Did SEO Spyglass Ever Get Its Own Database?

[The Expert]

I was wondering if SEO Spyglass ever got its own database of links. I remember that this was in the discussion after Site Explorer went down, but I don't see anything about it on the company blog and don't see a checkbox for it in the software itself.

[Dana Gaus]

If you check out their discussion forum there is a thread talking about it as well as some others. It looks like they have suggested some work arounds but dont currently have a good replacement for YSE.

[Mike Anthony]

SEo spyglass blew a whole lot of smoke on the day Yahoo shut down about not being affected much by it and that the results would still be there but they were as affected as anyone. Yes they use Blekko which is one of the better free ones out there but on a lot of domains Blekko and the other provider exalead etc just don't have the reach.

I think theres no big solution coming either. It takes multimillions of dollars to have what Yahoo had because they were a major search engine. TO get your own database to rival Yahoo you have to be a major search engine with alot of facilities to crawl through the internet in big enough chunks.

All these companies knew this was a coming for quite some time. It didn't surprise them. They just don't have the resources to replace Yahoo site explorer. Seo quake is pretty worthless now as well.

[The Expert]

This is like, a big bummer. Of course, it's a limitation that applies to pretty much everyone.

The immediate adjustment that I'm making to my workflow is that I'm maximizing each site I can get links from.

Before, I used to find a competitor's site, find where he was getting his backlinks from and then get one link from each of those sites. Now, since I'm getting less results when examining competitors, I'll max out the backlinks from each site I get links from. Instead of dropping one well-written blog comment, I'll drop 7 to 10 over the course of 10 days and simply keep each one in a spread sheet to track progress.

I lose a bit of link diversity this way, but I think I'll be consistently wracking up more inbound links (and thus more link juice) than the next guy who's not choosing a path and going with it because he's waiting around for some manna to fall from heaven and make things the way they were before.

It's the whole "Who Moved my Cheese?" in real time.

[Marc_L]

I use ahrefs.com, export those links then paste them into spyglass and then click rebuild. Basically doubles the links found in most cases.

[Ian Harmon]

Looks like they've just announced it.....

New powerful backlink source just launched!

It'll be interesting to see just how much difference this makes. I stopped using it after YSE went down the pan.

[MikeFriedman]

I've been running some tests on this new database today. So far I have run through 5 different websites. Here is what I did. First I ran the site through SpyGlass with just SpyGlass's new database (SG). Then I ran it through with all the other databases and not using SpyGlass's new database (NSG). Next I ran the same site through using all of the databases (both the old ones and new database) to get an idea of how much overlap there was between the old databases and SpyGlass's new system (Both). I wanted to get an idea if it was just pulling the same results as other sources or if it was pulling a lot of additional links as well. Lastly, I ran the site through Ahrefs to get a good comparison from a popular source. Here are the results.

Site 1:
SG - 68 links
NSG - 75 links
Both - 137 links (62 additional links)
Ahrefs - 73 links

Site 2:
SG - 1071 links
NSG - 229 links
Both - 1247 links (1018 additional links)
Ahrefs - 1361 links

Site 3:
SG - 628 links
NSG - 308 links
Both - 923 links (615 additional links)
Ahrefs - 710 links

Site 4:
SG - 594 links
NSG - 168 links
Both - 734 links (566 additional links)
Ahrefs - 627 links

Site 5:
SG - 590 links
NSG - 433 links
Both - 922 links (489 additional links)
Ahrefs - 734 links

Obviously, this is a limited test so far, but the results look pretty positive. The new database seems to be pulling in a lot of additional links that the other backlink sources in SpyGlass were not. It also compares favorably to the number of links you will find in Ahrefs.

[MikeFriedman]

Has anyone else been testing this at all? I'm curious if others are finding similar results.

[SEOtraveler]

I own an Enterprise SEO SpyGlass version and was doing competition research for the following site: seosmarty.com

After Yahoo Site Explorer went down, SEO SpyGlass was showing 677 links

After the new db was launched, SEO SpyGlass found 17,518 links in total: 676 from search engines, 16,719 from the database

[JSProjects]

Looks good Mike.

Guess I may need to give it a try.

[topijerami]

spyclass must buy right?
can give me tool do not buy,
dont have money eh

[MikeFriedman]

I ran 6 more sites through the same test. I'll just post the totals, not each site individually.

SG - 9648
NSG - 1497
Both - 10,805
Ahrefs - 13,197

SpyGlass beat Ahrefs on every site except one where Ahrefs found over 3000 more links than SpyGlass.

I guess the next question would be is there a lot of overlap between SpyGlass and Ahrefs or are they finding a lot of different links from eachother? Is it worthwhile to use both of them in conjunction together or is each on their own sufficient?

[PrincessJasmine]

How do I use their new database?
Do I need to update my Spyglass? Or does it automatically apply on their backend?

[MikeFriedman]

When you load it up, there should be an update that runs.

[Mike Anthony]

Yeah definitely an improvement and still in beta. Looks promising but I have my doubts with their limited resources it will totally replace Yahoo (but they don't have to in order to be a good tool) so I will be continuing to use all of them to see as many links as I can.

[yukon]

I'm about done with SeoSpyglass!

Heck I'm trying to check links & so far I get 4 captchas, screw that, & I'm not paying for a captcha solver...

I closed it out after the 4th captcha.

What sucks is Seospyglass knew a year in advance Yahoo was going to dump YE.

[MikeFriedman]

If you only use their in-house database, there are no captchas.

It is mostly Google. If you just turn off Google, which barely provides any links anyhow, you won't see captchas.