GSA Ser noob wants to know

Hello dear BHW community,

As I mentioned in the title, I recently started using SEO tools and experimenting with them. I have been building a fully automated news/blog website to generate some quality backlinks. To increase my domain authority, I started using GSA SER recently.

I purchased GSA SER, Captcha services, and an indexer, but I'm not happy with the results. Most of the "backlinks" I've generated are just 301 redirect links, and the article comments I submit are either not visible or are still waiting for administrator approval.

So far, I haven't managed to create a single successful backlink using the tool.

I couldn't find many useful tutorials besides those from the Thai company behind the software and a few self-proclaimed "marketing geniuses," so things haven't worked out very well for me.

Also, the links I scraped from Semrush, Ahrefs, and similar tools don't seem to work at all.

So I have a couple of questions:

• What project settings should I use?
• What's the deal with proxies? It seems like everyone is using them. Why are they important, and should I use them as well?
• Most importantly, how can I create an effective campaign?

Thank you all in advance!

marketing_enjoyer said:

Hello dear BHW community,

As I mentioned in the title, I recently started using SEO tools and experimenting with them. I have been building a fully automated news/blog website to generate some quality backlinks. To increase my domain authority, I started using GSA SER recently.

I purchased GSA SER, Captcha services, and an indexer, but I'm not happy with the results. Most of the "backlinks" I've generated are just 301 redirect links, and the article comments I submit are either not visible or are still waiting for administrator approval.

So far, I haven't managed to create a single successful backlink using the tool.

I couldn't find many useful tutorials besides those from the Thai company behind the software and a few self-proclaimed "marketing geniuses," so things haven't worked out very well for me.

Also, the links I scraped from Semrush, Ahrefs, and similar tools don't seem to work at all.

So I have a couple of questions:

• What project settings should I use?
• What's the deal with proxies? It seems like everyone is using them. Why are they important, and should I use them as well?
• Most importantly, how can I create an effective campaign?

Thank you all in advance!

Click to expand...

fyi the company behind GSA SER is a german company, not thai, so im not sure where you were looking. if youre just getting started with the software i would recommend a list service, as most of them come with tutorial pdfs and quick-start project files, along with the list itself of course, so you have plenty of targets to submit to without scraping (backlink exports are not a good source tbh). there are a couple of list sellers in the marketplace here if you have a search.

don't judge a campaign by submitted links alone.
the verified links report is usually the metric worth paying attention to.
a lot of submissions never become live backlinks.

@marketing_enjoyer if you are running gsa without proxies that is 90% of your problem right there. your home ip probably got blacklisted in the first ten minutes and now every site is just blocking your requests. you need private proxies for posting, otherwise you are just wasting your bandwidth. i made the same mistake when i first tried ser years ago and wondered why nothing was verifying...

also like @cherub said, scraping ahrefs exports is a waste of time. those sites usually have tight security or don't even allow comments. you need to scrape actual footprints for platforms like blogengine or wordpress, or just buy a cheap verified list from the marketplace to see how a working campaign actually looks.

XSMMDoctor said:

@marketing_enjoyer if you are running gsa without proxies that is 90% of your problem right there. your home ip probably got blacklisted in the first ten minutes and now every site is just blocking your requests. you need private proxies for posting, otherwise you are just wasting your bandwidth. i made the same mistake when i first tried ser years ago and wondered why nothing was verifying...

also like @cherub said, scraping ahrefs exports is a waste of time. those sites usually have tight security or don't even allow comments. you need to scrape actual footprints for platforms like blogengine or wordpress, or just buy a cheap verified list from the marketplace to see how a working campaign actually looks.

Click to expand...

I am using internet found proxies provided by gsa software it seems to be working, should i buy them ?

marketing_enjoyer said:

I am using internet found proxies provided by gsa software it seems to be working, should i buy them ?

Click to expand...

Try reading this tutorial for starters all you need to get started properly https://www.serverifiedlists.com/resources/

you need verified lists of actually active platforms not scraped URLs from Ahrefs since those are mostly dead or irrelevant for GSA.

Sone said:

Try reading this tutorial for starters all you need to get started properly https://www.serverifiedlists.com/resources/

Click to expand...

Thank you i have been looking something like this for a very long time !

I highly suggest you read and spend some time with the Tool (not only GSA) just entire black hat tactics, Tiered link building, GSA SER, Xevil, private proxies, dedicated proxies, port scan proxies, recaptchas kind of things then you will know how these things work and you can connect the dots. GSA search engine ranker is a great tool so spending some time on it and learning is well worth it.

That being said, to answer your exact questions

• What project settings should I use?

It depends on what kind of tools you are using, like what captcha solver you use to break captchas on websites when submitting, etc.

• What's the deal with proxies? It seems like everyone is using them. Why are they important, and should I use them as well?

Whether you are using an automation tool like GSA SER or Ranker X or whatever it is or build manual link building you need proxies or you will get banned as webmasters don't want to build multiple links on their websites, to avoid footprints etc. So proxies are a must. You can't register multiple times without getting banned so proxies are a must. Avoid public proxies as they are already banned and flagged.

• Most importantly, how can I create an effective campaign?

Do your keyword research... Choose your main keywords, partial keywords, branding keywords, generic keywords etc and generate high quality content and load up GSA. you can easily do nowadays with AI models even free models like Gemma or almost free (my favorite Deepseek)


Choose only contextual and Do follow engines and uncheck all (check all engines then uncheck no contextual links its just few clicks)


After few days create another project with unique content and point it to first project

GSA SER is still one of the best automation tools for tiered link building, but it has a learning curve.

Your biggest mistake is probably expecting scraped links from SEO tools to work. Ahrefs/Semrush backlinks are not the same as GSA-ready targets. SER needs platforms it can recognize, register on, post to, and verify.

Use private/shared proxies, not public proxies. Use good emails or catchalls. Use XEvil or a decent captcha service. Most importanly use a verified list instead of scraping at the start.

Once you get successful verifieds, then start tweaking engines and filters.

Two things drive "bad results" that look like a captcha problem but aren't. (1) Verification: a lot of "failed" submissions are actually posted but unverified — check verified vs submitted before blaming the solver. (2) The 301s are usually target-list quality, not the captcha. On the solver side, GSA does best with a local/fast solver for the bulk image captchas and a token service only for the reCAPTCHA targets — routing everything through one slow service tanks your LPM. Tighten engine selection + list first; the captcha layer is rarely the root cause early on.