Anyone Ranking Sites With GSA?

GSA had two abilities...

The first one that everyone loves is the ability to fire a bazillion links out in a very short period of time. This can easily shoot low to medium and even high competition keywords to the top of the serps. With this speed comes the burn and it is inevitable that the ranking pages will crash at some point.

The other ability is to build huge tiered networks with solid tier 1 quality backlinks that are so natural looking it is unbelievable and/or send oodles of tier 2 through tier 1000 of decreasing quality links for ranking and indexing purposes. With this ability you can easily squeak out 1 high quality and targeted link a day if you wanted.

The biggest problem with GSA is that there are a MILLION ways to formulate a campaign and as such there are a ton of right and wrong ways to do everything with the software.

So to answer your initial question....I have seen churn and burn sites stay ranked for 1-6 months depending on the structure of the campaign. That is pretty good for keywords that get thousands of searches a month and high payout commissions. As long as you do not mind the relentless churning and burning process.

As a caveat to this, it is hard to say how long your campaigns/rankings will last since I do not know your setup. Also you have to decide whether you want to attempt to weather the Google Animal Storms or not. So to create churn and burn campaigns that can make it past the next one or two algorithm updates OR to create campaigns with no care and if the next Google update crushes your rankings...so be it..move to the next campaign setup that will allow for churn and burn...since there always will be something that can be exploited.

I use GSA to rank my websites, unlike other people, I only create 20 to 30 tier 1 links then try scrapebox to create tier 2 links, about 1 month later, all the keywords rank upgrade a lot. However, some main keywords never have the chance to rank in the first page maybe the competition is a little too high, maybe I'm lack of knowledge to rank them on the first page. Since the new year google update its pagerank, GSA seems doesn't that powerful as before, that makes me very sad about it.

I quit using GSA at least six months ago. It will rank a site, but over time you will lose a ton of the links it builds. You would be better served doing the work manually and you will gain experience with the algorithm. I don't know of anyone that is confident in their manual linkbuilding skills that would use GSA to rank their site. Especially since none of the links are relevant, they look super spammy, they fall off, and tiered link building is really dangerous. Also you will never learn how to rank a site without a crutch by using GSA.
Now, as far as longevity of rankings go, I used GSA exclusively on a local contractor site starting in September of 2012 and I got first place rankings for both of its highest traffic keywords. I built two link pyramids with GSA and haven't touched it since, one keyword has since fallen off the first page, but the other is still ranked #2 after a competitor built links. I used 35% exact match keywords with some naked urls and a little generic text. It's lasted through a year and a half of penguin updates and the contractor got a $30,000 job that I know of, but I would never use GSA for any reason these days.

I completely agree with GTC1187 that people need to gain experience when it comes to ranking web properties. The thing I do not agree with is that GSA only builds irrelevant links that are removed, look super spammy and that tiered link building is dangerous. Everything in that statement is completely generalized in nature.

GSA started out as an easy push button solution to linkbuilding with it's internal scraping system and its massive list of footprints that were mostly there to get massive backlinks without any moderation issues. Load spun content that is unreadable, pick every footprint in the list and hit start on the campaign....watching it churn out 400+ links per minute....awesome!!!!

The thing is, since that time the more mature internet marketers that utilize tools like GSA have learned that it is much more than a massive spam tool and in combination with other tools/skills/techniques, it can easily build relevant, quality, long lasting backlinks that can easily help any site rank better. Do proper keyword research, scrape the internet for footprints of sites that are relevant, authoritative and not spammed to death, write quality and useful content that can be placed on these sites, drip feed the links at a natural rate in tune with manual link building, do this over multiple projects so the overall link building campaign can be controlled in a very granular manner and finally keep an eye on all aspects of the projects to ensure quality and consistency as to not slip into any spammy waters.....

Now of course doing this is much more time consuming that just hitting the GO button and as we know that most SEO's/IM'ers need easy buttons and to do it under 15 seconds...so most do not spend the time learning techniques like this...so of course GSA will not help and usually only hurt their rankings.

As a perfect example, GTC you mentioned you built two link pyramids to a site a year ago and then just left it. This is in the nature of someone pushing a button, looking for a result and never going back to continue the process and as such the results have slipped off the first page. Not that I am saying you are lazy or anything but it is what people thing GSA is for....push go, rank to #1, move on and expect that #1 to stay forever without ever building another link again.

Red, it is just fair warning that if you are going to utilize GSA that you have to use your brain along with it no matter if you are Churning and Burning to rank sites till they implode, then rinse and repeat OR if you are attempting to rank for the longer haul. Either way, just hitting the GO button will not do as much as it used to with GSA.

I would have been willing to do more work on that particular site, but it ranked well for over a year just from those two link pyramids. By the time it started slipping I was no longer working with that contractor.
I'm aware that there are filters that would allow for more relevant sites to be used, but then you are looking at much lower link counts. Plus the links you are building are still going to be blog comments and profile links on social networks, forums, plus some social bookmarking links and that type of thing.
These days, I won't build links without a certain degree of relevancy. Plus I like contextual links that are placed editorially. Another thing that I prefer is getting links that people click through.

So true about getting links that people will actually see and click on.

There has been many improvements in the recent while with GSA. Things like the SEREngines module for web 2.0 posting, a ton of wiki, directory, article, document, video share sites and the ability to craft your own footprints to what ever site type you want.

Also the number of options to gain only relevant links that atleast have something to do with one of your target keywords/anchor text.

There are still tons of people trying to use GSA as a complete spambot tool to massive link their way to the top. If you are into manual link building, there are a ton of features now that with some effort can take the manual link building process to a slightly automated state. Even just the ability to pull a article from a specific folder because of a match for specific keywords on the page that you are posting to...so you do have to post a forex article on a dieting site that may have mentioned investing in your diet.

GSA SER still works incredibly well. I've got multiple lists that I use depending on what I want to do. It took me a month though to build the lists.

But yeah, you can take a site targeting a medium competition phrase to the top 5 really, really fast if you know what you're doing. (Less than a week in many cases.)

still confused
should i use GSA or not ?
nothing is guranteed

I have only ever used it to build 3rd tier links.

This is what I was told to do to keep it safe:

1) Create web 2.0 or social properties which have your website linked in the profile(and maybe a couple of posts or tweets - don't go made on backlinks to your money site from these though). Then send, mostly, contextual backlinks to each property. If you don't see much love then diverse the backlinks with blog comments, social bookmarks, social signals.

or tier it twice this way.

2. I create an Owly link to my money site, then I take that Owly link and create a Bitly link with it (so it has a couple of tiers for safety).

Th first option gives you more control, and if the backlinks become toxic you can always dump the web 2.0 properties. But I think method 2 is quite safe too, much safer than just running it direct on your money or affiliate site.

How long did you run these campaigns for just out of interest, and have you put in an extra tier in front of your website?

I am use GSA but not good response for ranking purpose if use white hat technique better for seo.