Scrapebox’s Hidden Treasures for SEO

Scrapebox has been getting a good buzz lately from some of the traditional, “white hat” SEO blogs that I follow. I’ve been using Scrapebox for 2 or 3 years now and have picked up on a lot of advanced tactics which people seem to either forget about, or haven’t quite figured out.

This post will let you know why Scrapebox should be in your SEO toolkit… 6 months ago! Scrapebox is really an SEO switchblade, packing more than 10 different tools within.

Attention! At the end of this blog post, I’ll show you how to get this $97 piece of software for only $57!

Scrapebox is a fantastic SEO multi-tool that is shockingly low price for the number of features it offers. It costs $97, has no monthly fees, and free updates for life.

No matter which SEO “hat” you wear, Scrapebox is the bomb when properly used.

How can you take Scrapebox, a piece of software that has gotten a bad rep for hanging out with the bad kids of SEO and use it for golden link building opportunities that even Martin Prince would endorse?

The secret of Scrapebox is hidden within the add-ons (it’s not really a secret), but there are some great ones that long term users still seem shocked to learn about.

It’s an excellent way to do keyword brainstorming.

Let’s start with these keywords: SEO, web design, classic gaming.

Save your keywords into a .TXT file, load up Scrapbox, click Scrape, and import your keywords. Click scrape. For my 3 keywords, I received 66 keywords. Repeat the process with your new keywords,

BAM! 3 keywords became 1135 keywords, not to shabby!

Return to the main Scrapebox interface and you’ll be able to remove the duplicates. This leaves us with 560 unique, long tail keywords relating to the original keywords. From there, import this list into your favorite keyword metric juggling tool. I personally use Google’s keyword tool and SEOMoz’s keyword tool.

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to get some URL lists built. Take your keywords, add them to the keyword box and add a custom footprint.

I find I have a much higher success rate and an overall quicker/cleaner process using my own footprints as oppose to using the few radio button options the software comes with.

Start harvesting and go grab a beer, oh yeah!

Once you’ve got the list, you know what to do! Analyze the links and figure out which are good ones to chase down…

This is better in Excel, or with Link Detective but it’s still doable within Scrapebox.

Download your links (I use Open Site Explorer)

Take those links, get them into a text file (I know, it feels dirty going from Excel to plain text)

Load those links into Scrapebox using “Import URLs” on the right

Click Remove/Filter, and get rid of the duplicates.

From this point, you’ve got a few options on what to do.

Followed Check – Click Addon at the top, this time select DoFollow/NoFollow Checker plugin. Let the plugin run it’s course and you’ll be left with a list of followed and no followed links.

Organize, Filter, and Batch Analyze

Check the PageRank of the URL, Domain, or both!

Check whether or not the page is cached by Google.

Check to see what platform (WordPress, TypePad, etc) the link resides on.

Check to see if your link is found in the source code of any URLs.

Got a massive list of links to your site already? Want to know which are still active? Scrapebox allows you to run a batch scan of your link list, it’ll let you know how many of them do, or do not, contain a link pointing back to your website. Nothing to fancy about this.

Scrapebox can find malware located on websites. You can do something like this 100% automated after you load your list. Scrapebox offers a plugin called “Malware and Phishing Filter” which will pinpoint sites on your list that have, or recently had, malware issues.

This is a great way to start building relationships with webmasters which could very well lead to a future link if played out correctly.

I’ve written about the benefits of having your own URL shortening service, but Scrapebox does offer a pretty nice alternative for creating a lot of short URLs with practically no labor.

You can import a text list of URLs you want shorter, and it’ll do all the manual labor, spitting back a nice list of short URLs from a variety of services.

Just yesterday, I read a post at Search Engine Land, which goes into doing WHOIS queries on domains to find out who owns them. If you do enterprise SEO, or deal with sites that have a massive link profile, that post is full of great information.

You can even use the Domain Resolver Plugin to get a list of IP addresses associated with every URL in your list, meaning you can cluster sites that are on the same server together for further filtering.

No.

In case you didn’t have enough games to keep you busy, Scrapebox offers chess!

A few quick Google searches has led me to an offer on the official Scrapebox page where you can buy Scrapebox for $57 instead of $97.