Using SEO Spyglass

I can confirm what your saying through my own observation with market samurai.
Those that have highly relevent site backlinks are very powerful.

but how do you know that the other links are useless?

You are one step ahead of the crowd when you can make your own judgement and observations like that. People will argue with you until they are blue in the face that their backlink packages work but all that matters is what you put into action to get the desired effect.

One thing you have to remember though is that not every website on the web is run by marketer's trying to manipulate the search engines for their own benefit. They get their links through viral or normal marketing, useful and reference materials, media exposure etc. They will thereore naturally lack the refined anchor text that IM websites usually possess. As you get more experienced and your domains begin to age you will notice what backlinking methods work the best.

Efficiency is an important matter for many marketers because they are trying to promote dozens of domains at a time and the largest time-sink is often the off site promotion.

In my experience it all depends on what niches you are looking at.

If you are looking at niches where the payday is high enough, what you have are entities with significant amounts of money, time, people and/or other resources to do build up a huge brand, advertise, build something that goes viral, etc. So clearly, in these situations, the types of links they will be getting back will be people linking to them from mostly relevant sites to stuff they like, think is cool, find useful, etc. Also, because it will be other people linking in and they have no control over the anchor text in the links (if there is any anchor text), the anchor texts will obviously be all of the board.

These sites will also tend to have huge amounts of links, from lots of different ips, etc. Of course, this is a huge endeavor. If this is the route you want to go in, when starting out in IM with $500, good luck with that.

Now, if these sites could control the anchor text coming in, don't you think they would? I bet you they would, but they have no control of them.

Now, in 99% of the markets that IMers go after, we are talking about micro niches where we don't have the resources to do that sort of branding, viral marketing, advertising, etc. It just doesn't make financial or other sense. So, it is a fact of life we need to manufacture backlinks.

If you look at the typical markets that clickbank products target for instance, you typically wont' see the type of site that is described above. Instead, you will find sites that need to manufacture their links because they don't have the resources to get the massive numbers of links to rank well in google and the other SERPs.

Now, if you have $20,000 to build a huge brand for the market "how to deal with panic attacks", great for you. But, most of us do not have that luxury.

What I have experienced and others here, and our sites play it out, is that we get sites ranked well in these typical markets getting links from sites, some from relevant ones, some for non-relevant ones (i.e., I don't really check, so obviously some will randomly be "relevant"). In terms of relevancy, to be honest, i'm not even sure what that means. Some one here argue that relevancy only relates to the particular page is on, so in theory you could tailor a profile page with an about me, bio, etc. section which turns your bio page into a relevant page to your niche even if the main domain is about hamsters and your site is about IM. Again, that's if relevancy really matters all that much and it hasn't so far with my sites.

If you are going to be creating a niche site on at home teeth whitening, you obviously could spend a lot of money and/or time for the branding and try to get the sites to link in and become profitable in the long-term. Or, as many of us do successfully, you can spend very little of your own money or time and manufacture the links from a variety of relevant and non-relevant sites and become profitable in the short-term.

Most people do espouse IP diversity from links, no matter what school of thought they come from in terms of backlinks, so i'm not sure what including that point means here. I didn't think this was debated, but I guess I could be wrong.

So, to summarize...

(1) clearly in some markets a big budget branding effort can help you build a brand that others will link to, which will result in very varied anchor texts and usually relevant sites linking in (i.e., you aren't the one creating the links);

(2) most of us do not have those sort of resources for the markets we are getting into;

(3) unfortunately, you can't draw a conclusion from a correlation with regard to #1, as there are lots of other factors, namely you don't have internet marketers trying to compete in those markets unless they have the $$ for that branding.

Tom

Hey Tom, what do you use it for mostly?
Checking your sites' backlinks or the competition's?
(probably both. )

Good stuff, Tom. You gave some great info in this thread.
Thanks

another thing I dont understand with SEO Spyglass.

I checked backlinks to an inner page with spyglass (says 42) then I checked the same page in yahoo explorer ( says 114). I thought spyglass was supposed to show them all? At least that is what is says in the advertising page for it.

article submissions, directories and web 2.0 sites are not shown for me in SPyglass but they are most certainly there in Yahoo site explorer!


what gives?

Hmm... I'm not sure.
In the free version that I had, when I tried selecting all sources, it wouldn't allow me. The only one you could check was Yahoo.com. Before you click Next for it to begin its analysis, you select the option "Show expert options on the next screen" that brings up all of the available sources/websites. The free trial won't allow you to select anything except Yahoo. At least for me that's how it worked.