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Should I Scrape My Own Backlink Lists or Buy Them?

SonSon Malaysia
in Need Help

I’m currently working on GSA SER and wondering whether it’s better to scrape my own backlink lists or purchase pre-verified lists.

Could anyone share their experience on this? Which method has worked best for you in terms of verified links, success rate, and long-term effectiveness?

Also, if you recommend buying backlink lists, could you suggest some reliable suppliers?

If you prefer scraping backlink lists, what tools, settings, or strategies would you recommend to build a high-quality, verified list for GSA SER?

Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Comments

  • organiccastleorganiccastle Germany
    Commercial or shared lists are perfectly fine to spam your competitor's sites.

    No need to scrape. Export relevant URLs from Semrush / Ahrefs and process these. Or use the data available on commoncrawl.org.
    Thanked by 2Son dnshost
  • sickseosickseo London,UK
    I'm not a fan of using paid lists, especially popular ones that many users have access to. The more a list gets used, the number of external links just continue to increase - in effect the site is leaking link juice. It's value decreases over time and usage. You're also forever dependent on the list seller to find new sites. If you're just using the software for last tier link building, then yes, this is probably going to be ok.

    I use the software for all tiers. Certainly on T1, there are very few high DA/DR contextuals/profile link sources in anyones site list. If you want these types of sites, then you will need to scrape.

    I prefer to scrape the search engines myself and build custom site lists that other users don't have access to. Tools like hrefer and scrapebox are the ones I normally use. Although i've abandoned scrapebox recently as it's no good for scraping google after recent updates.

    I'm now using zenno to scrape google with my own custom bot and 50 residential proxies, which works really good. But that's not something you can buy - you have to build the bot yourself.



    Those are my current T1 link sources. Contextuals and profiles. You can see most of them are for the new SERnuke engines. There are quite a few high DA/DR sites in there too.

    I seriously doubt any list seller has that many sites for sale in their T1 list.
    Thanked by 4Son dnshost Hunar iamzahidali
  • dnshostdnshost Thailand
    organiccastle said:
    Commercial or shared lists are perfectly fine to spam your competitor's sites.

    No need to scrape. Export relevant URLs from Semrush / Ahrefs and process these. Or use the data available on commoncrawl.org.

    “Hi organiccastle,

    Thank you for the helpful advice! Could you please expand on your explanation? I would appreciate it if you could provide more detailed steps or examples on how to use URLs from Semrush/Ahrefs or CommonCrawl.org effectively. Specifically, I am interested in the best practices for processing these URLs to achieve optimal results. Thanks in advance for your guidance!”


  • organiccastleorganiccastle Germany
    dnshost said:

    “Hi organiccastle,

    Thank you for the helpful advice! Could you please expand on your explanation? I would appreciate it if you could provide more detailed steps or examples on how to use URLs from Semrush/Ahrefs or CommonCrawl.org effectively. Specifically, I am interested in the best practices for processing these URLs to achieve optimal results. Thanks in advance for your guidance!”

    The concept is very simple.

    a) Semrush
    - Find the top sites for your particular topic and, if applicable, region and language.
    - Export their backlinks, filtered by platform such as blog, forums, CMS, wiki.
    - Delete the irrelevant and obvious spam URLs
    - Repeat this for several pages and merge the URLs found into one file.
    - The list is ready.

    An example for websites related to autismn:

    Half an hour of work and I could built over 500 unique links from relevant websites with it.

    You don't need any other tools for this, even a free Semrush test account is sufficient.

    The advantages are
    - No scraping
    - Topic-relevant links, often with good authority
    - Only the platforms that you can process with automatic link building tools
    - Higher chance that your niche specific content will be published on moderated platforms

    b) Commoncrawl.org
    You can use this to search very precisely for specific footprints and keywords in the URL or to create a very large list with fewer filters. The index files are sufficient for this and are correspondingly faster to process.
    Alternatively, you can also search the entire content, but this naturally takes longer due to the enormous volumes involved.
    The platform is very well documented and shows examples. I find the process via the API and a small Python script the most efficient.
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