Getting backlinks to your website is currently the holy grail of any SEO process. To outrank your competitors, you need more and stronger backlinks than they have. If you want to approach this process analytically, then you need a good backlink analyzer software. This is exactly where SEO SpyGlass belongs.

SEO SpyGlass Review

Automating backlink analysis is the key. You can do partial analysis manually, but there is simply too much information to collect for this method to be sufficient when you're serious about SEO.

For many years, SEO Elite has been the number one choice for many web optimization specialists. Indeed, it is an excellent software, but after weeks of testing, I can tell you that I found a very strong competitor that gives SEO Elite a run for its money.

The software that I have in mind is called SEO SpyGlass, offered at half the price of SEO Elite. And it comes with a surprisingly full-featured free version (download it now if you wish). Here's the main screen:

To make the story short, it represents what I believe to be best backlinks analyzer in the market currently available. Read more if you need to know why. Or just watch my video review.

Features of SEO SpyGlass

Analyzing backlinks is actually the only purpose for which SEO SpyGlass has been designed. It does not offer other functionality, such as finding linking partners, emailing them, etc. If you need these features, you should either look at the SEO Elite mentioned above, or another application from the developer of SEO SpyGlass, called LinkAssistant.

But when it comes to analyzing backlinks, you have every possible tool at your fingertips. Let's have a quick look:

• Analyze backlinks either for a specific URL or by providing a keyword (SEO SpyGlass will fetch the top-ranking website automatically)
• Check anchor text of links pointing at the website being analyzed
• Verify if the link found by search engines is actually still present on a page (in many cases, it will not be present any more, especially if the website is using any optimization tricks and dynamic/paid links)
• Check several other factors, such as age of linking domains, PR of a specific page and its domain, anchor url, Alexa rank, presence in DMOZ and Yahoo! directories. total number of links, number of outbound links, IP address, etc.
• Get statistical summary of each important factor

There are two special modes called Report and Analysis.

In the Report mode, all results are boiled down to an 8-page long summary with the most important suggestions and resources for your link building. This is a nice feature, and such a report can be a useful tool when you need to impress your customers or when you're just learning the game of SEO.

But the real power is in the Analysis mode. It dissects any link building strategy in a matter of seconds. In fact, several screenshots here will help more than any description.

These are just three sample analysis modes. But you can use any of the tabs shown on screenshots to extract very precise, yet concise information revealing any back-linking strategy. This will allow you to assess the real power of you competitors and formulate proper strategy to outrank them.

SEO SpyGlass in practice

The data collection stage is very reliable. I haven't had even the slightest problems with getting all the required data, and I've used the program a lot. It may take a while if there are many backlinks, but performance is very reasonable.

What I also liked a lot is that even though the whole process is probably quite resource-intensive, I was able to do other work on my laptop very comfortably while the software was analyzing links in the background.

The whole software is written in Java. Initially, I was a little afraid that I would be somewhat look and behave in a somewhat cumbersome way, but that was not the case. Actually, the software is quite comfortable and very easy in every-day use. And as an added benefit, it can run not only in Windows, but also in Linux. I am sure there are many people who will appreciate it.

There is one limitation though, and you have to keep it in mind. It is actually not anything that SEO SpyGlass can do about - the same limitation applies to all link analysis applications. Even though Yahoo can report any number of backlinks, it will display only the first 1000. It means that if there are 2000 backlinks reported, you will have no way to access about half of them.

It took about 15 minutes for the software to perform a complete analysis for a site with 1000 backlinks, using my 2 Mb connection.

Things to improve

But are there any shortcomings worth mentioning? In fact, there are, several. All of them are in the "missing feature" category, and all of these features go slightly beyond pure analysis of backlinks, but would be useful nonetheless.

• No reporting functionality. Ok, actually there is the "Report" feature mentioned above, but what's really missing is the ability to export all statistical information in nicely formatted tables, without the lengthy and rather unnecessary commentary. All you can do is copy the table with results and paste it into Excel. I know I can format the report myself, but elegant reports that can be forwarded to customers would be nice.
• No way to directly compare competing sites side by side. This is the feature that I like in applications such as WebCEO.
• No way to automatically calculate the "link power" - both for the individual link and for the entire site. The software calculates link value, but it's based mainly on the PageRank of the linking page and the number of outgoing links. I would like to see more sophisticated calculation, taking into account domain age, consistency between title and anchor text, maybe Alexa rank, etc. These factors should have customizable weight. For the entire site, this value would simply be a sum of power of individual links.

Free vs. paid versions

SEO SpyGlass offers a surprisingly full-featured free version that you can use without any time restrictions. Many of the most important tools are available. What's missing?

• Ability to use the Report feature
• Ability to save or copy & paste reports
• Only Yahoo is available to check your backlinks

I could live without the Report feature - I don't use it much. I also use mostly Yahoo as data source and care little about other engines (I sometimes add Google to the mix).

Saving and exporting your results is the really deciding factor. Analysis of one URL can take between 10 to 20 minutes if there are many backlinks. You may have different competitors for different keywords in the same niche, and you may want to analyze not only the no. 1 ranking competitor. In case of many of my projects, I analyze at least 10-15 different URLs. This takes a lot of time and I need the ability to refer to the results at any time in the future without redoing the work.

On the other hand, if you want to just learn some SEO, discover various linking techniques, strategies and tricks, there is no better tool than the free version of SEO SpyGlass. As you become more advanced, doing some serious SEO work for your own projects or for your customers, you will probably need the save and export features, but let me say it once again - even the free version of SEO SpyGlass is one of the best and most useful SEO tool I've come across.

Verdict

The best testament to the quality of this software is that I use it virtually everyday in various scenarios - when researching new niche, maintaining my old sites, doing some customer work, etc. This tool has very quickly become indispensable. It is highly reliable, fast, precise and offers wealth of data to help me make more informed decisions in my link-building efforts. In fact, if I had to reduce my arsenal to just two tools, I would probably leave this one and some keyword research service. The choice between the two would be too difficult :-).

SEO SpyGlass is very highly recommended by SEOproToolz.com

You can download the free version immediately.