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Oct 24

Arachnophobia…

Feed the Spiders, Heavy construction, Inorganic agriculture, Internet Marketing, Noobs Add comments

There is a beta tool online, about site assessment and SEO called Spydermate.

It doesn’t seem to do much at a casual glance, but it’s actually a neat analysis tool.

First of all, you need to register, because the unregistered crawl goes up to 25 pages only.

Crawl your site, and check out the analysis.

You can skip the summary page, it is kind of worthless. The first section informs you if your site is linked from edu or gov sites, as if that is an important SEO factor… The most useful info here are the broken links. Fix them.

The analysis tab is more of the same, just for a quick view of the Alexa rank and Yahoo linkdomain. Again, the tool insists of informing you about edu links. The most significant number here is the Average Page Depth, which should be as close as possible to 1. Something like 1.25 is more realistic.

And finally, we get to the juicy parts, the Link Equity tab. This tab, is pretty much useless unless you click on the “show rows: 1000″ (and of course had your whole site crawled, not just the 25 pages).

And now we see some cool things. First of all, this page, unless it times out, shows you a great overview of your website. Each and every page, analyzed, PR, backlinks, broken links. An experienced SEO, can simply glance at this page and predict the rankings… Especially if you click on “Targeted Keywords”.

The keywords it shows, link to SEOBook’s keywords research tools, which I personally find useless, but it’s there if you want it. No idea why.

If you don’t see the value in the Link Equity tab, go do some more reading, you still have a lot to learn.

Next comes the Scheduled Crawling. Another thing I personally have no use for, but others might want it. It does what the name says. Figure it out for yourself.

And the second useful feature of this tool, the Compare tab. Simple, when you are registered, it automatically saves your previous crawls with a timestamp. With literally two clicks, you can see an overview of your site between point A and B in time. Awesome, fast, easy and useful.

EDIT: It seems that I have to spell that out for some people. You can compare two different sites.

Some might think that I bury this tool in this review. Actually I am not. As I always say, I am a person that looks for the 80/20 rule in my tools. Well, while I have no use for the silly tabs in Spydermate, I have great use for Link Equity and Compare Crawls.

Honestly, this tool has become the mate (pun intended) for my SeoQuake plugin, another amazing website overview tool. With those two, I can easily skim through the stats of other websites, see how good their SEO is, how “stable” their rank is, what their weakness is. By comparing the overview of the competitors to my sites, I can find out what to do to outrank them.

As I said above, if you don’t see the value here, go do some reading. No, NOT EBOOKS. :)

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written by Glowleaf     \\ tags: , ,
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One Response to “Arachnophobia…”

  1. You Know You Are Too Far Into Online Marketing When… Says:
    November 12th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    [...] I said in the review post, experienced SEO’s find the site compare ability [...]

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