SEO Spyglass Process Overview
At some point, either for yourself or for your clients, you are going to need to perform a full audit of incoming links to the target website.
SEO Spyglass, part of SEO Powersuite from Link Assistant, is the tool on show here that looks to perform all of your link audit tasks
Access To World Class Link Database
From my own experience, the first function I was looking for was a full and regularly updated link database.
You may already know that Google Webmaster Tools reports a subset of the links that it finds to any website. However, Google themselves make no apologies for saying that they do not offer a full and comprehensive list of links. Typically, they report a maximum of 1000 and scale down from there. IN practice perhaps reporting 40% of the links a website may have.
I base that 40% on my own experience and comparing the figures reported by GWMT with the link lists from Majestic, Open Site Explorer and AHrefs. Google frequently reports far fewer links than these tools and an accuracy check, performed by following a sample of these links to their host websites shows that all of these tools are very accurate. Google just choose to give a small subset of the total link volume a site may attract.
The database on SEO Spyglass indexes over 1 billion URL’s per day according to the guys at SEO Powersuite.
SEO Spyglass Example Workflow
Initially you need to set up a project for each website you are looking to manage, SEO Spyglass has no limitations on the number of projects you can have. For the one-off fee and annual algorithm update cost, there are effectively no limits on the number of clients and websites that can be managed.
There is even a “create numerous projects” option which allows you to cut and paste a list of websites and the application will create a separate project for each site.
After a quick scan to check that the website resolves, you will be presented with an option to use the SEO Powersuite link list only – or whether you would like to add Google Analytics and/or the Google Search console data to your projects. This will require you to log in with the credentials you need to access these tools.
Once complete SEO Spyglass will fetch the links for your site or sites from its massive database. It’s a comprehensive list of analytics.
- Backlink Page – The page on the referring site that the backlink appears
- Title – The title of the page (if set by that webmasters META data)
- Linked Page – Which page on your website is linked to
- Anchor Text – The anchor tag for the link if one is present
- First Found Date – The approximate age of the link.
- Last Found Date – The last time the host page was crawled, and the link was present
There is also the option to add your own columns by pressing the 4 block icon on the top right of the screen. Some of the more useful optional columns are;
SEO Spyglass Discount and Free Trial
Use the links on this page to have a download your 1 month free trial of any or all tools from the SEO Powersuite
We also offer an exclusive 10% discount on any purchase of SEO Powersuite through these links.
You won’t find this software at a better price anywhere else.
Key Performance Indicators for your Back Links
- Back-link Status – Whether the link is live or been deleted. Your own local project will keep a record of the links even when the main database reports them as gone. Useful for tracking link attrition.
- META Description – The META description set in the HTML header of the host website. Useful for understanding context and relevance.
- META Keywords – Similar to the above. What keywords are set in the HTML Meta data of the host website.
- Alexa Rank – The websites rank in Alexa. A listing that attempts to rank website by the number of visits they get.
- Inlink Rank – An alternative to Page Rank. A very accurate measure of the authority a link has. Very consistent and reliable. The higher the Inlink rank the more valuable the link is.
- Social Mentions – How often the host/referring site has been mentioned on social media. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ are shown. Very useful to see if the site is popular outside of pure SEO terms.
- Link Toxicity – Is the back link safe? Is it from a domain that has accrued trust over time or does the host site have issues such as a history of hosting viruses or levels of instability?
In Commercial Markets Back-links Are A Vital Component of Effective Search Engine Optimisation
The main purpose for attracting strong links is of course SEO. It is fair to say that in commercially competitive niche, links are vital. While they might not be the “be all and end all” they were a few years ago, they are still, along with content, the most important ranking factor a website has.
In short if a website does not attract a good number of relevant links it will not do well in the search engines for its chosen valuable keywords.
SEO Spyglass is a tool to report these links to clients and manage these links
Whatever method you or your agency uses to manage and grow a website’s link profile, there is always a need to know in detail what links are pointing to the target website, where they are from and what value they offer.
SEO Spyglass performs this function and provides neat, detailed reports that, with the enterprise edition of the software, allow you to produce white labelled reports for each project.
Which Back Link Metrics Are Vital For Your Clients?
- Link volume: A simple count of the number of links pointing to the target website
- Target URL: What is the actual page in the target website that the link points to. Important if you have several landing pages, products or sub niches. Which ones are benefiting from inbound links and which may need to have their citation level improved.
- Link Authority: INLINK is the SEO Powersuite proprietary link authority metric. It considers the trust factor of the host website which in turn is comprised of many individual elements such as the domain age, its own inbound link profile, its Alexa rank any penalty history and of course the content the host website has. The correlation between INLINK and other better-known measurements of trust is very close. INLINK might report 6 to 8 points higher than the MOZ trust rank, but it does so with real consistency, so if you want to translate INLINK to MOZ trust, reduce by 6 and you will get an accurate representation.
