Footprints
Hi,
I am new here. I have not idea if this is the right place to post this but I am trying to find footprints for Gscraper to use with my keywords, to feed GSA SER. I have seen bits and pieces but not a good or complete list. Is there any link to get that? Is it more part of personal research? I am still trying to understand what footprints are so its a bit confusing for me.
Thanks,
Julio
Comments
Don't forget to also scrape by using urls as footprints.
Right now I'm focusing on contextual backlinks, and when I come across a site that offers a contextual backlink, I look at the others who posted on the site. I'll randomly select links others have posted (or if the site is not heavily spammed I'll check them all) and do a search in Google. If I see for the first few pages that the links are contextual backlinks, I save that url in a list as a footprint. If on the other hand I come across a lot of blog comments, guestbooks, etc. I leave it alone. I prefer to follow someone who does a lot of contextual backlinks.
I can't access the link @brainiac posted because I'm at work so I don't know what the list contains, but besides urls of other internet marketers and GSA footprints (i.e. spun variations of default text), you should also look at the textual and in-url footprints of sites of where you can place a backlink.
Textual footprints are what you see on the page like "powered by wordpress," although depending on the footprint, you may need to be more specific. When you visit of a lot of pages, you will see the patterns of text that often appears on the pages.
In url backlinks are snippets of the url. If you are going to post a link in a guestbook, the url is likely going to contain "/guestbook/" or some variation. So a footprint would be: inurl:/guestbook/.
For every potential site you can place a backlink at, PAY CLOSE ATTENTION to both the textual and url footprints.
You can find a lot of good targets that have not been heavily spammed or not spammed at all.
Don't be too rigid and play with variations of phrases of the textual footprints, and use more than 1 set of phrases to do your search to refine the results, but not necessarily too refined where it severely limits the search results.
@jfoppoli I have only scraped with Scrapebox, but the footprints work across the board. In the example I used of "inurl:/guestbook," that particular search, I think, is limited to Google search engines, but you should be able to use the footprint in all the programs.
What I do is merge my list of footprints with a list of generic words.
You're welcome @jfoppoli
Something else to consider when you are manually looking for footprints, move up 1, 2, or 3 page(s) in the hierarchy to find some textual and in-url footprints.
For example, say you come across my article on training dalmations. Moving up one page may give you a list of articles on Dogs. You may see something at the top like: User Articles in the Category Dogs.
You can use "user articles in the category" as a footprint. This footprint may or may not be specific to the site my article is on. Do a search on Google and see if other sites contain the footprint. If a lot of different sites come up, it should be good (this is just example, not necessarily an actual footprint).
Just keep moving up the hierarchy for workable footprints to use.
With this method I found a lot of sites for contextual backlinks. Some have been heavily hit by spammers, others have not, including one that hasn't been touched at all and that hasn't been active for years, so my backlink should have no problem sticking, and not getting deleted.
More footprints + Keywords = More Sites to Post