SEO Spyglass is one of the 4 tools Link-Assistant sells (individually) and as a part of their SEO Power Suite.

We did a review of their Rank Tracker application a few months ago and we plan to review their other 2 tools in upcoming blog posts.

Key Features of SEO Spyglass

The core features of SEO Spyglass are:

• Link Research
• White Label Reporting
• Historical Link Tracking

As with most software tools there are features you can and cannot access, or limits you’ll hit, depending on the version you choose. You can see the comparison here.

Perhaps the biggest feature is their newest feature. They recently launched their own link database, a couple of months early in beta, as the tool had been largely dependent on the now dead Yahoo! Site Explorer.

The launch of a third or fourth-ish link database (Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer, A-Href’s rounding out the others) is a win for link researchers. It still needs a bit of work, as we’ll discuss below, but hopefully they plan on taking the some of the better features of the other tools and incorporating them into their tool.

After all, good artists copy and great artists steal

Setting Up a Project for a Specific Keyword

One of my pet peeves with software is feature bloat which in turn creates a rough user experience. Link-Assistant’s tools are incredibly easy to use in my experience.

Once you fire up SEO Spyglass you can choose to research links from a competing website or links based off of a keyword.

Most of the time I use the competitor’s URL when doing link research but SEO Spyglass doubles as a link prospecting tool as well, so here I’ll pick a keyword I might want to target “Seo Training”.

The next screen is where you’ll choose the search engine that is most relevant to where you want to compete. They have support for a bunch of different countries and search engines and you can see the break down on their site.

So if you are competing in the US you can pull data the top ranking site off of the following engines (only one at a time):

• Google
• Google Blog Search
• Google Groups
• Google Images
• Google Mobile
• YouTube
• Bing
• Yahoo! (similar to Bing of course)
• AOL
• Alexa
• Blekko
• And some other smaller web properties

I’ll select Google and the next screen is where you select the sources you want Spyglass to use for grabbing the links of the competing site it will find off of the preceding screen:

So SEO Spyglass will grab the top competitor from your chosen SERP will run multiple link sources off of that site (would love to see some API integration with Majestic and Open Site Explorer here).

This is where you’ll see their own Backlink Explorer for the first time.

Next you can choose unlimited backlinks (Enterprise Edition only) or you can limit it by
Project or Search Engine. For the sake of speed I’m going to limit it to 100 links per search engine (that we selected in a previous screen) and exclude duplicates (links found in one engine and another) just to get the most accurate, usable data possible:

When you start pinging engines, specifically Google in this example, you routinely will get captcha’s like this:

On this small project I entered about 8 of them and the project found 442 backlinks (here is what you’ll see after the project is completed):

One way around captchas is to either pay someone to run this tool for you and manually do it, but for large projects that is not ideal as captcha’s will pile up and you could get the IP temporarily banned.

Link-Assistant offers an Anti-Captcha plan to combat this issue, you can see the pricing here.

Given the size of the results pane it is hard to see everything but you are initially returned with:

• an icon of what search engine the link was found in
• the backlinking page
• the backlinking domain

Spyglass will then ask you if you want to update the factors associated with these links.

Your options by default are:

• domain age
• domain ip
• domain PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz Listing
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• On-page info (title, meta description, meta keywords)
• Total links to the page
• External links to other sites from the page
• Page rank of the page itself

You can add more factors by clicking the Add More button. You’re taken to the Spyglass Preferences pane where you can add more factors:

You can add a ton of social media stuff here including popularity on Facebook, Google +, Page-level Twitter mentions and so on.

You can also pick up bookmarking data and various cache dates. Keep in mind that the more you select, especially with stuff like cache date, you are likely to run into captcha’s.

SEO Spyglass also offers Search Safety Settings (inside of the preferences pane, middle of the left column in the above screenshot) where you can update human emulation settings and proxies to both speed up the application and to help avoid search engine bans.

I’ve used Trusted Proxies with Link-Assistant and they have worked quite well.

You can’t control the factors globally, you have to do it for each project but you can update Spyglass to only offer you specific backlink sources.

I’m going to deselect PageRank here to speed up the project (you can always update later or use other tools for PageRank scrapes).

Working With the Results

When the data comes back you can do number of things with it. You can:

• Build a custom report
• Rebuild it if you want to add link sources or backlink factors
• Update the saved project later on
• Analyze the links within the application
• Update and add custom workspaces

These options are all available within the results screen (again, this application is incredibly easy to use):

I’ve blurred out the site information as I see little reason to highlight the site here. But you can see where the data has populated for the factors I selected.

