GSA Website Submitter Review
September 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under Link Building Software
I see a few people asking “what is the best directory submitter” and “do directory submissions still work” so I am kind of reluctantly going to post about this.
I say reluctantly as I have not seen anyone else promote what I have found to be by far the best directory submitter around and I have kind of kept it to myself for the past year.
Before we go on, this bit is important:
GSA WebSite Submitter is a stripped down version of GSA SoftSubmit. SoftSubmit is the same price but will post pad files to software directories and do directory submissoins, however, they have strict TOS that prohibit its use for craplink building and threaten to terminate your license if you use it for backlinking junk products and sites. However, if you are selling legitimate software products then get SoftSubmit instead.
GSA: The Best Directory Submitter
GSA Website Submitter is probably the tool all those “3000 manual directory submissions for $500″ are using and:
- Allows you to spin lots of variants of your listing at different character lengths (for different directory platforms)
- Supports captcha solving services like de-captcher and bypass captcha
- Has a very limited inbuilt captha solving capability, but really low success rate, hardly worth mentioning really
- Runs 100 odd threads and is FAST
- It has a tool to access POP mail accounts to auto confirm the mails sent
- It has several thousand link directories in its database
- Flags directories that require a reciprochal link
- It has all the categories for theses sites in its database
- It allows you to select long lists of categories using searches and order them by preference
- It will do a couple of thousand submissions in maybe 20 minutes
There are a couple of negatives to this software.
- It is not as user friendly as it could be.
- It does not handle sites were reciprocal links are required (I have been trying to get the developer to implement something for this but he is not keen)
- It is slow to add category lists
- It creates a mess if the captcha services go down
Categories are the biggest pain, it takes time to return them all, searching for them can be a nuisance, but it does work well. In short, when you select one category for one site, it will set the same category on any other site that uses it. So if you choose “shopping/consumer electronics” it will set that on every site that has that category. If you do a search for a category it will return a long list of available options which you can prioritised or deleted, and it will then go off and apply those to the entire directory list.
If the captcha service you are using fails, it does not default to another service, instead it starts popping up captchas for you to manually solve, it will not move onto a secondary captcha solving service. Also, during routine use you still seem to get the odd captcha popping up. For this reason I prefer to keep an eye on what it is doing rather than leaving it completely un-attended. I also recommend ByPass Captcha with this tool, which was added at my request. De-Captcher just isnt reliable enough IMHO.
A typical run will burn around $15 worth of captchas and get you a few hundred approved submissions (links).
Do Directory Submissions Still Work?
These submissions will get you anchored links on a wide IP distribution of sites. Why wouldnt they work? They will work as long as Google continues to obsessively bean count anchored links, the same as blog comments, article submissions and all the other stuff that SEO’s say “does not work” but really does. The reason people say “does not work” is usually because they have an alternative or a “secret” to sell you… but I digress.
In terms of measurable benefits I normally see a short term boost from these links as my submissions are listed on the “recently added” pages, but over time you will be relegated to deep internal pages.
Another thing I have noticed with these directories is that many order links by PR (Page Rank), but do not update the PR very often. So, if you can wait until you have some PR for your site before submitting you are going to get slightly better placements than if you submit a PR0.
If you can find the URLs it is worth backlinking these, as a lot of these directories are only partically indexed. A PR2 directory with 30,000 listings is rarely going to be fully indexed.
How Much Does GSA Website Submitter Cost?
Pricing is set to your local currency and there are several options available:
- $50 per month
- $170 per year
- $519 permanent
- $1351 if you want to run a submission service
I went for an annual subscription last year and will be renewing it in a months time.
I do not know how they track whether you are running a submission service, but I am sure they have a way to do this, they are no fools. I have used it on lots of sites to date, not all under the same whois details and not had a problem, so for regular IM work there is no issue using a general license.
This software allows you to make submissions that are just as good as manual subs, due to the accuracy of category selection and the ability to vary your anchors and descriptions.
Should You Buy GSA Website Submitter?
Well first of all there is a trial version you can play with to see if you like it (link below).
The question is not really whether you should buy this product, but whether you value the links it creates. There is no other software I have seen that works as well as GSA, its the only player on the field as far as Im concerned.
The only alternatives I have seen are a complex Xrumer Mod, that icanSoft rubbish that doesnt even submit properly to its puny 500 strong target list and semi automated products like SubmitEaze, which essentially form fill the fields to speed up your manual processing, but still take hours to submit to this many sites.
If you want the links from these directories then you want this software, period.
