Dallas Internet Marketing

Review of Advanced Link Manager & Advanced Web Ranking

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I am a member of the SEOBook forum, a high level community of business owners, marketers and web developers all trading tips and asking questions related to marketing on the internet. It’s a really great forum, and I often catch myself sneaking away to check out what is going on within the forum walls.

Two tools that comes up over and over again in people’s recommendations are Advanced Link Manager and Advanced Web Ranking. “How did you make that chart?”, “Oh, its easy with Advanced Link Manager’s link popularity graphs.” “How do you track link growth over time?” “Just use AWR”.The chorus goes on and on.

I dislike fluff in describing a product, but honestly, the word of mouth in the SEObook community about both of these software products is really impressive (especially because there are no affiliate links happening when it is discussed). After hearing people rant and rave about the tool, I thought I would take advantage of a promotion they were running offering a copy of the tools in exchange for a review.

Here have been my experiences with the tool. I will start with Advanced link manager.

One of the biggest problems I have faced as I try and help businesses grow their internet presence, is tracking website’s back links for growth, new communities to get involved in and checking in on competitors back links to see the methods they use. The Yahoo Site Explorer is a good tool, but the interface can take forever to sift through if you are dealing with anything more than a handful of links and it is impossible to keep track of link growth over time through the tool. I like Majestic SEO and highly recommend it, but its downfall is that the links it generates are often from several years ago and don’t exist on the web anymore. That said, I think Majestic gives the best quality link data available. Its just that you have to rummage through a lot of noise to find the jewels.

The immediate thing I liked about Advanced Link Manager is that it verifies which links are still in existence. So you can take the great data that Majestic SEO gives you, import it into Advanced Link Manager let the tool verify the live links and weed out the dead links and you have the best list of live links for your site, or a competitors site.

This feature seems helpful for starting with new clients and beginning the tedious task of studying who is already linking to them.

The second thing I noticed about Advanced Link Manager was the graphic display of link evolution over time. This is really helpful in that it allows for quick visualization of the success or failure of link cultivation over time. The fact that you can plot competitors and measure growth rates is a great feature in being able to show clients their own strengths and weaknesses and give them an idea of the effort they will need to invest to succeed.

The third handy feature is the ability to analyze link anchor text. The layout allows you to get a quick overview of what words people have used to link to the sites in question and allows you to see how people are referring to your site. Recently a business that I consult with asked, “We are doing well for so many key phrases, but why is our competition beating us on this one phrase. Why is that?” By analyzing the anchor text it was easy to show the client the huge amount of links the competition had built up using that one phrase of anchor text. Now this same feature is available with Majestic SEO, but because of all the noise in the back link data of Majestic, combining the two could be a great one-two punch.

I am including a big screen shot to give a clear view:

As for Advanced Web Ranking, it’s great at grinding out large amounts of website ranking data for clients. E-commerce sites, with whom I primarily work, want to keep track of lots and lots of keywords and see where they rank. Given the vast levels of traffic change that can occur with moving up or down a couple spots in the rankings, being able to import a huge list of keywords and have it return back the ranking positions will allow me to blow through those type of reports with ease.

Another great thing about AWR is the ability to track search engine ranking over time. For some of my clients certain keywords are really valuable for their business and to be able to show changes in rankings over time helps demonstrate the effectiveness of the campaigns we run.

Again, another large screen shot

You can also track rankings across search engines so you can see how your site is doing in Google, Yahoo or Bing.

As for critiques of the software, I do have a few. First, on Advanced Link Manager, the interface is a bit stiff. There are a lot of features, but I feel like they are thrown at you all at once and it seems a bit difficult to navigate. In addition, some of its focus on reciprocal link partners seems to promote an SEO tactic that was outdated several years ago. Overall though, I think it will become a regular tool in my tool belt.

As for Advanced Web Ranking, the biggest beef I have with it is one I don’t know if there is a solution to. Search Engines are doing so much personalization of search results as well as changing results based on user location, the SERPs can change drastically even within state, let alone trying to work with international clients. When using Advanced Web Rankings, I saw advertised a feature for monitoring rankings from different data centers, which would be a big help for me, but I was unable to find how to use that option with the actually software. It could just be my oversight, but nonetheless, the ability to check rankings from different data centers to me, is crucial and would be a make or break for me in using the software regularly.

I don’t have a good solution for this manually either, but I was hopeful that Advanced Web Ranking would be able to handle this feature.