In the upper left hand corner of the applications is where you can build the report, analyze the data from within the application, update the project, or rebuild it with new factors:

All the way to the right is where you can filter the data inside the application and create a
new workspace:

Your filtering options are seen to the left of the workspaces here. It’s not full blown filtering and sorting but if you are looking for some quick information on specific link queries, it can be helpful.

Each item listed there is a Workspace. You can create your own or edit one of the existing ones. Whatever factors you include in the Workspace is what will show in the results pane as factors

So think of Workspaces as your filtering options. Your available metrics/columns are

• Domain Name
• Search Engine (where the link was found)
• Last Found Date (for updates)
• Status of Backlink (active, inactive, etc)
• Country
• Page Title
• Links Back (does the link found by the search engine actually link to the site? This is a good way of identifying short term, spammy link bursts)
• Anchor Text
• Link Value (essentially based on the original PageRank formula)
• Notes (notes you’ve left on the particular link). This is very limited and is essentially a single Excel-type row
• Domain Age/IP/PR
• Alexa Rank
• Dmoz
• Yahoo! Directory Listing
• Total Links to page/domain
• External links
• Page-level PR

Most of the data is useful. I think the link value is overvalued a bit based on my experience finding links that often had 0 link value in the tool but clearly benefited the site it ended up linking to.

PageRank queries in bulk will cause lots of captcha’s and given how out of date PR can be it isn’t a metric I typically include on large reports.

Analyzing the Data

When you click on the Analyze tab in the upper left you can analyze in multiple ways:

• All backlinks found for the project
• Only backlinks you highlight inside the application
• Only backlinks in the selected Workspace

The Analyze tab is a separate window overlaying the report:

You can’t export from this window but if you just do a control/command-a you can copy and paste to a spreadsheet.

Your options here:

• Keywords – keywords and ratios of specific keywords in the title and anchor text of backlinks
• Anchor Text – anchor text distribution of links
• Anchor URL – pages being linked to on the site and the percentages of link distribution (good for evaluating deep link distribution and pages targeted by the competing site as well as popular pages on the site…content ideas )
• Webpage PR
• Domain PR
• Domains linking to the competing site and the percentage
• TLD – percentage of links coming from .com, net, org, info, uk, and so on
• IP address – links coming from IP’s and the percentages
• Country breakdown
• Dmoz- backlinks that are in Dmoz and ones that are not
• Yahoo! – same as Dmoz
• Links Back – percentages of links found that actually link to the site in question

Updating and Rebuilding

Updating is pretty self-explanatory. Click the Update tab and select whether or not to update all the links, the selected links, or the Workspace specific links:

(It’s the same dialog box as when you actually set up the project)

Rebuilding the report is similar to updating except updating doesn’t allow you to change the specified search engine.

When you Rebuild the report you can select a new search engine. This is helpful when comparing what is ranking in Google versus Bing.

Click Rebuild and update the search engine plus add/remove backlink factors.

Reporting

There are 2 ways to get to the reporting data inside of Spyglass

There is a quick SEO Report Tab and the Custom Report Builder:

Much like the Workspaces in the prior example, there are reporting template options on the right side of the navigation:

It functions the same way as Workspaces do in terms of being able to completely customize the report and data. You can access your Company Profile (your company’s information and logo), Publishing Profiles (delivery methods like email, FTP, and so on), as well as Report Templates in the settings option:

You can’t edit the ones that are there now except for playing around with the code used to generate the report. It’s kind of an arcane way to do reporting as you can really hose up the code (below the variables in red is all the HTML):

You can create your own template with the following reporting options:

• Custom introduction
• All the stats described earlier on this report as available backlink factors
• Top 30 anchor URLs
• Top 30 anchor texts
• Top 30 links by “link value”
• Top 30 domains by “link value”
• Conclusion (where you can add your own text and images)

Overall the reporting options are solid and offer lots of data. It’s a little more work to customize the reports but you do have lots of granular customization options and once they are set up you can save them as global preferences.

As with other software tools you can set up scheduled checks and report generation.

Researching a URL

The process for researching a URL is the same as described above, except you already know the URL rather than having SEO Spyglass find the top competing site for it.

