Review: Caphyon Advanced Link Manager 2.0

Search engine optimization requires two kinds of procedures: (1) Preparing search-engine friendly webpages with lots of keyword clues to help search engines spiders accurately index your content. (2) Gathering links to your website through reciprocal linking or a variety of other strategies.

Caphyon's Advanced Link Manager is one of several similar tools designed to help you monitor and track incoming links to your site. I tried the program and was quite impressed. Since it uses cross-platform Java, it can be run on your favorite desktop machine, whether it's running Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux/Unix operating system.

To have Advanced Link Manager search for links you take the following steps. First, input the domain (or domains) you want to check for incoming links (sometimes called "backlinks"). Then select the search engines you want Link Manager to query as it builds a comprehensive list of incoming links. You can choose from A9, Alexa, AltaVista, AOL, Dogpile, Excite, Gigablast, Google, HotBot, Ixquick, Kanoodle, Mamma, Metacrawler, MSN, Wisenut, and Yahoo. (Of course, many of these search engines are "incestuous," getting their data from the same few sources, so to select all is overkill.)

Now Advanced Link Manager queries each of these search engines (excluding onsite links, unless you uncheck a box), pausing or sleeping between queries to be a bit friendlier. Link Manager enables users to insert both Google and Yahoo! API keys, to insure more responsible use of these search engine query resources.

What results is a comprehensive list of referrers, which can be sorted by PageRank, status, date added, and IP address (to detect multiple links from the same IP address). These URL paths can be filtered by "contains," "begins with" or "matches regular expression," allowing you to see URL patterns. You can also filter referrers by PageRank, and whether the referrer has moved up or down in rankings since you last checked. It also tells the type of link, whether a text or image link. If you like, you can import a list of target URLs from local files or relevant webpages that can be analyzed by the program.

Link Manager queries each of these referrers to examine links. For each it displays the link text and the URL of the link, as well as the page title on which the link appears and whether the page has a "no follow" tag (to prevent the link from being followed by search engines). Columns in the Backlinks tab also show for each referrer domain: PageRank, Alexa Rank, number of outbound links, number of backlinks to your site, links added since last checked, links removed, and normal links (older links that still remain after you last checked). The Professional version can also create reports that you can send to clients, including graphics that show over time whether you are gaining or losing links, called "backlinks evolution" and "search engine evolution."

The program exhibits flexibility, speed, and ease of use. If you're managing a links campaign for your company or organization's site, this tool looks quite helpful and enables you to see exactly where you need to focus your efforts to improve the number and quantity of inbound links. It not only allows you to monitor a linking campaign. It also allows you to analyze both your own site's incoming linking patterns and those of your competitors, so you can go after links from sites that already link to your competitors.

Advanced Link Manager comes in three versions. Standard (US $99) is good for small companies that are doing their own linking campaigns. Professional (US $149) allows customizable reports that can be sent to clients as well as tools to find potential linking partners. Both include 12 months of updates and maintenance. A Professional Plus package (US $229) provides an additional two years of the maintenance plan. The program works well, but I found it sometimes takes a few days to get e-mail questions answered by the vendor. Recommended.