Project File Structure
I'm going to automate the management of SER project files and I want to make sure that I understand the file structure correctly. Files can be found in this location, C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\GSA Search Engine Ranker\projects
project-name.prj
This is the main project settings and is pretty self explanatory. Basically plain text of the GUI.
project-name.static
This is the accounts created. This is a key file if you want to reuse your accounts for multiple submissions. In my early tests, submitting new links to accounts that SER already created works fine. I need to test this on a wider scale though and of course this is for platforms that except multi-submission, mostly bookmarking and article sites.
project-name.targets
This is the other key file if you want to submit without using the global site list or scraping for targets. Any URL's in here get parsed and submitted to based on your project settings.
project-name.success
This is the file with your successfully submitted links and also contains the URL and keyword used, the platform and some other info. I plan on keeping a copy of this after each run for verification by another instance of GSA SER. It's also useful for comparing to your target list and seeing what url's can be removed from your targets file.
project-name.verify
If your project is set up to verify successfully submitted url's then the ones that are verified go to this list. This is the list that GSA uses to build link reports and is the one we can parse for tracking our own database for reporting and further tier building by other applications.
project-name.urls_done
Honestly this one confuses me a bit. It gets created as your targets are parsed and keeps track of which ones have been tried. I don't know how it differs from the next one... hosts_done.
project-name.hosts_done
My guess is that the difference between urls and hosts is that you might have a lot of urls for a particular host (for blog comments for instance) and you might only want to post once to each domain. There would be an entry in hosts_done the first time we try to submit to a domain and an entry is made in urls_done as we submit to each individual URL. Can Sven or anyone confirm this? What I do know is that if you delete or move this file and urls_done you can reset the project to start submitting to the whole list of .targets again.
Other files are created too depending on your project settings like project-name.prefilled, project-name.new_targets and project-name.new_keywords, and others probably, but I'm not going to be making use of those so I'm leaving them out of the initial discussion.
It's worth noting that the campaign should be stopped when you go and start editing or doing anything with these files. I intend to use the Scheduler to pause my campaigns for 15 minutes a day while when my system programmatically updates the project files.
Anyway, if anyone could help me to better understand urls_done and hosts_done, that would be great. Cheers!