In an earlier article on automated link building tools, we talked about the good way to use automation in your SEO and the bad way to use them. In this Scrapebox review, we’ll be talking about the Scrapebox automated SEO software and whether or not it’s a worthwhile investment for your SEO and internet marketing strategy.  You’ll also learn how the value of Scrapebox has a lot to do with the way that you use it.

Scrapebox Review Introduction: What is Scrapebox and What Does it Do?

Scrapebox is a downloadable program that runs on your laptop or desktop. The price of Scrapebox (at the time of this writing) is $97, but it is available on some sites for just $57. Scrapebox performs many automated tasks including:

  • Allowing you to search for blogs that are related to a specific keyword.
  • Allowing you to create “phantom traffic” to web pages, thus making it appear that those pages are getting more traffic than they really are (more on this in a second).
  • Allowing you to ping the links which you’ve built and submit those links to RSS feeds, thus theoretically increasing the value of your backlink.
  • Allowing you to automate generic blog comments and create backlinks in a much faster time using blog commenting.

Scrapebox performs all of these functions very quickly and with little need to learn how to use the program. For example, by typing in the keyword “how to play guitar” and hitting “start harvesting” you can gather thousands of blog URLs that are related to the topic of playing the guitar using search results from:

  • Google
  • Yahoo!
  • Bing
  • AOL Search

On top of this, you can select to have the duplicate URLs removed from your list and also have the links to URLs that are either password protected or return errors. Scrapebox also allows you to filter URLs according to page rank so that you can select only the highest-ranking pages for building links to. Now, let’s talk about the features of Scrapebox and how useful they actually are for your SEO strategy.

Using Scrapebox’s URL Harvesting Feature

This is easily the best white hat SEO feature for Scrapebox and one which can save you a LOT of time. For example, you can harvest blog URLs, export them to an Excel spreadsheet and hand them over to an outsourcer who will create blog comments and help you to build qualified backlinks to your site. For best results, remove the duplicate URLs and broken URLs before you export your list and send it to your outsourcer for link building purposes.

It’s also a good idea to provide the following information in the spreadsheet along with the URLs to the blogs where you want to comments:

  • The specific URL to which you want the link built.
  • The email which you want to submit the blog comment under (you’re best off using a “dummy email” account for this, one which isn’t your primary email because you’ll be getting a lot of emails from the blogs that you comment on).
  • The keyword you want to be used as the blog commenter’s “name” will ensure that your keyword is used in the anchor text of the link back to your site.

To ensure that your outsourcer is leaving comments which will have a shot at getting approved by the blog owner, you can also request them to copy and paste their comment into the spreadsheet next to the URL where they left the comment.

This way you can check the comments and make sure they’re not leaving the generic: “Nice blog, I liked reading it,” or “I like this topic, do you know where I can read more about it?” These types of comments usually get deleted by blog owners, meaning that you built the link for nothing.

Using the Scrapebox Automated Blog Commenting Feature

With this feature, you can select the blogs from your harvested URLs and have Scrapebox automated hundreds of comments in just a few minutes. The speed is made possible by having a list of generic “one size fits all” comments which Scrapebox posts on the selected URLs. For example, some of the comments which Scrapebox might leave are:

“This is a good post, I really enjoyed reading it.”

“Do you know where I can find more on this subject?”

“Every time I read a blog like this it makes me want to stop surfing and work on my own.”

While it can be tempting to use this feature because of the high volume of comments you can leave in such a short time, it’s important to remember that blog owners want comments on their blogs that actually add to the conversation. The above comments have a very high rejection rate, making the automated blog commenting feature an inefficient strategy for building backlinks.

Using the Scrapebox Pinging and RSS Feed Feature

This feature allows you to “backlink your backlinks” using by submitting them to RSS feeds which is believed to get them indexed faster by the search engines and also enhance the value of each link. RSS submission and pinging does have some value in improving the power of your backlinks since sites with a high number of inbound links are obviously considered to be more valuable to the search engines. However, some SEO experts claim that if your site if less than three months old, it’s better to hold off on pinging your backlinks and submitting them to RSS feeds, and letting the links get indexed naturally.

Using Scrapebox to Create Phantom Traffic

When you purchase Scrapebox, you have the option of using “proxy servers” to create “phantom traffic” to:

  • Articles that you’ve submitted on article submission sites
  • Pages where your profile links are built
  • Pages that include your blog comments

Proxy servers are IP addresses that don’t represent a specific human user, but the search engines and tracking programs don’t know that. They simply track each IP address as a unique visit, and that’s how proxy servers give the appearance of having a lot of traffic to the pages where your backlinks are. Since backlinks on pages that have a high amount of traffic are considered more valuable, this “phantom traffic creation” is believed to be good for your SEO.

Just be very careful if you decide to use this feature of Scrapebox as a means of adding power to your backlinks. Not only is it arguably unethical, if the search engines catch onto what you’re doing, but it will also be obvious that you’re trying to trick them into giving you higher rankings, something which search engines hate.

Scrapebox Review Conclusion

In conclusion, Scrapebox is a valuable tool for automating your SEO processes and saving you a lot of time and money. Just be sure that you follow the suggestions in this article. Use Scrapebox to harvest URLs for building backlinks and (as long as your site is more than three months old), use the RSS submission and pinging features to juice up your backlinks.

However, be careful not to be lured into the laziness trap and try to shortcut your SEO using proxy server traffic or generic blog comments which will end up deleted most of the time anyway. If you do this, Scrapebox can be a very valuable SEO tool.

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