SEO SpyGlass Software Review

About a month ago we received an email from Andy Moor at Link-Assistant.com telling us of their new SEO tool, SEO Spyglass.  SEO Spyglass is a competitive analysis tool that allows you to analyze the backlinks of your competitors.  You can find out all sorts of information about the backlinks, including who they’re coming from, the PR of the linking page and even the anchor text used on the page. 

The tool sounded very intriguing and hey, it’s free so we thought why not give it a try.  To test it out I decided to use one of our current clients as I am already somewhat familiar with their backlinks.  Here it goes…

SEO SpyGlass

SEO SpyGlass is very easy to use.  The download is quick and using it is as simple as entering in your competitors URL.  The program can take a little time to run depending on how many backlinks the site actually has, but if you are capable of multi-tasking this shouldn’t be an issue. 

After you enter in your URL and the report finishes, you are given a screen that shows the backlinks and the PR for each link.  Simply click on a link, hit analyze, and you are presented with the following:

• The anchor text of the link
• The number of times your competitor's keywords appear within the anchor and title text of their backlinks
• Number of outbound links on the page
• Page Rank of the main domain and linking page
• Number of backlinks from domain to your site
• IP Address of domain
• If the domain is listed in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
• Alexa rank
• Age of Domain

This is all really great information in determining whether or not a link is useful or not and it is definitely nice to have it all in one place for you.  The best part of SEO Spyglass is that it truly is time saving.  There is no way someone could find all of the information about each link in the time it took SEO Spyglass.  (And trust me, I’m not going to even try)

The only real downfall of the program is the inability to save the results or even export them. (In a Digital Point forum post December 14th, there was an indication that they will be working on these).  For now, you simply have to copy the results directly from the program and paste into an excel file.  While it’s not ideal, it is still easier than manually trying to find all of that information.

Conclusion

I have to say that I was very impressed with SEO Spyglass.  Everything I had read about it on other posts and forums was accurate and it seems as if they have a nice product on their hands.  One thing I do have to disagree about…this claim on the website: “SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool designed to let you see exactly how your competitors got to the top in search engines — so you can mimic their winning linking strategy, improve on it, and blow right by them in Google, Yahoo! and MSN!”  Ahh, if it were only that easy.

Comments

[TL]

Purchased the full version of Spyglass a while back and I have been underwhelmed.

I agree that it is basically easy to "use" -- meaning point it in a direction and let it go. But I did not find the results to be very useful. Perhaps for a webmaster looking for a bunch of stat data?

In short, the interface is basic, but getting what you want out of it is very difficult. If you want to spend a lot of time getting up to speed and analyzing data, maybe you'll like this software.

Anyway, they have a free trial that you should definitely try first. I wish I would have ... then I wouldn't have purchased the full version.

[Max]

Thanks for the review! I'm going to purchase the full version of SEO Spyglass in a matter of minutes.

I can't agree with the comment above (from TL). This product seems to be the best backlink analyzer ever. TL, you say that "but getting what you want out of it is very difficult" -- and what exactly do you want from a backlink analyzer? Moreover, this tool provides a report in plain English if you can't read numbers.

Besides, I don't understand why didn't you just get a refund if you didn't like the software so much?

Anyway, seems like this comment was left by some kind of SEO SpyGlass' competition... too bad :(

The only thing I can't but agree is that you may get a free version, test it, and then make your own decision. Spyglass rocks! ;)