Mail crawlers

Do they really work?

[specter]

Hi everyone,

Searching for a good link development strategy.
Do mail crawlers really work?
I heard bad things about them...
Why?
Alternatives?

Thanks for sharing your opinions/experiences

Sincerely

[idolw]

using mail crawler sounds like a start for spam development strategy ;)

[designaweb]

Alternatives?

How about hand picked, site tailored, handwritten, personal emails?

[Crush]

heck yeah. Our crawlers pick up contactmail, contact forms. Check backlinks of competitors etc etc. Whilst you guys are handpicking we go for lunch :)

[designaweb]

*sigh*

designaweb hopes some day folks like Crush will find out they are not making the world a better place...

[sugarrae]

I'd say it depends on what you want to develop links for... hand picking and auto picking usually depend on the end goal in mind of the webmaster (high quality or high quantity) - just depends on what you want.

[clickme]

I have to agree with designaweb. I have had great luck with personal emails. I have received a surprisingly high response rate and have incresed traffic just with these links!

[Crush]

We can add all sort of filters to my crawlers because we want RELEVANT mails. We are not a one man band. We have 100's of sites to promote and getting people to hand pick is too much for a company like us. Each to their own. The question to this thread was "Mail crawlers
Do they really work?"

So I say yes from a few years of automated experience. I should add we custom built ours and have learned a lot on the way. We used to try some chinese spam product but it was too unpredictable.

[specter]

Hello,

I apologize for my lateness,but the thread didn't seem to take off...

Well,basicly I'm agree with Crush.I could have either a lot of sites to promote or I could have a single site to promote increasing hardly its backlinks.In both cases sounds like a joke to handwrite mails to get link exchange.I should live for them!
Also considering that in order to get higher PR for your site/s,we get into thousands of backlinks...

I'm persuaded that to save time to spend for other useful promoting activities,over a lunch or a good dinner is better than caring about unuseful strategies.

So,for me,the discussion is not mail crawling or handwriting,but only if mail crawling really works,question that nobody answered,except,again,Crush,that reports a positive experience.
I basicly trust in positive reports,but since I heard,I say again,also bad things about,I'm still curious to know what they could be and if they represent a real risk for the site ranking/indexing.

Thanks again for any further participation

Sincerely

[sugarrae]

>>>Also considering that in order to get higher PR for your site/s,we get into thousands of backlinks...
Not neccessarily true. Besides, who cares about the green bar - it doesn't matter.

>>>So,for me,the discussion is not mail crawling or handwriting
>>>I'm still curious to know what they could be and if they represent a real risk for the site ranking/indexing.

Several people above suggested if you want long term ranks, sending bulk emails with a crap templates may not be the way to go.

FYI - Crush - you are using programming skill and knowledge not held by the average person. I respect that you've built an auto-grabber that can almost filter as if it were human [though I still see valuable link ops being missed at times] - but I also understand that 98% of people looking to automatically solicit links as newer webmasters will not, and thus why it is usually a bad idea for most of them.

All you can really do is try it specter. Always test everything you hear, no matter who says it, to see what the results are yourself.

[joaquin112]

"Always test everything you hear, no matter who says it, to see what the results are yourself."

That's the worst advice I've ever heard.

[sugarrae]

LOL, ok, I'll bite - why *wouldn't* you test things you want to employ for yourself? I didn't say to test it on your main domain or core site. How do you truly know what works and what doesn't if you don't do some testing for yourself?

[Crush]

"That's the worst advice I've ever heard."

I have lots of theories and I DO test them out myself because there is simply too much speculation here. "John says this on WebmasterWorld so it must be true". Bull. A lot of people on webmaster boards and are a bunch of sheep and beleive everything they read. The only true way is if you try yourself.

[specter]

>>>Also considering that in order to get higher PR for your site/s,we get into thousands of backlinks...
Not neccessarily true. Besides, who cares about the green bar - it doesn't matter

Well,than I'm missing something...
I'm relatively new with Webmastering and SEO,managing some dozen of web sites,and in my experience for ALL of them,I always get succesfully PR 4-5 and a good general ranking in the SERPs for most of the target keywords or keyphrases,in a reasonable time,but from this point my progress stop.My sites are still at that level from a couple of years or so,and now I'm asking why,I'm reviewing and reviewing my SEO strategies but I don't seem to can do more.At my analisys the sole weak point appears the link development,as in the best case I have only some hundreds of backlinks for the site...
I heard that going ahead,the number of backlinks becomes relevant to get higher rankings (not only PR).So that's true? False?
What can I do to move my sites from their "stalmate"?

[sugarrae]

No, links do matter, but good ranks aren't synonymous with PR7 page rank. You don't neccessarily need thousands if you can get several really good ones (assuming we are speaking Google). For instance, I have a PR4 site that beats out PR6 and PR7 sites in the industry with 1/4 of the backlinks they have for the biggest terms in the industry, because of where my site has backlinks from.

All I'm saying is don't get hung up on the page rank... just get good inbound links, watch your ranks - it is when your rank improves that you've been successful at SEO'ing the site, regardless of what the green toolbar says. :-)

[CainIV]

Well said sugarrae.

Quality inbound links from relevant sites OR quality one way inbounds from completely unrelated sites.

Pick your poison :P