You have the same deep reporting and data options as you do with a keyword search. It will be interesting to watch how their database grows because, for now, you can (with the Enterprise version) research an unlimited number of backlinks.

SEO Spyglass in Practice

Overall, I would recommend trying this tool out. If nothing else, it is another source of backlinks which pulls from other search engines as well (Google, Blekko, Bing, etc).

The reporting is good and you have a lot of options with respect to customizing specific link data parameters for your reports.

I would like to see more exclusionary options when researching a domain. Like the ability to filter redirects and sub-domain links. It doesn’t do much good if we want a quick, competitive report but a quarter or more of the report is from something like a subdomain of the site you are researching.

SEO Spyglass’s pricing is as follows:

• Purchase a professional option or an enterprise option (comparison)
• 6 months of their Live Plan for free
• Purchase of a Live Plan required after 6 months to continue using the tool’s link research functionality.
• Pricing for all editions and Live Plans can be found here

In running a couple of comparisons against Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO it was clear that Spyglass has a decent database but needs more filtering options (sub-domains mainly). It’s not as robust as OSE or Majestic yet, but it’s to be expected. I still found a variety of unique links from its database that I did not see on other tools across the board.

You can get a pretty big discount if you purchase their suite of tools as a bundle rather than individually

Link Assistant’s Rank Tracker Reviewed

Link Assistant offers SEO’s a suite of tools, under an umbrella aptly named SEO Power Suite, which covers many aspects of an SEO campaign.

Link Assistant provides the following tools inside of their Power Suite:

• Rank Tracker – rank tracking software
• WebSite Auditor – on-page optimization tool
• SEO Spy Glass – competitive link research tool
• Link Assistant – their flagship link prospecting, management, and tracking tool

We’ll be reviewing their popular Rank Tracking tool in this post. I’ve used their tools for awhile now and have no issue in recommending them. They also claim to have the following companies as clients:

• Disney
• Microsoft
• Audi
• HP

Rank Tracker is one of the more robust, fast, and reliable rank checking tools out there.

Is Rank Tracker a Worthy Investment?

Rank Tracker offers a few different pricing options:

• Free
• Pro
• Enterprise

All of the editions have the following features:

• Unlimited sites
• Unlimited keywords
• Customizable reports (you can only save and print with Enterprise level however, kind of a drawback in my opinion. Pro accounts should have this functionality)
• API key’s
• Human search emulation built in
• User agent rotation
• Proxy support
• Proxy rotation
• Google analytics integration
• Multiple language support (English, German, Russian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Slovak)
• Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux

All editions offer access to their keyword research features, with all the features included, the only difference here is the free edition doesn’t allow KEI updates.

Rank Tracker Feature Set

Rank Tracker offers a keyword research tool and a rank checking component within the application. A more thorough breakdown of the feature set is as follows:

Keyword Research

I prefer to do my keyword research outside of tools like this. Generally specific tools seem to excel at their chosen discipline, in this case rank checking, but fall kind of short in areas they try to add-on. I like to use a variety of tools when doing keyword research and it’s easier for me, personally, to create and merge various spreadsheets and various data points rather than doing research inside of an application.

However, Rank Tracker does offer a one-stop shop for cumbersome research options like various search suggest methods and unique offerings like estimated traffic based on ranking #1 for that specified term.

Overall, a nice set of keyword research features if you want to add on to the research you’ve already done.

Rank Tracker also gives you the option to factor in data from Google Trends as well as through Google Analytics (see current ranking for each keyword and actual traffic).

Rank Checking

As this is the core piece tool it’s really no surprise that this part of Rank Tracker shines. Some of the interesting options here are in the ability to track multiple Google search areas like images, videos, and places.

In addition to the interesting features I mentioned above, Rank Tracker also includes a wide array of charting and design options to help you work with your data more directly and in a clearer way:

Usability is Top Notch

While the interfaces aren’t the prettiest, this is one of one most user-friendly rank tracking tools that I’ve come across.

First you simply enter the URL you wish to track. Rank Tracker will automatically find the page AND sub-domain on the domain ranking for the keywords chosen, so you don’t have to enter these separately.

You enter the site you want to check (remember, subpages and subdomains are automatically included)

Choose from a whole host of engines and select universal search if you wish to factor in places taken up by Google insertions into the SERPS:

Enter your keywords:

Let Rank Tracker go to work: (you can choose to display the running tasks as line views or tree views, a minor visual preference)

That’s all there is to it. It is extremely easy to get a project up and running inside of this tool.