Download Trial Version or Order
If you found this review helpful please consider rewarding me with Sheckels by using my affiliate links:
GSA Homepage Listing All Products Including Website Submitter (and SoftSubmit for developers only)
Download Website Submitter Trial Version
SoftSubmit is the Same Price as website submitter but submits to link directories and software directories. It is therefore much better value but is strictly for legit software developers so make sure you understand the TOS for this product before buying:
If you use GSA Auto Website Submitter, how do you get the urls of the submitted pages so that you can backlink them? Submiteaze has a “Directory Detective” functionality that gets your link location, as I understand it. What would you do for your GSA Auto Website Submitter urls?
Hi Jon,
Well that is a problem!
I took a look at SubmitEaze and it has not resolved the issue either.
The problem is finding the page that has your listing on it, which will hopefully have a matching page title, and of course your full link.
I started writing a script to do this but got a bit stuck due to the different formats of directories.
The easiest way is to search for your link, and then follow search results back to your listings page, but not all dirs have the link back to the listing on the search page.
Furthermore your link can appear on many pages, for example “recently added”, and of course the category pages. Over time, the links on these pages change, so more recent links may appear at the top and whereas you once appeard on page 1 of a given list, over time you may move down to page 4.
So, the link you need to find is the one for your own page, with your title, your link. You can be sure that will always link to you. And that is the tricky part!
If you look at the demo of “Directory Detective” it does NOT find the listing page, it finds the link on some other page.
Its useless for backlinking as chances are your link will dissapear from that page over time anyway.
I am going to keep workign on this problem, but for now, there is a cheat you can do:
1) GSA provies a success report of dirs submitted to.
2) Most directories are of the same format and their search pages are the same so you can do something like:
directory.com/search?id=your-domain.com
Of course backlinking those is not the best plan either, as all your backlinks will show the same URL structure.
Sorry for the long winded reply… hope it makes some sense to you!
Am glad I found this, as like you I believe there is a use for directory links and have been wanting to find a good submitter.
Have you any thoughts on the soon to be released new version of deep linker pro?
Had a quick look.
Its a lot cheaper with one off cost.
It mentiones a links.html file with recip links, unless that is formatted for every site it wont work, as directories want specific text, not just any old link.
They say that adding this link farm to your site is ok with search engines as its meta no followed. That is not true, SE’s still read those pages. Im pretty sure phpLd can check for this anyway as its an old trick.
Category selection looks easy, but no telling how well it will work.
Deep linking feature looks good.
There are only 674 target sites, on about increasing to 1000, GSA has a LOT more than this.
There is no captcha solving… that is a deal breaker for me, I would not bother with anything that needs me to sit there punching in captchas.
It has potential and I like the price, but as it stands right now its not gonna cut the mustard.
I just mailed the guy to see if he was interested in hearing my suggestions for improving his software… maybe he will reply…
Yeah I think he got a bit of a hammering for deep linker when it was first released, but, I reckon he’s a genuine guy and the new version might well be worth a look, if he ever manages to release it.
Thanks for this review. I just stumbled of it and I have to agree that this GSA software is amazing. If only I would have known of that before.
So many sites and all working (or well almost all, at least they release updates very often).
Worth every cent I have payed.
To bad that this software is not so well known and the other crap is so hyped.
Very interesting review. This is one of the few tools that I’ve actually never heard of before. I’m curious though, you mention:
“get you a few hundred approved submissions (links).”
So are you saying it submits to over 3000 directories but ends up only getting you a couple hundred links? Is that because a lot of the submissions are unsuccessful or simply because most of the links aren’t getting indexed? $519 sounds like a lot for only a couple hundred links
Hi Zach,
It has thousands directories loaded, but after you filter out the ones that require a reciprochal link, directories that do not have your category, or are not in your language your down to a couple of thousand for most runs. Then some directories will reject your submission. After that, not all links are indexed, so what you end up with from all this is a couple of hundred links indexed in Yahoo.
The price is $50pm or $170 per anum for normal users. The higher prices are only if you are running a submission sevice. So, if you were charging people money for a “directory submission service” then the licensing cost for that is higher.
If you are a regular user then its a lot cheaper.
Does the Sick submitter directory subimtter come close to this product, if it does then surely Sick is better considering all the other things it can do.
Not for directory submissions no.
The main advantage with this tool is the category selection. If you want to get links approved correct category selection is important, and sick cannot really do that because it does not harvest the category lists from the remote sites.
The other feature GSA added since my review is a crawler that tries to find the actual directory listing URLs containing your links (after approaval). There are sick mods that try to do this but they are not as good.
As for which product is the better buy, thats a no brainer, Sick for $19pm (less if you find the special offer they posted on BackLinksForum.Com) is the best value product of its kind by a wide margin.
Sick is a great app to start out with, cheap and versatile, best buy… but ultimately its a jack of all trades master of none.
GSA is the master of directory submissions… but cannot do anything else.