I recently discovered a new tool called SEO Spyglass. This tools allows you to see how competing sites are gaining top Google rankings. It traces backlinks and exaimines them so that you can see how either a specific keyword is top ranked or how a specific site atains its rankings.
The company Link-Assistant offers two versions of the product, a free license that allows only the main version of Google, MSN, and Yahoo or an paid license version (
$87) that allows the various localized verisons of these search engines to be used. In addition the free version does not allow you to save your projects, access support or get updates. The tool operates pretty efficiently but this will vary by connection speed.
It took about 15 minutes for me to run a search for VoIP. The application is Java based and so it easily runs on almost any operating system. The disadvantage is that it takes a significant amount of system resources.
The 15 minute wait was well worth it. This wait will vary by the number of backlinks a site has. In this case my search returned 1156 backlinks. The first result for this term (besides fcc.gov) was the wikipedia entry covering VoIP. SEO Spyglass returns an amazing level of information about each site linking to the site your examining. It starts with the backlinks page rank, The title of the page, whether or not the pages links back, the anchor text linking it, the URL, the number of outbound links on that page, total of links on that page, the link value, the domains page rank, whether or not the page is listed in DMOZ, listed in Yahoo directory, the Alexa ranking for the site, and the age of the domain.
This level of detail allows you to examine the value of the links that are launching a page into the top of the Google rankings. You can also sort all of the backlinks by any of the above information types.
Overall SEO Spyglass is a very nice addition to a webmasters tool box and if you are targeting more than the main Google and Yahoo sites is definitely worth $87. The company claims that new features are coming for the paid version, I’ll try to review these as they become available.