- Historical link growth. This is the main measure that clients who are not themselves SEO experts tend to look at SEO Spyglass provides several ways to present this growth in their very professional looking reporting suite.
SEO Spyglass Used for Toxic Link Management
This is a topic unto itself. Google invented the concept of negative SEO and that certain links could actually harm a website’s potential in their index.
A potted history is that some webmasters tried to shortcut the link accumulation process by buying many hundreds or thousands of poor quality links made either on poor quality sites or by “bots” who hacked links or created them on web platforms that allowed third party content to be added such as Blogs, Forums and WEB2.0 style sites.
Google took a dim view of this attempt to manipulate their index, so imposed a penalty risk for sites that had link profiles that were poor in quality and showed signs of being manufactured artificially.
Of course, the issue here is that, an honest webmaster does not have control over who links to his site. It may be that sites that Google consider poor quality want to link to him, or it could be that unscrupulous webmasters in the same market actually create poor quality links pointing to a site in the hope that Google penalises their competitor for having a spam link profile.
To that end SEO Spyglass has some excellent tools to manage link toxicity. Using the INLINK rank to get a first impression of a individual backlinks value. Perhaps considering the nation where the link host website is based as a second criterion and perhaps the anchor text as another. Right clicking on any link brings up a menu, you can then check “Add to Disavowal list” then, periodically it should be possible through Google Webmaster Tools to add these link to the Google “link disavowal” system.
10 Minute Overview of SEO Spyglass
Cost Effectiveness Versus the Competition
An issue with all these tools is the cost of continually updating the link database. In practice this involves constant re-indexing of as much of the internet as possible. Web crawlers always searching for new URLs
All of these solutions come at a cost. So perhaps the first consideration is the value and accuracy of each tool in comparison.
Looking at 3 medium sized local business websites with between 1000 and 10,000 back links and comparing the volume of links reported, the accuracy given and the cost per link. (see table below)
As we can see, in all cases Google under reports by a substantial margin. Remember though Google does not claim to give you a full list of your links, just a sample.
For the other tools the results are very similar indeed. In fat we are looking at 2% maximum difference between any of the results. Personally I would be happy with any of these solutions from a volume point of view.
Accuracy is a slightly different matter with Open Site Explorer sending me to quite a number of pages on different IP addresses that did not contain the links that were being reported. In fact of the 50 links I traced back only 37 actually existed. A 26% error rate. This may be a result of transient links being archived by Open Site Explorer.
Transient links are those that appear on sites where pages are archived or extended in a flexible way. For instance a blog comments page that exceeds a certain number of comments might either archive older comments (removing them from index) or push them on to a second page (changing the URL they are on). Sometimes of course webmasters delete third party content from their own sites if they think they are being cynically targeted.
As we can see, in all cases Google under reports by a substantial margin. Remember though Google does not claim to give you a full list of your links, just a sample.
For the other tools the results are very similar indeed. In fact we are looking at an average of less than 5% difference between any of the results. Personally I would be happy with any of these solutions from a volume point of view.
Accuracy is a slightly different matter with MOZ (Open Site Explorer) sending me to quite a number of pages on different IP addresses that did not contain the links that were being reported. In fact of the 50 links I traced back only 37 actually existed. A 26% error rate.
Given that MOZ membership is many times more expensive than the other solutions here, this is disappointing. That being said MOZ does offer more than just link profile reporting and management tools, but the result here is very disappointing. SEO Spyglass , part of the SEO Powersuite had 47 out of 50 links that could be traced back properly to the host domain and Majestic SEO also 47.
Price wise it’s not such a simple comparison as each tool comes with its own set of features. The price of Open Site Explorer is hard to extrapolate from the overall cost of MOZ membership.
We scaled up from servicing two clients to now more than ten while actually reducing our admin overhead per client in the process.
The reports are world class and allow us to promote our business to new clients and report to existing clients with confidence.
SEO Powersuite is highly recommended.
Competitor Comparison. MOZ
The standard MOZ membership of bought annually comes in at $948 per year. However at this lowest level of paid membership the features are severely limited. Fine if you are a single website owner, but of little or no use if you are a serious marketer or an agency user.
- 300 keyword rankings
- 150 Queries per month
- Max 10,000 backlinks reported
As I say fine for one website, maybe 2 or 3 at a push if they were rather small and were not being SEO optimized for many keywords, but for an agency or owner of many websites – which is what we concentrate on here at Yourmetalife, these restrictions mean that the standard MOZ plan is of no use to us.
