Type: Website Submission, Directory Submitter
To make things clear, I am not affiliated with GSA or any of the links on this page will get me some money (affiliate links).
I hate it to read all positive reviews on programs and finding out they have just been written to push affiliate sales.
Anyway this review is more positive than negative though. But lets start from the beginning.
1. The License Types and Fees
You can buy it in different license types starting from a month version to a life-time version. The price for the month version is the cheapest as you might have guessed. It is good to test the program in full mode if you find that the demo version was not enough (it is in my eyes though).
See detailed prices on website submitter's webpage.
If you decide to buy a month or year license, don't worry about returning costs. It seems that you can decide when to buy another license and for how long.
One important restriction for the program that you have to watch out is, that you can only submit your own websites and not for someone else. I don't know how they keep control about this but I guess they will find out.
So if you plan to use the program for a submission service, buy the correct license for that or leave it.
2. The order process.
I found out that they use Regnow as a payment processor. I bought a couple of applications over Regnow and didn't find any issue with them. Though I know there are a couple of complains about this payment processor. But you can find this everywhere about any system. So nothing to worry about there payment system as Regnow is one of the biggest in online sales when it comes to software.
So after ordering my copy (credit card), I got a license by email and another email about the captcha services they offer (see below). That didn't even took 10 minutes so very fast delivery.
3. The registration
As I have installed the demo version before, I just entered the license code and restarted the program as suggested.
And YES my full version of GSA Website Submitter was activated.
You better copy/paste the data into the fields as they seem to be case sensitive.
4. Preparing the submission
Before you start to use this website submitter, you have to create a project for the website with all kinds of data.
This is the most boring thing on all programs but necessary. Fields required are like: Name, E-Mail (important for link validations), Descriptions in different lengths, URL and some address data.
I am not sure why address data is required but I guess because some websites need it. I just used some fake data there as I think no one should know my real address.
What I noticed here is that the program uses a so called "spin syntax". Some of you might know this already but let me explain it anyway.
A spin syntax allows you to write text where the final output would be different each time you create it.
A sample: {You|I|They} can {write|read|spell} this {sentence|words}.
You noticed the brackets? Each word or word combination within them is chosen randomly on each output creation.
So this sentence can have different results like the following:
You can write this sentence.
I can read this words.
They can spell this sentence.
...
And what's the use of this you might ask? Well that's useful to avoid duplicate content. If you start to submit your website to thousands of other websites and directories, you will have the same description on many many sites. This is something google e.g. doesn't like. They think if people just copy/paste the same thing on other websites, its somehow spam and not good content.
Google likes unique content that is only appearing once or a couple of times on other webpages.
So if you keep using this "spin syntax" a lot, you will make google happy.
If you don't like this spin syntax, you can even create different descriptions sets in the program (unlimited number it seems). Even in that you can use spin syntax, but you don't have to.
Ok once done with the project setup, you can start the website submission. Now that was fast (more to come though later on) I thought.
5. Starting the submission.
Now there are basically 3 types how you can submit your website.
a) Manual submission in an internal browser
b) automatic submission
c) automatic submission with multiple projects
Of course I used the automatic submission. The manual submission would take ages with that many sites.
After a short startup period (maybe 10seconds), the program rapidly started to submit my website. This was so quick that I only saw it jumping from here to there in the list of the sites. That's because the program uses so called threads to submit your website. Meaning it is not submitting to one site and than another, but it is submitting to many sites parallel.
6. The captcha stress
There comes the first negative impression of GSA Website Submitter. A window appeared during the submission asking for captchas. These captchas are used by a lot of directories to avoid automated submissions. So you are forced to enter them to get your website submitted.
The program pretended to analyses them on there own but if you have a look at some of the captchas, you realize that this can hardly be done any more by a program. The captchas are hard to read even for a human. The list of "to fill captchas" grow quick and I realized that this is keeping me busy for a while. I stooped the submission after a could of hundred successful website submissions to read there email again (that you got when ordering) where they announced there captcha service.
They offer not just one captcha service but the most common is surely decaptcher.com.
As I have an account there, I used it and than, no more stress on captchas any more. Note that this is not necessary, but for such a low rate (6 USD / 1000 captchas) it is worth the money and stress less.
But some of the captchas still popped up even with the captcha service. I asked GSA by email and they said that this can happen when captcha servers are overloaded or when some capthcas simply can't be sent to them. Though the number of these captchas have been very low and I could life with that.
7. The end of the submission
After nearly half an hour (I used 40 thread instead of 10) the whole submission was finished with 2187 successful submissions. That's really amazing but according to there database not closely to the 10.000+ sites. The reason for that is simple - the categories.
In the beginning I just have chosen one category and now the program asked to fill categories for the sites where no matching one was found.
First I thought that this would take ages as there are many thousands to fill out. Well I was wrong. Once you select a category for one site, the program is automatically trying to find and fill the same category on all others as well.
And there is another nice feature called "Fill by Mask". If you use that and enter a word or mask like I did with "SEO", you get a list of suggestion for categories to chose. So in a couple of minutes all possible categories have been filled.
Of course some sites have so strange categories, that I didn't find any matching one. Some of the categories had even a language I don't speak so I left that out as well.
The program starts to submit to the sites again once you have finished with that category stuff. This took even longer now (maybe 50 minutes) but ended of course in a even better success rate of now over 6000.
There are a couple of sites where the program was not sure if a submission as successful or not (Unknown status). And of course a lot failed submissions as well. I think because of wrong captcha codes (even a captcha service can fail) or not set category or even a site being down or not accepting any submissions.
8. The Email Validation.
A lot directories ask you to confirm your submissions by email. This is a boring task almost like filling captchas. Though even this is automated in GSA Website Submitter. You have to fill out some data about your email account to allow the program to log into it and read the emails. Once done you can parse for email links, and then let the program open them in background. I did so and the validation was done in some very short time.
One thing you have to make sure is that you don't have your email client get the emails before GSA can as your client probably deletes the emails from the email server. And that some link validation requests come in very late (some came in a couple of days later).
These links you have to validate on your own than.
8. The Success rate.
The number of placed links is hard to tell as the program simply submits the website but doesn't know if a webmaster actually accepts the submission and places a link, or rejects it. The program has some "Link Validator Tool" in it to give you a detailed report about the sites who placed a link or not.
Of course it makes no sense to use that tool right after submission as some sites will take days, weeks or even months to place the link online. I will update this review in a couple of weeks with the success rate.
9 Conclusion
Even though I have no success rate yet, I can say that this program is by far the best I have ever used for directory submission.
The interface is clean and stripped down to the basics. But even SEO professionals will like it as it comes with a lot other things I have not mentioned here (submission reports, reciprocal link manager, multiple project submissions...).
The submission process was very fast. The only thing I didn't like was the captcha stress. This is a big minus but on the other hand I can see that it is not really possible to solve this by software. A captcha service is required if you don't want to fill them in by hand (or turning of the submission to captcha required sites in program options).
