SEO Spyglass - Part 1 by Terry Kyle This page is a bit of a scrappy HTML job but I used this format to make the pics below nice and big. I know this page won’t be winning any design awards (drats!) but hopefully the info is worthwhile… OK, so I’ve been monkeying around with SEO Spyglass for a little while and I wanted to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this SEO analytical tool. I suspect there will be quite a few (forthcoming) parts to this analysis simply because of the depth of information that SPG (my acronym for SEO Spyglass) offers – but it ain’t perfect as we will see. Now the first thing that SPG offers is a verdict on several crucial (and over-asked) questions in SEO and on this front SPG has proven me wrong about a couple of key issues. Let’s look at a couple of the most common of these SEO issues/assumptions: [1] Backlink relevance. Now if you’ve read my recommendations before, you’ll know that I don’t believe that the relevancy of links matters at all. If I have a man-boob site (and I do!), I’ll happily take links from aerospace forums and Siamese fighting fish sites all day long. My Warrior Forum SEO experiment, which admittedly wasn’t hugely scientific, supported this view. Matt Cutts, the head Google KGB Search Engine guy, is always banging on about LSI, relevant links blah blah blah. BUT, if you examine the volume of links that SPG finds (WAY more than Market Samurai by the way as the pics below will show), most of the #1 sites that I have been analysing have TONS (and I mean tons) of completely irrelevant backlinks. It could however be argued that the linking power is mainly coming from those few relevant sites but that big an imbalance in SEO would have been obvious long before now. Case closed there then. Possibly. In a way, Matt Cutts has to keep repeating that company line for two possible reasons: firstly, if he said something like, “yeah go ahead and spam your links on any old site, we’ll reward that in the SERPs”, it would be a green light for even more (kind of) junk links across the Web. Secondly, I suspect that a completely LSI driven Web is where Google wants to get to – eventually. The killer problem though is that genuine, true viral articles that go ballistic on the Web do naturally attract honest 'rewardable' backlinks from completely irrelevant sites. Like the social nature of the ‘real world’ that Google sort of mirrors with backlinking, plumbers do know lawyers whose daughters date Communists whose cousins are genetic engineers etc etc. Anyway, back to SPG! The second big issue where SPG busted me was on anchor text. On this one I have followed Angela Edwards’ advice (not blaming her at all) of using ONLY the exact anchor text keyword that I want that target page to rank for. I have had great results with this approach even though it doesn’t look at all natural. Here’s the funny thing though. The #1 sites that I have been analysing have a staggeringly high proportion of unanchored links (probably images without alt text) – like more than 40-50% - and a staggeringly low number of exact anchor keywords. Unanchored links, irrelevantly anchored links, any kind of link, it seems, helps. Here's what I mean: If that is the case and of course a lot of this is speculation and experimentation, then we can all participate in ultra-high PR forums with posts, threads etc and just mask our site link inside a legitimate looking signature like (e.g. a Joomla forum like Joomla.org with a homepage PR9 - even forum.joomla.org is PR8): Blah blah blah. Thanks for your help. Useful Joomla Resources. Where almost all of the signature phrase ("Useful Joomla Resources") was actually linked to a good Joomla resource page but one syllable or couple of letters away from the most likely clicked ‘hot zone’ (probably the middle to the end of the phrase) was linked to your weight loss Clickbank blog e.g. “se” in Useful. Though there is disagreement about this, try backlinking the full stop, smiley faces etc. If you START a thread on that Joomla forum, the bots will see you on that PR8 forum homepage until a new thread bumps you off (very high PR sites get crawled constantly – use Google Alerts to see what I mean). With so many #1 sites having so many unanchored backlinks, they must be using tactics like these too. In a way, and I am contradicting my earlier recommendations here, just get high PR backlink volume and a lot of it. Especially when you see how many backlinks high ranking sites might really have (and SPG is probably not seeing them all either!). Let your title page and H1 tag tell Google what keyword to rank it for. Usually these sites will have the keyword they rank highly for as their title and/or H1 tag. With backlinks, as SPG reveals it’s volume, volume, volume – preferably high PR though these #1 sites get tons of PR- (like n/a) and PR0 backlinks e.g. Where can you get the prime forum and blog sites that these #1 sites are using? Just select it in SPG and it will show you the exact URL which you can click on and log e.g. Now I don’t want to overload with you stuff and make SPG out to be perfect but look at this comparison of backlinks found for my Small Business Ideas book on Amazon (normally in top 5 on Page 1 but has dipped off Page 1 for that term as truckloads of backlinks are being added – all normal Google stuff): http://www.amazon.com/Small-Business-Ideas-Latest-Greatest/dp/0955898900 Here’s Yahoo Site Explorer’s Result: Now Backlinkwatch.com: And Market Samurai: What about SEO Spyglass (duplicate pages not sites removed): Feel free to harvest plenty of nice backlinks from that list (the free version of SPG limits you to 1000 results only, paid version has unlimited backlinks reporting). Remember, this is NO affiliate promotion here, just my analysis and here are SOME of the big problems with SEO Spyglass: [1] Unless you buy the $250/£250 “Enterprise Version”, you can’t export the backlink URLs from the program. The $100 version let’s you export just 5 URLs. Generous - not! Helpful Warrior Phil Moulds filled me on how UK buyers pay the same amount in pounds that US buyers do in dollars i.e. UK buyers are getting shafted big-time. Thank you Phil! [2] The “one-off” purchase price is actually a 6-month licence. [3] You can’t print out or save their recommendations for ranking against a specific site unless you buy the most expensive Enterprise Version. I got around this by Selecting all of the relevant chapter, copying and pasting it into a Landscape Word document (to fit in the information). It doesn’t look that pretty but all the info is there. [4] Link Assistant (the company behind SPG) recommend things like ‘approaching webmasters to ask for a link there’ (didn’t that go out in 1992? This is the least time-efficient and productive way possible to gain backlinks, in my view) and they also recommend reciprocal links (a big SEO no-no these days). So that’s Part 1 on SPG. If this was a bit basic for you, I will be going into it more deeply in the coming days and weeks but hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought and insight there. You can email me at terrykyle2 (at) yahoo.com if you have further comments or questions. I didn’t do this as a blog post as that would have cramped the pics down and I wanted you to be able to see the graphics clearly. Talk to you soon and keep on backlinking! All the best Terry Kyle The Backlinks Black Belt Report http://backlinksblackbelt.com/blog/