Utah SEO Consultant

Why I Use Advanced Web Ranking & Advanced Link Manager

Posted on November 6th, 2009 by Bart Gibby.
Categories: SEO.

Personal Experiences With Advanced Web Ranking

As a professional SEO Consultant for over 3 years now I have tried a few hundred software tools and services related to all things SEO. My 1^st experience with Advanced Web Ranking or AWR was at my college’s business incubator, a fellow entrepreneur was using it to check his rankings. At his day job he managed a team of SEO professionals and that’s the tool he was introduced to while working at that firm. I finally started using the tool my 1^st job working for a SEO firm. I was given minimal but adequate training to get the job done. At 1^st glace AWR seemed daunting and overly complicated. But as I got into the program and learned how to use I came to rely on its keen user tips and fast user interface.

AWR is meant for the advanced user whose needs are beyond the average SEO. So if you are looking for a cheap rank checking tool, go back where you came from this is not for you. But if you are looking for the most robust tool that can turn your ranking data inside you have found the holy grail of all search engine rank analysis tools.

I got approved to buy and use AWR at my second job at a SEM firm to manage more complex ranking situations for the larger clients that we had. Six months later we had a client who want us to check over 60,000 search terms a crossed multiple 50+ different search engines in 9 languages and 12 countries. We went 30 results deep for each engine, taking 10 results at a time. I did millions of search queries every month for this client using this tool. I do not know of and have not been able to find another tool that could do this.

6 Reasons why I use AWR on a Daily Basis Over Other Tools

1. Uses the windows task scheduler, which means if I am logged out of the machine the task still runs. Because it uses my username and password to login and check all the rankings for me.
   1. This allows me to log out of the computer when I am done using it for the for the day
2. Caphyon’s support is amazing:
   1. When their software didn’t roll IP proxy addresses and I was getting banned using 120 proxy IPs they started to roll the IP addresses.
   2. When some weird text characters in a URL ruined my data, they fixed it.
   3. When I wasn’t getting any data from search engines because they were outdated they listened and fixed the problem.
3. They add new search engines all the time, they have over 1,200+ all over the world covering multiple languages.
   1. They release new updates for search engines at least 3 times a week.
4. AWR has a data sharing server that allows for multiple users to access the projects edit them and them from multiple computers on the network.
   1. This means I no longer have to export the data then import the data into the tool onto a co-worker’s computer

5. AWR allows me to save the ranking positions for searches I am tracking for clients. So what, why I would need to know other rankings besides my clients’, right.

   

   Top ranking urls for the search term Utah SEO on Google.com

   Well here is why:

   1. When your client’s website ranking(s) drop you need to explain why, this helps you to tell the client who is and why using historical ranking history
   2. Because it has the historical data you can identify threats to your client’s rankings even before they pop into the top ten, thus helping to avoid the situation above
   3. Allows you to find what competing websites need to analyzed to see why they are moving up in rankings
6. The keyword research tool integrates allows me to pull keywords from google’s adowrds keyword tool or even use the word tracker API

Personal Experiences With Advanced Link Manager

I also had a client, at the second firm, who had 400+ websites that they had used to create “link farm” in which they had no idea was a bad thing. Of course the client did not disclose this

Screen Shot for ALM refferers tool tab IP address break down

information to me, it was discovered later on while getting benchmark for existing links versus links built. I was able to identify the “link farm” by using the link popularity tools namely due to the IP address feature in the ALM or Advanced Link Manager software. So ALM gathers not only the url and text of hyperlinks but the IP addresses of the link pages server. They ten allow you the sort and filter by ip address. Allowing you to do a break down the IP addresses by any of the IP class you like.

For my client the IP addresses were grouped in such a way that I got concerned and decided to investigate further. Because ALM also has quick links to “whois” data I was also able to see that the websites were all my clients. WOW, I was surprised. So that’s when they came clean and told me about all the other websites, client’s jump when they realize that if you can figure out the “link farm” then maybe the search engines can too. In this case Yahoo had them pegged 2 years earlier and had stopped sending them organic traffic for those 2 years.

After this “link farm” incident I made it part of my process to check for possible duplicate websites and “link farms” using ALM. A simple reverse IP lookup can tell me what other domains are the same IP which is usually adequate if you know the client only has one IP and is rather small with their revenues. But when they have more money than they know what to do it’s a good idea to ask some questions about how many websites they have and if they link to each other. So ALM comes in handy when the client doesn’t know or has intentionally decided not to reveal everything.

Why I Wrote this Post Now

I have been using AWR and ALM for years now. I recently took a job at a SEM Firm where they are not using AWR and ALM, I couldn’t stand using the other tools. I gave them a months trial run and well they fall short in so many areas it was ridiculous. Caphyon is incentivizing me to write this post, in which they will give me a free license of both AWR and ALM. So I’ll finally have a license of my own to use for my own websites and I’ll be able to use them at my new job.

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