I have not been here long, however, I have been reading the site for a while now and decided to toss my two cents in. I have more than a couple sites and have been trying tons of things in the past six months and finally sat on this routine for now (as everything changes) I utilize sick submitter, scrapebox, and xgen (but not so much xgen as it sucks) I do not do too much commenting at all, maybe I am too lazy, maybe I just dont care enough, or maybe it is not automatic enough for me. However, I do use scrapebox to scrape for sick submitter (though they are trying to create their own scraper in beta right now) I scrape for forums of course, but do not use forum profiles for my main sites. I also scrape for directories, both article and regular directories, and I scrape for bookmarking sites. That is my extent of scrapebox use, scraping for sick submitter, and keywords of course. However, good use of google and yahoo can do the same thing, with the same footprints. Then I use sick submitter to submit to every directory I possibly can, as well as bookmark as much as I can as well on a scheduled basis. I do only so many per day and schedule them for at least 2 months at a time to submit while I sleep. I also create blogs, tumbler, and the like to place my articles as well, and for those I will use forum profiles, because I dont want to use forum profiles on my main sites. I create about 20 articles a week and use sick submitter to not only submit the articles to article directories, but also post them on my blogs so I have about 65 blog type sites that point to each of my main sites, constant article creation, and submission such as forum, directory, and bookmarking I also take many of the links and create RSS from them Of course the submission part of RSS and creation is also done with sick submitter too. The last thing I have been doing is creating videos and putting them up on two different sites, like youtube. I do not submit those automatically though. I do them manually right when I create them with good description and keywords. I do this for every site and just push backlinks to the external sites at a good pace and some at the main sites at a slower pace. and that is pretty much it. That has nothing to do with the actual seo I use on site and the way I create the articles, but I try to do that well as well.
Hmm never been a very big link automation guy, I tend to prefer the manual approach. It is more time consuming, but you tend to get better links in my opinion. You process can be quite useful for wheel sites although I will be a bit wary on using them on my main sites. The links to rss method is an interesting thought tho.
Yeah, I agree, manual is better, but I have not bee tossing any forum profiles at my main sites I definitely stick to backlinking my blogs and pinging the accepted articles, but no matter what, I do automate the directory submission of my main sites. who wants to do the exact same thing to over 2000 directories? lol I found that bookmarking is safe for the main sites as long as it isnt 10k bookmarks a day of course. and the links to rss is simply when I create forum profiles to the blogs and video submissions I just gather them up at 100 a time, create a single rss and then submit it. I dont know how much of a difference it really makes in all, but if I backlink my external sites more, and less to the main sites, I have been getting much better results.
Wow, thanks for sharing all of this info! It's cool to hear about the different things that work for different people. It's funny how everyone seems to have a slightly different approach to backlinking. There is no "one right way" and if it works for you, then it is the right way! I tend to go more for the automated link building myself because that's what many big SEO corporations use successfully. You just have to be smart about how you do it, and not put junk out there that just clutters the internet. It still sounds like what you do is a ton of work. 20 articles a week?! Do you write all those yourself?
There will always be one side argueing for manual, the other for automatic... I personally think both can work, but if you're manually building backlinks, I wouldn't do profile links. The only manual ones I would do are comments on high PR blogs and links on gov/edu sites. Building 100 manual profile links a day is a lot of work, and prob won't get the same results as the guy pushing 2000 automatic ones per day. It's good that you have a system in place- keep it up!