Scrapebox methods…
Here’s just a few methods I use with the fantastic tool – Scrapebox. Most of these methods are pretty basic, but sometimes just seeing exactly how it’s used by others, it puts it in a more clear perspective and allows you to take these ideas and replicate. Although I urge people to try and put your own spin on them. What I will discuss here, is by no means earth shattering, however these methods work, and work very well. One thing to keep in mind is that with Scrapebox (or any other automated spam tool) – I use private proxies for comment spam, and I’ll use at least 20 of them, but for other features like pinging, harvesting, and rss submitting, I’ll use the harvested public proxies because you can get so many. Also – make sure you know how many threads your private proxy provider allows you to use and adjust your connection settings in Scrapebox. Some companies will suspend your account and your connections won’t work if you go over the max # of threads/connections.
The obvious way to use Scrapebox is by automating comment spam, which it does very fast and very well (this post will stick to comment spam – I’ll talk about other functions of Scrapebox in future posts and in my newsletter). There are many ways to use comment spam to promote your promoters (I never mass comment spam directly to a money site). For the most part, I use 2 main methods. First – there’s the targeted method. It’s generally accepted that its better if you get links from related sites in your niche. How true that is, I don’t know but it seems logical that if you had links from authority sites in your niche, you would do better than if they were from sites that are completely not related. So taking this into consideration – the first method, the targeted method – we will harvest sites that have something to do with your niche and/or target keywords.
Basically, I’ll start out by harvesting wordpress blogs from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL. There’s a lot more wordpress sites than Blog Engine or Moveable Type – and they work better/faster (although you find more unmoderated with the other two so it’s good to use those too). I’ll use my main keywords that I’m trying to dominate – but usually those are too specific to harvest enough sites, so I also throw in a bunch of more general, but RELATED keywords. The more keywords – the longer it will take to harvest, but this is a numbers game – you want to get thousands or hundreds of thousands of urls. The more the better, because many will be duplicates, many will be moderated and unless you write some amazing, on topic comments, they won’t get approved. That’s one benefit to doing a keyword/niche targeted campaign, because although there’s less targets, more comments are more likely to get successfully posted because you can write comments about the niche. If they are on topic with the blogs you are posting on, it’s more likely they get approved.
So harvest your blog list with targeted and general niche-related keywords. Hopefully you’ll get a nice big list. If not, use different but related keywords. Remember, this is just to get a big list of blogs, it doesn’t have to be the exact keywords you want to target. Then I’ll of course remove the duplicate URLs. Now – removing the duplicate domains depends on a few things – how well my comments are spun or how many comments I have, and also the # of proxies.. I remember doing a run a few weeks ago, where I actually spammed my own blog – FOUR times with four different posts… BUT when I was looking at the comments – they were from different IPs (from diff. parts of the country) and the names/emails were different, AND the sites that were being promoted were different, AND the comments were completely different (not only do I spin the comments using The Best Spinner – but I use LOTS of completely different comments). So it really looked like different people commenting on my site. So if you do spam the same site’s various blog posts – just make sure you are able to make it look different from each other. And this varies depending on how much time I have… So sometimes I’ll remove duplicate domains, sometimes I won’t.
About the comments used – this varies a lot with me as well. It depends on a lot of different factors: the amount of time I want to spend on this project (usually not a lot – remember, this is just mass comment spam!), whether I’m doing a targeted campaign, or whether I’m just going for lots of links, and so on. So for doing targeted campaigns – I use on topic comments – comments that have my keywords in them. Sometimes I’ll write a bunch myself (again, depending on how much time I want to spend), or sometimes I’ll do a method like comment extractors. When you use comment extractors – just remember to go over the list and remove the pointless ones (you’ll get them), remove the vulgar ones, remove the short ones, remove any with URLs, etc… Then I’ll take my comments and put them through everyone’s favorites in The Best Spinner. Then I put it up in Scrapebox and let it rip.
About the websites list in Scrapebox. This is the list of sites you are promoting. You don’t want to put too many URLS on there. You just won’t get the # of links per url to make it worthwhile. So it might mean you have to do a few runs, but that also gives you more/different blogs to spam (since you will harvest using other keywords) so it’s a good idea anyways. I always keep it under 10. But the # will vary depending on how many blogs I harvested. If I’m doing Blog Engine, or Moveable Type – there’s going to be a LOT less, so I’ll probably only promote a few (3). The other thing you have to keep in mind is Akismet and other tools like that will ban a URL from being promoted, so if you only put 1 URL in there – you probably won’t get a lot of successful posts because it will get banned (I don’t know how fast it bans a URL, but why push it). Or it may work fine that one run, but if you try to do more runs with that URL, they may not be as successful. Anyhow – it’s good to have a few urls promoted, but not too many.
About the names list – some people use the names generator to make it look more normal, and some use keywords since that is where the link will be on. If you use keywords, your success rate will go down. How much, I’m not sure, but it will definitely be less. I do both. I use the regular names, and keywords – and I mix up the list.. I definitely use more regular names than keywords though. With the emails – I have it create about 20 emails with one fake domain name, and 20 more with another fake domain name, and I do that about 3-5 times so that it’s not all using the same domain name. That’s another way it could block you and lower your success rate.
So now you have your targeted blog list, your website list, your names and emails and comment list. At this point – you can use the new blog analyzer to remove the bad urls (some of the harvested urls will no longer be pointing to a good page or site)… or you can let it rip.
That’s it for the targeted comment spam campaign. Now let’s go for the bigger numbers game.
There’s only really two big differences between the two..
First – it’s the keywords… This won’t be a targeted list. Targeted lists limit your scope. Here, we want to get the biggest blog list that you can. So you’re going to want to use VERY general keywords and you’re going to want to use a LOT of them. Remember – when scraping/harvesting Urls, you are limited to 1,000 results PER keyword. That doesn’t mean you can only get 1000 results, it means you can only get 1000 results for every keyword you scrape. So the more keywords, the more results – but if the keywords are too similar, you’ll get a lot of duplicates which is just wasting time. So you want to come up with a big list of varying, completely different keywords… Keywords like: celebrity, computers, entertainment, education, money, sales, sports, games, work, etc… Hopefully you get the picture. Come up with as many general keywords as you can. And you can have Scrapebox scrape more using those keywords to get more, but just remember that it will produce more duplicates that way – but you will get a little more. Using those types of keywords, you will get a LOT of blogs to spam.
Second – the comments. Since you aren’t targeting a specific niche, it’s hard and/or pretty much impossible to come up with on-topic comments since you are spamming such a broad selection of blogs and niches.. This is where you want to stroke the blog author’s ego.. I always mix it up – I include comments related to my niche I’m promoting because a lot of blogs aren’t moderated and the comments will get through so you might as well have your keywords in the content. But on moderated blogs, those probably won’t get approved since it’s probably not related to the blog post. So I mix it up. I’ll use pretty generic comments, talking about how great the post is (you can now add things like %BLOGTITLE% to the comments and it will put the page title there – its good to make it look like you are actually writing the comment), etc.. There’s two schools of thought on this – come up with really ingenious comments that will get approved, or just put whatever, keyword stuff, and a bunch of links since only the unmoderated sites will allow them.. I try to do both.
Third – depending on the size of the list you harvest, you can add more sites to the website list. If you have a huge list, you might want to because of the sheer volume of comments you’ll get. If you get 5000 links to a Squidoo lens, you might get complaints, your lens might get deleted, or the links might get discounted due to the speed and volume of your link velocity.
That’s it for now. I hope this was helpful. I’ll definitely be writing about some more methods on how to use Scrapebox, in the future…also read Scrapebox Posting Tips
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