The medium plan costs $1527 per year and just about meets the criteria for a small agency. Again it only allows 10 campaigns to be run which might be a hard limit however the keyword ranking totals of 750 is probably usable and the 5,000 queries per month for keyword data will allow you to run perhaps 10 or 12 reports for new client prospects or link toxicity reports. The next plan “Large” costs around $3000 per year if you have more than 10 websites or clients. For the sake of fairness and because MOZ offers more than keyword analysis we will stick with “Medium”
Competitor Comparison. Majestic SEO
Majestic has a similar set up in terms of agency usability. For $499 per year the basic plan “Lite” offers
- 5000 Index Item Units (potential keyword queries)
- No ranking reports
- 1,000,000 Analysable backlinks
In general, this is many more than MOZ, but obviously more limited in the functionality.
The “Pro” plan for $999 per year with 20 million analysis units and 300 reports per month and the ability to retrieve up to 5 million links per report offers far more than MOZ and likely enough for a digital agency managing as many as 50 medium sized sites.
Competitor Comparison. AHRefs
Here we see the same pattern again with the “Lite” offering at $990 per year providing
- Tracking for 300 keywords
- Maximum of 5 websites analysed (called campaigns)
- 1 project (website) for audit
- 10,00 pages per month crawled
As with the two products above this is about enough for 1 medium sized website, and clearly that is the purpose of this offering at this price point.
The “Standard” plan costs $1790 per year and disappointingly only allows 10 campaigns. It would be a small agency indeed that would find this useful. 1000 tracked keywords is also a little low being an average of only 100 per website. Plenty for local businesses but one moderately large client could swallow most of these. At Gambit Nash we have a European client who offers management training and we track over 500 keywords and phrases on their behalf. 1,000 is possibly enough and you would need to consider the needs of your current client base and the likelihood of requirements from future clients before committing to this plan.
The “Advanced” plan costs $3,990 per annum and with its 25 campaigns and 4,000 tracked keywords is realistically the option most digital agencies and owners of multiple websites would need to go for.
SEO Spyglass Review
SEO Spyglass, part of the SEO Powersuite, offers a great deal of bang for the buck. It’s important though to understand where it sits in the toolbox for digital marketers.
Specifically SEO Spyglass is, as the name suggests a tool for SEO, but more than that it is almost completely focussed on Google.
It is worth remembering that Google still place a great deal of emphasis on the inbound links to a site (or more specifically a URL) when deciding where to order it in their index. Being on page one of Google is still an extremely effective route to market. In some cases it can be the difference between a highly successful website and a complete flop.
However, other than moving visitors from place to place, it is only Google that uses links in their ranking algorithm. It’s been suggested that Yahoo and Bing have added some analysis of a website’s inbound links to their algorithm for ordering their search index, but the proofs of this are not consistent and it is certainly the case that websites can rank well in these smaller search engines without links.
SEO Spyglass is therefore, almost exclusively for Google ranking.
As an agency we have many clients, and servicing them in a cost effective manner is a real challenge. Initially, when a client arrives with us there is a good chance they already have a website. If they are looking for us to do their digital marketing for them with a focus on SEO the first thing we do is perform a complete link check using SEO Spyglass.
It’s not a courtesy thing. We really need to know if this client has a toxic link profile. The last thing we want to do is to take on a client with a site that is about to be banned and end being blamed for that.
The ability to run a report in a few moments, then check the links for any issues and have a report for the client, often all while they are present in our initial introduction meeting or on the other end of a Skype call has proven invaluable. It positions our competence very quickly. It allows us to talk specifics straight away, and of course the white label reporting means we can hand this information off to a client with our own branding via PDF or even via HTML where we might create a password protected page for the client on our own website where SEO Spyglass reports are uploaded at intervals.
Digital Marketing Competition Analysis
It’s also a good idea to evaluate the website you are looking to promote against its online competition. To get an understand of the link profiles and SEO strength of these sites to see what sort of time scale and cost to put on a project.
It’s always best to give a new client realistic expectation. There are no guarantees in SEO, but an understanding of the competition is vital to pitch your services in the right ballpark.
This is where SEO Spyglass really comes into its own. We might want to, for example, see the competition for perhaps 6 keywords in Google. This might return many sites we need to analyse. With other solutions each site eats into your monthly scan allowance, it reduces the number of reports you can run that month and very soon you are being asked if you would like to sign up for the next service tier.
Not with SEO Spyglass. Running ten of fifteen competition reports takes a few minutes per report, and exporting the data in CSV form means that doing comparisons in Excel or similar can take just minutes.
For a one off fee, the only service out there that has this cost model, SEO Spyglass soon pays for itself with power to add.
