Is Scrapebox Ever a Legitimate Tool?
I recently wrote in this space about XRumer, which is a spam tool designed to allow people to send out forum posts in thousands of forum messages all at once. Scraepbox is in essence to blogs what XRumer is to forums. It’s a program which can look up hundreds of blogs and place posts on all of them at one time, without the need to actually visit them.
In essence, XRumer is the ultimate forum spamming tool and as such, it’s the darling of black hat SEO experts and the bane of white hat SEO experts everywhere. Similarly, Scrapebox has been described as being a black hat SEO tool. However, there may be some legitimate uses for Scrapebox which I didn’t see for XRumer. Here’s what you need to know:
Finding Sites to Comment On
One of the things that Scrapebox excels at is helping you find blogs to comment on. While you can use the program to automate the process of sending out such comments, which by definition makes it into a black hat SEO tool which sends out comment spam, you can also use the software legitimately.
It can harvest lists of sites and tell you which ones are do follow so that you can find sites which will accept useful comments.
Then, instead of sending out spam comments which are next to worthless (no reputable blogger will allow such material to be published – I constantly delete spam comments from my blog), you can go ahead and write real comments on those blogs.
RSS Submission
While Scrapebox is primarily known for offering you the chance to do blog commenting, it also does other things. One of the things that Scrapebox is capable of doing is RSS submission to numerous RSS aggregators. Since these aggregators all welcome submissions from you, it’s not spamming and it’s a perfectly legitimate use of Scrapebox to do this.
Pinging
Another feature which some people may find useful from Scrapebox is the ability to ping the links that it creates for you. This means that you are able to get your links placed and then use the software to ensure that they’ll actually get indexed. This is also worthwhile, though I’m not really that sure it’s worthwhile on its own.
Blogs that Don’t Care
Of course, there are also blog owners who are happy to take comments any way they can get them, even when the comments in question are basically just spam comments. You could use Scrapebox to send out comments to such blogs and gain some backlinks from them. The thing is, I’m not really sure such backlinks hold much in the way of real value for you.
Bottom Line
Scrapebox has its uses, but pinging can be done with numerous other programs for free. Finding blogs to comment on which are do follow can be done using Traffic Travis, which I discussed the other day, so I’m not so sure how much value Scrapebox has on its own. Still, used properly, it can be a legitimate SEO tool.
Thank you for your very active blog. I am learning quite a lot about SEO and what to do and what not to do.
I’m glad you liked it so much. I do hope you come back regularly.
Hi Eric,
Thank you for your thoughtful review. I balked at the idea of getting Scrapebox because I had heard it was a spammer tool – but as you pointed out it apparently can be used in a completely white hat way.
Now I just have to figure out if it’s worth my time to buy it, pick it up, and use it to find blogs to manually post comments on 🙂
Danielle
thanks for information. Theres no need to pay scrapebox spammers
Great review, Eric!
I was thinking of getting Scrapebox until I read your review.
I’m glad I could help. Please do drop by regularly for more reviews.
No indeed. There is not. Then again, like I said, there is one use for the tool.
Hi eric, does scrapebox belongs to the seo tools banned by google? I mean does this tool does not make our site to its demise? thanks.
NIce – and it’s true that scrapebox has several legit uses. You name barely one or two of them. Link checking, competition analysis, PR checking (and rooting out rogue PR) TDNAM auction auto checking,footprint finding (very handy for bookmarking – which is 100% white hat. I have 135,000 Pligg sites that I then loaded into Bookmarking Demon)
Loads that SB can do.
But really. It’s in it’s own as a commant spamming tool. I can get a site ranked in a relatively competitive field inside a couple of weeks with Scrapebox and little else. (proxies and captchas)
Sure that’s black hat…but it makes money – so who cares? Not me.
@jon
There is no linking tool that will get your site banned by google.
Only Onsite elements wil get your site de-indexed.
Offsite elements will never get a site de-indexed.
If they did – I would turn scrapebox on to my competitors site and spam links and comments by the billion from disgusting areas of the web…then so would anyone with half a brain do the same, and soo everyonhes site in every nihe would be spammed to death with links from “nasty” sites from all over the place.
Google isn’t stupid. YOu can get “shuffled” for a while if your linking profile is not natural – but you will get back.
You get “banned” for inappropriate contnet ON YOUR SITE…and that’s the only way anyone EVER got a permanent ban.
Think about it -you have no overall control of what others put on their sites, or even who links to your site from p*** sites or t*****t sites ir wherever. I could link to your site now from some places that are frankly disgusting. I could come up with a list of half a million p*** blogs (and there are billions of them to choose from) and spam your sites URL over all of them.
Hell, it would only take half a day.
I could destroy the whole top 10 of google in any niche
in a five day week
Google knows people would do that, so there is NO OFFSITE LINKING TOOL THAT WILL GET YOUR SITE BANNED.
Also Google has no idea what tool makes a link..How could it?
It can pick up on suspect links and decide it “might be” a spamming tool..but Google isn’t the internet. It doesn’t know (and has abslutely no authority to know) who is doing what on the internet.
Don’t get paranoid.
@Dave King
Thank you man for the enlightenment, I am sorry for being so ignorant, I just want to make sure that my sight might get banned as I am new to my field. Thanks for the help
Hi Jon,
As a general rule, I agree with Dave. However, it is possible to get your site ranked a little lower if you suddenly have lots of spam links discovered. JC Penney had that happen to them a little while ago. Still, he is right that you can’t get delisted just because of junk links.
This is definitely true. However do be aware that it is possible that you can get dropped in the rankings somewhat as happened to JC Penney.
In the short term, yes. In the long term though, Google will catch on and simply ignore those links and even drop you in the rankings. Though you are correct that they won’t deindex you just for that.
Banned by Google? No. They don’t ban any tools. They do ban certain techniques and if they catch you doing it, it may affect your rankings as I mentioned in your other comment.
Your argument is strong, and it’s great how you have shown both sides of it. It might change the style this industry operates, although it is worth remembering the possibility of even more change.
Well as I’ve said, the fact remains that Google doesn’t like any kind of SEO other than link bait anyway. Thus these kinds of tools can be just as “accepted” as more traditional SEO, however they are also much easier to abuse than traditional kinds of seo.
This is true.There is no linking tool that will get your site banned by google.Also Google has no idea what tool makes a link..How could it?
Yes and no. You can get dinged in the rankings for getting lots of spammy links. And Google’s web servers are pretty sophisticated, able to spot certain kinds of patterns of abuse. However, they cannot know if it’s Google Bowling and so the most they’ll do is ding you but not ban you.
Generally I don’t learn post on blogs, but I would like to say that this write-up very pressured me to try and do it! Your writing style has been amazed me. Thank you, quite nice article.
I’m glad you liked it. Could you tell us what specifically you found so interesting so that I know for the future?