatically to use as the summary.
Once that’s ready, you can preview it, complete with links and all.
Repeat the same steps to add a second article. Easy as that!
On the bottom are some more options for editing your articles in terms of links and such.
You can either insert a link with a sentence at the bottom, a sentence in the article, or No link.
To be honest, these options don’t give you as much control since the link seems randomly placed. To make it look more natural, directly add your links when you are spinning the article with The Best Spinner.
I talk about this in my The Best Spinner tutorial but you can do this with a tag in GSA Search Engine Ranker.
Next you can insert media randomly with GSA Search Engine Ranker and that saves you some time. One last thing I change on here is to not duplicate content anywhere instead of per account.
Click OK to finish your campaign setup and you’ll see it get added to the list!
Setting up a tiered link building campaign is fairly easy and is similar to creating a new campaign. First we have to create a new campaign like we did before.
The one difference is to tick the box that says use verified URLs of another project (multi tier/link wheel). As soon as you select that box, a pop up will appear.
Choose your project, the money site.
Now your new campaign is going to build links to the campaign you chose earlier, tier 2 to tier 1.
To add another tier, repeat the steps to set up another project, tick the same box and pick the second tier.
Building tiered link structure is quite easy in GSA SER!
We all know that Google is constantly changing. What worked perfectly a year ago, may not work so well now. So you always need the ability to remove links you have built, just in case!
GSA Search Engine Ranker can help you clean your backlink profile as long as they were created by GSA SER which is extremely useful.
All you have to do is right click on the project, hover on status and click Active (remove links). GSA SER will go through and remove all the links created as it is running.
It can’t remove ones such as blog comments since there was no registration/account created but it can remove a large amount of them.
GSA Search Engine Ranker allows you to integrate with various services to help you set up campaigns quickly.
One of the best tools I like to use for this is Kontent Machine. Just follow my Kontent Machine tutorial to learn how to prepare your content.
Once you’ve finished preparing your content with Kontent Machine, there’s an option to build and export. Choose the GSA Search Engine Ranker template, select export and save it.
When it’s done saving, you can go back into GSA Search Engine Ranker to import the content.
Select Tools, import, data field, your file and fields you want to fill. Right away all of the data has been exported and filled in all of the boxes.
You could also use Kontent Machine to generate hundreds of articles to import into the article manager.
The GSA Search Engine Ranker team has been constantly working and updating this tool in the last year and it’s miles ahead of what it used to be when it first came out.
They have come a long way in the past year to make it one of the most powerful and diverse link building tools on the market. It really is a crucial tool to have in your arsenal.
Want to write product reviews like this one? Use my product review template!
GSA Search Engine Ranker – A very diverse link building tool.
GSA Captcha Breaker – The best captcha solving software.
BuyProxies – I use the semi-dedicated proxies.
Kontent Machine – Check out my full review to learn how to use it properly.
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Hello Matthew,
Today is 1/10/2024.
1) Thank you for your tutorials. Top notch!
2) I would like to know if GSA is still working for ranking. I am planning to use it according to your tutorials but would not want to break my ranking!
Please let me know!
Hi Yvan, in 2024, I would suggest you build your links organically/manually rather than automatically with GSA.
Tienes algún cupón de descuento para adquirir la herramienta?
Si! https://searchlogistics.com/deals/gsa-search-engine-ranker-discount-coupon/
Thank you so much for such an amazing and informative blog. I loved reading it and gaining knowledge from it.
Glad to hear that. Keep it up!
Acctually it is work well in 2022
The video is from 2014. Will this still work for ranking today?
Not as well as it used to.
Excellent GSA SEO tool tour in whole internet
Thanks!
Hi Matt,The best video tuto of all the world.I start project with GSA since 1month but my links build is not indexed by search machine so the result is nothing :(A advice to improve the indexation of links on Google ? (I have GSA Indexer too…)Thx Laurent
There you go- https://searchlogistics.com/seo/tools/backlink-indexers-test/
omg is this still working?thank you Matt!
Less than it used to, but yes!
Hi Matt, excellent content indeed, thank you!A simple question, is it still valid in October 2020, since last Google updates?
No problem Julien! Yes, it is!
Wondeful bro, I’ll try it. شات
Great Mohamed- Let me know how it goes!
thanks sir, for this tutorial GSA
Glad I could help Santri
Thank you for the helpful guide. I think i will buy this service.
You’re most welcome 🙂
Hlw Sir, This Content is very nice & solve my Problems Plz Do more for us Thnkyou Sir,
Glad I could help!
What a Great blog of gsa search engine ranker!
Thanks 🙂
I remember I used to have complete GSA setup with captcha breaker, WAC, dedicated proxies, etc. I used it on my affiliates sites and ranked many websites within a month or even less.This article is really handy for people who are looking forward to starting building tier links with GSA>Great article as always.Thanks, Matt.
Thanks very much Jay
thanks for this new thing for me
No worries
Hahaha, Dude you are just amazing..
Thanks very much Hamza
First of all…I didn’t know about GST…But I saw when i’m browsing your top articles…Explained really well…Thanks for taking this many efforts…-Abhishek
No problem Abhishek!
Nice review.
Thanks 🙂
I’m using GSA Proxy Scaprer, can you make a tutorial configure between GSA SER and GSA PS. Actually, i see GSA have many new tools (or new with me) and only few very simple guide to use it. All of guide i saw on internet, your guide is easy to understanding and more details than others. Hope will see more tutorial about SEO tools. Thanks Matthew Woodward
I dont use it sorry, the price of semi dedicated private proxies versus the speed increases they give make it a no brainer for me. I use BuyProxies
i just want to know that which tool is best between linkassistant and GSA for link building ?
GSA for sure
You have great articles Matthew, i have a question that i m using link assistant for seo. Is GSA better than link assistant ?
What are you trying to achieve?
GSA is super powerful. However it is not as simple as its cover design. Not easy to learn especially for an Indonesian like me, with a lesser English comprehension. Thanks Matthew for this review, really helps!
Yes it takes some time to get used to
Thanks Mathew, Awesome Tutorial
No problem Saloue!
Great video, thanks Matt. I know how long they take to do so appreciate it.I always worried about using automated link building tools like GSA. Recently purchased it and am seeing some results. I guess I can always monitor all Google updates and cut the links to my money site in even of penalty.
How are you getting on now?
Thanks !
No problme Marie!
Keep sharing good stuff. Thanks!
Thanks Hamza!