Client Reporting
The clincher of course is the ability to create client reports. Both to attract new clients with professional looking proposals, and to provide monthly updates of the digital marketing you have done on behalf of existing clients.
The Enterprise version of SEO Spyglass comes with the ability to export white label or self-branded reports, putting your own competence at the forefront and saving considerable time.
We have used SEO Powersuite for more than 2 years now. We are also always looking for something better. Something that will provide better ROI. That stands to reason, we are a business and our own profitability and ability to service digital marketing clients in a cost-effective manner is key to our success. It’s fair to say nothing has come close to SEO Spyglass, part of the SEO Powersuite in this regard. In fact, the developers update these tools so regularly, adding new features and expanding existing ones that as a value proposition, SEO Spyglass keeps getting better and comes highly recommended.
SEO Spyglass Free Trial and Discount
Yourmetalife is pleased to offer the best SEO Spyglass free trail and discount available on the internet. A powerful tool providing unlimited access to a best on class link database, with well over 1 billion backlinks scraped from hundreds of thousands of sites every day. SEO Spyglass offers detailed information essential detail to anyone serious search engine optimization.
SEO Spyglass Free Trial
The unlimited free trial of SEO Spyglass gives its users real power. Unlimited use of many of the core functions of the application. For some users this trial might be all they need to assess the link profile of their website or a website of a competitor and gain real, actionable information to allow them to make SEO changes for the better. Harvest links from the huge and regularly updated link database, sort and order them by their various factors. Check them for authority, popularity or toxicity. A full feature list of the various versions of the software is listed below.
SEO Spyglass Discount
Professional digital marketers would likely befit from our SEO Spyglass discount. Unlike other similar link interrogation tools, SEO Spyglass is yours for a one-off fee and from Yourmetalife you get it with a 10% discount. You are probably aware if you have looked at competitors like Majestic, that their pricing structure scales once you need to make a lot of queries, pull more than a few reports or add more than a relatively low number of websites. That is not the case with SEO Spyglass. This application can be used with confidence by agencies and professional digital marketers. Gathering viral link data on many websites, sorting and compiling these links and their associated metrics, exporting them to spreadsheets or using the stunning white label reporting common to all SEO Powersuite Enterprise level products. IN short. This is an all in one agency level solution that competes in price and beats the functionality of monthly subscription products.
Look at the feature list below and deice which version of SEO Spyglass is right for you.
SEO Spyglass Version Comparison Table
The Yourmetalife Difference
Yourmetalife offers the best discount available anywhere on the internet for this and all other tools in SEO Powersuite.
We also offer superb 3rd party support. While the designers of this tool (part of SEO Powersuite) have been in the business for many years and have a great history of updating their tools regularly, adding new features and providing superb support, Yourmetalife take the position of end user advocates.
We have a history of working closely with digital marketing application developers and communicating with end users. We are happy to answer questions and pass on suggestions. If you know our history on demondemon and similar sites, you’ll appreciate how closely we work with our own community to ensure the best user experience.
A free trial, the best discount and unique level of third party support. That’s the difference Yourmetalife makes.
This site is part of the Yourmetalife group
About
Paul Rone-Clarke is Digital Marking Director with Gambit Nash. A creative agency based in the stunning rural countryside of Worcestershire.
Starting in digital marketing (long before it was called digital marketing) in 1996 with small jobs for local companies. Promoting a local shoe shop, a large catalogue firm and several small businesses working alongside his time in education, as a very mature student and working as a Production Planner and Senior Manager with great companies such as Bosch and Superform Aluminium.
If you are interested, Superform make the super-heated aluminium body panels for cars such as Aston Martin and Morgan.
Deciding to start Yourmetalife in 2009 and creating a successful brand alongside the more important issue of happy and well serviced clients it became apparent after 5 good years of growth that without some level of automation, outsourcing or the introduction of complementary skill sets, further scaling up of the business was going to be a difficult process.
Gambit Nash
In 2015 Gambit Nash was formed as a creative agency bringing together graphic design, coding, net and server infrastructure, project management and print under one roof. This allowing collaboration between various members of the team, the capital to grow and the ability for each team member to concentrate on their core activities.
Gambit Nash, and Yourmetalife use the products featured on this page extensively for client acquisition, digital marketing and client communication via the excellent reporting and export options. The choice of SEO Powersuite was after several weeks of consultation and assessment of the cost benefits of a whole range of products.
As such SEO Powersuite – in particular the Enterprise versions of the tools – and each of the four applications that make up its total come highly recommended for professional and agency use. The Professional version is a product I have used myself with Yourmetalife for many years prior to that. The software is well supported, frequently updated with new features and by some way the best value of any other set of DM tools I have looked at.