ScraepboxI recently wrote in this space about XRumer, which is a spam tool designed to allow people to send out forum posts in thousands of forum messages all at once. Scraepbox is in essence to blogs what XRumer is to forums. It’s a program which can look up hundreds of blogs and place posts on all of them at one time, without the need to actually visit them.
In essence, XRumer is the ultimate forum spamming tool and as such, it’s the darling of black hat SEO experts and the bane of white hat SEO experts everywhere. Similarly, Scrapebox has been described as being a black hat SEO tool. However, there may be some legitimate uses for Scrapebox which I didn’t see for XRumer. Here’s what you need to know:

Finding Sites to Comment On

One of the things that Scrapebox excels at is helping you find blogs to comment on. While you can use the program to automate the process of sending out such comments, which by definition makes it into a black hat SEO tool which sends out comment spam, you can also use the software legitimately.
It can harvest lists of sites and tell you which ones are do follow so that you can find sites which will accept useful comments.
Then, instead of sending out spam comments which are next to worthless (no reputable blogger will allow such material to be published – I constantly delete spam comments from my blog), you can go ahead and write real comments on those blogs.

RSS Submission

While Scrapebox is primarily known for offering you the chance to do blog commenting, it also does other things. One of the things that Scrapebox is capable of doing is RSS submission to numerous RSS aggregators. Since these aggregators all welcome submissions from you, it’s not spamming and it’s a perfectly legitimate use of Scrapebox to do this.

Pinging

Another feature which some people may find useful from Scrapebox is the ability to ping the links that it creates for you. This means that you are able to get your links placed and then use the software to ensure that they’ll actually get indexed. This is also worthwhile, though I’m not really that sure it’s worthwhile on its own.

Blogs that Don’t Care

Of course, there are also blog owners who are happy to take comments any way they can get them, even when the comments in question are basically just spam comments. You could use Scrapebox to send out comments to such blogs and gain some backlinks from them. The thing is, I’m not really sure such backlinks hold much in the way of real value for you.

Bottom Line

Scrapebox has its uses, but pinging can be done with numerous other programs for free. Finding blogs to comment on which are do follow can be done using Traffic Travis, which I discussed the other day, so I’m not so sure how much value Scrapebox has on its own. Still, used properly, it can be a legitimate SEO tool.