Working with Rank Tracker

Inside of Rank Tracker the data is displayed clearly, in an easy to understand format:

In the top part you’ll get to see:

• the keywords you selected
• current rank compared to last rank
• overall visibility (top rankings) in each search engine selected
• custom tags you might decide to choose to tag your keywords with for tracking purposes or something

On the bottom chart you’ll see three options for the selected search engine (bottom) and keyword (top):

• ranking information for each search engine for the selected keyword
• historical records (last check date and position)
• progress graph (visual representation of rankings, customizable with sliders as shown in the picture)

The ranking chart shows the chart for the chosen keyword and search engine:

Within the ranking results page, you can select from these options to get a broader view of how your site is performing on the whole:

Customizing Rank Tracker

Inside of Rank Tracker’s preferences you’ll see the following options, most of which are self-explanatory:

This is where you can take advantage of some of their cooler features like:

• adding competitors to track
• adding in your Google Analytics account
• customizing your reporting templates
• changing up human emulation settings
• adding in a captcha service
• scheduling reports
• adding in multiple proxies to help with the speed of the tool as well as to prevent blocks

You can track up to 5 competitors per Rank Tracker profile (meaning, 5 competitors per one of your sites).

Key Configuration Options

Rank Tracker has a ton of options as you can see from the screenshot above. Some of the more important ones you’ll want to pay attention to begin with their reporting options.

You’ll want to set up your company information as shown here: (this is what will show on your reports)

On a per profile basis you can customize client-specific details likeso:

You can create new and modify existing templates for multiple report types here as well:

Emulation settings are important, you want to make sure you are set up so your requests look as normal and human as possible. It makes sense to check off the “visit search engine home page” option to help it appear more natural in addition to having delays between queries (again, to promote a natural approach to checking rankings/searching).

One thing that irks me about Rank Tracker is that they have emulation turned off by default. If you don’t adjust your settings and you try and run a moderately sized report you’ll get a Google automated ban in short order, so be careful!

In addition to emulation, search approach is also worthy of a bit of tinkering as well. Given how often Google inserts things like images, products, and videos into search results you might want to consider using universal search when checking rankings.

Also, the result depth is important. Going deep here can help identifying sites that have been torched rather than sites that simply fell outside the top 20 or 50. 100 is a good baseline as a default.

Successive search gives you a more accurate view as it manually goes page by page rather than grabbing 100 results at a time (double listings, as an example, can throw off the count when not using successive search)

Finally, another important option is scheduling. You can schedule emails, FTP uploads, and so on (as well as rank checks) from this options panel. Your machine does have to be on for this to work (not in sleep mode for instance). In my experience Rank Tracker has been pretty solid on this front, with respect to executing the tasks you tell it to execute (consistently).

Software versus Cloud

There are some strong, cloud based competitors to Rank Tracker. Our Rank Checker is a great solution for quick checks and for ongoing tracking if you do not need graphical charts and such (though, you can easily make those in excel if you need to).

Competitors and Options

Raven offers rank tracking as a part of their package and there are other cloud based services like Authority Labs (who actually power Raven’s tools) you can look into if you want to avoid using software tools for rank checking.

There are some drawbacks to cloud-based rank tracking though. Some of them do not have granular date-based comparisons as they typically run on the provider’s schedule rather than yours.

Also, most cloud rank checking solutions offer limits on how many keywords you can track. So if you are doing enterprise level rank checking it makes sense to use a software tool + a proxy service like Trusted Proxies

Pricing and Final Thoughts

Rank Tracker offers a generous discount if you grab all their tools in one bundle. If you want to customize, schedule, and print reports you’ll need the enterprise edition.

I think requiring the purchase of your top tier for the basic functionality of printing reports is a mistake. I can see having that limitation on the free edition, but if you pay you should get access to reports.

You can find their bundle prices here and Rank Tracker’s specific pricing here. Also, similar to competitors, they have an ongoing service plan which is required if you plan to continue to receive updates after the initial 6 months.

Despite my pricing concern regarding the reporting options, I think this is one of the top rank checkers out there. It has a ton of features and is very simple to use. I would recommend that you give this tool a shot if you are in the market for a robust rank checking solution. Oh I almost forgot, rank checking is still useful

One More Note of Caution

Be sure to read the below complaints about how unclear & sneaky the maintenance plan pricing is. This is something they should fix ASAP.