[CASE STUDY] - Spamvilla reCaptcha OCR test
Hinkys
SEOSpartans.com - Catchalls for SER - 30 Day Free Trial
Hey guys
After finishing my latest practical test which compared Captcha Sniper to Captcha Breaker, I knew something was missing. While the test may not have been 100% scientific, it clearly showed which software will get you more links, with less time spent on captcha solving. It wasn't that. The test was missing the latest shiny new thing called recaptcha OCR by Spamvilla.
If you don't know what that is, read this thread: https://forum.gsa-online.de/discussion/5094/spamvilla-recaptcha-ocr-official-thread-help-and-updates/p1
Usually people will use a combination of CB / CS + a pay-per-captcha service (most commonly being DeathByCaptcha) when building out their first tier. Bot handles all easy captcha and when it fails to solve a harder captcha (which is Recaptcha most of the time), it will use the paid service to solve it. (Even worse, some people use just something like DBC which is really expensive.) The setup is simple enough and effective but there's always been a huge problem with this.
Your captcha costs scale with the number of links you build!
If you're building only a handful of links then this shouldn't really bother you but if and when you start building loads of links you will see what I'm talking about. SER eats through captcha like they're chocolate chip cookies.
The solution to this problem is relatively new in the form of this OCR. It can supposedly handle as many recaptcha as you want with a fixed monthly price which is $30 / month. It's even better with Captcha Breaker since you can configure it so that any recaptcha is automatically skipped in CB and sent directly the Spamvilla's OCR. This is a god-given solution for those that use GSA SER on a large scale.
The only problem was that nobody has publicly compared the 2 setups. So I figured why the hell not.
As with the last test, I didn't want to test this OCR by simply sending it recaptcha and then seeing which ones it solved correctly and which ones it failed. Booo, that's boring and unpractical. Instead, I've created 2 tests that produced (as expected) real life results.
Tier 1 test
Here is what I've done:
- Created 2 projects with identical settings
- Autofilled the content using WAC and very similar keywords for each project
- Compiled a list of 45k PR1+ sites (article, social bookmarking and social network sites) and imported that as target URLs to each project
- Project #1 was using CB + Spamvilla while project #2 was using CB + DBC to solve captcha
- CB was set to retry 5 times while DBC was set to retry 2 time
The idea is simple, do a run with each project and then take a look at the number of submitted links. Here is what it looked like.
While the Spamvilla project had 682 less submissions, take into account that the initial list was 45,000 sites. This means that this project managed to get up to 98% of possible submissions. Not bad at all for an all software setup, wouldn't you agree?
For me this proves that using something like DBC isn't unbeatable and that you can achieve the same results with something that has a better pricing model. But why stop here.
Blast Test
Basically I just wanted to see if using Spamvilla's recaptcha OCR makes sense in upper tiers. Cause why wouldn't you increase the number of links you can churn out if you can?
Again, here is what I did:
- Created 2 projects with identical settings
- Autofilled the content using WAC and very similar keywords for each project
- Compiled a list of around 110,000 different domains (all platforms) and imported that as target URLs to each project
- Project #1 was using CB + Spamvilla while project #2 was using just CB
- CB was set to retry 5 times
After the blast this is how many submitted links each of them had:
- Project #1 - 42,180
- Project #2 - 38,363
It's not anything revolutionary but it will certainly increase the number of links you're able to build.
Also, not that the project using Spamvilla's service took a bit longer to finish since reCaptcha solving seemed to be the bottleneck. How much longer will largely vary on the type of setup you have but you can count on it being a bit slower.
If you want to know exactly when you should or shouldn't use Spamvilla's OCR, read the original blog post:
Take what you will from this test but imo it shows that large-scale usage of services as DBC is coming to an end since you can get almost the same results with much less money spent. On the other hand, if you're a casual SER user who doesn't spend a lot (if anything) on captcha monthly then this service might be an overkill for you.
Also, if you have any experiences with Spamvilla, please share them here as I can't really comment on the stability and support.
Tagged:
Comments
Spamvilla still down. I'm getting a no valid response error.
That being said @spamvilla, people probably wouldn't post here if your support answered their tickets more often.