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SEO Powersuite Review
Guest Blog Eric Genesoto
I've been using SEO Spyglass for about the past month to analyze my competitor's backlinks. In this review, I will show you what I think of it, and a few ways I've found to enhance it's effectiveness even further.
I've been using SEO Spyglass for about the past month to analyze my competitor's backlinks. In this review, I will show you what I think of it, and a few ways I've found to enhance it's effectiveness even further.
What it can do
There are a number of tools on the market that allow you to analyze your competitor's backlinks. Most of them are missing at least one or more of the factors I look for in analyzing backlinks (usually Google Pagerank). The factors I care about most include:
- Google Pagerank (PR) of the page the backlink is on
- Google Pagerank (PR) of the domain the backlink is on
- Number of external (outgoing) links on the page the backlink is on
- Title of the page the backlink is on (to quickly determine relevance)
- Anchor Text of the backlink
If a backlink analyzation tool is missing any one of these factors, I will have to use another tool to get the needed data (which chews up my valuable time). What's more, of the tools that do include all of the data above, SEO Spyglass is the only one I've seen that organizes the information in a way that I can actually use! It does this in two ways:
1. Filters and Workspaces
SEO Spyglass has the normal 'quick' filtering option, where you can type in any text to find it in the data. For example, typing "italian restaurants" will filter the list by only those backlinks that include this text. You can also sort the data, say by highest PR. But while many other tools stop there, SEO Spyglass goes further. You can filter by each backlink factor, and with advanced options like "contains", "doesn't contain", "less than", "more than", etc. This added level of sophistication comes in very handy when you just want a quick filter.
Even more, you have the ability to setup "workspaces", whereby you can create combinations of filters and save them for later use! You can choose what columns you want to see, as well as group by most parameters.
These workspaces can even be copied and pasted to any other project. The one improvement I would love to see here is the ability to set up workspaces globally for all projects. Thankfully, this can still be accomplished with the copy & paste feature, but it would just be a bit more convenient to have it as a global option.
2. Statistics View
The statistics view is an excellent way to get a 'bird's eye view' of your competitor's (or your own) backlinks. You can view statistics about any of the backlink factors. In the example above I have chosen Webpage PR. In this view I can clearly see what the Pagerank is of this competitor's most valuable links. There are also views to help you easily grasp your competitor's anchor text profile, the pages they are linking to, and even the country the backlinks are coming from. Of course, all of this data is sortable within the Statistics view.
Other features worth mentioning:
Proxy Rotation: It's not 100% needed, but it sure speeds up the process of gathering and analyzing links. I recommend private, dedicated proxies for this use. They last longer than public proxies, and you just don't have to worry about the tool not working because your proxies stopped working.
Tags: Tag anything and sort/filter by them.
Reports: I haven't used these much yet, but I will if I ever need to create backlink reports for clients or prospects. The main use I could see for this would be to create a report as a sales tool, to show a prospective client that you know your stuff.
Project Comparison: The comparison feature is very handy if you want to compare your website with your competitor's to see why they might be ranking above you. You can compare all of the factors you would want to, including page PR, nofollow vs dofollow, and even total c-blocks.
How I use SEO Spyglass
I personally find that I get better results when I gather the backlink URL's from somewhere like Majestic SEO. Using this method I get more backlinks in less time, and I don't have to use a captcha service, of which the only option is currently the proprietary service from Link-Assistant. Majestic offers a free download feature where you can download up to 500 of your competitor's top links, which is plenty for my purposes. You can import the URL's directly into SEO Spyglass with the "Enter Backlinks Manually" option.
Then I dig into my competitor's backlinks to find the best ones, and see if I can duplicate them. It's pretty hit and miss, but I've found some unbelievable gems amongst the rubble.. and a tool like SEO Spyglass is essential for this type of research.
Conclusion
If you want to analyze the backlinks of your site, or your competitor's sites like I do, I really don't see how you can go wrong with SEO Spyglass. In my opinion, it's the best tool out there for gathering all of the most critical data on a website's backlink profile, and most importantly, organizing it in a way you can understand. If you'd like to check it out, including pricing and the other tools that are offered by Link Assistant, you can do so at http://www.link-assistant.com