Weapons of Mass DistractionAxandra ARELIS Link Manager Review

This is my Axandra ARELIS Review

The folks over at Axandra have recently released a new version of IBP and ARELIS which combines them into a single UI. Arelis, in case you don't know, is software that does a competitive analysis of other sites and automates a huge portion of the work involved with gaining incoming links to your site. It will figure out who is linking to the site you want to beat, and come up with a nice list for you. It reminds me of the Link Popularity Improver tool in IBP, only much much better.

Here's how it works:

1. Feed it your site's URL.
2. Pick a search engine that you want to achieve a good rank on
3. Tell it what keyword you are targeting.

It will then find the top 10 sites for your keyword on the search engine you chose. After this it will ask what engines you want to check the backlinks on (up to 5 different engines at once). You can also specify how many links to analyze for each of the top 10 sites (up to 50 per site). After this you just sit back and let it run. You can run up to 16 threads at once just like with IBP, so that can speed things up quite a bit. It does give an estimate before you start how many pages it will have to analyze and how long it might take. I imagine maxing it out at 50 would take a while even on a really fast connection. I chose 20 to test the speed just now and it took less than 2 minutes with 16 threads. It outputs a big report just like the IBP optimization tool, which can be customized if you run an SEO business and purchase the business edition.

That is only a small portion of what this product does. The killer app here is finding link partners. There are a slew of options for this including (but not limited to):

• Find sites with link suggestion forms
• Find sites that link to competitors
• Find sites by keyword search
• Import links from directories

The top 3 items on that list are the most interesting. There is a huge benefit to be had by getting links from sites that link to your competition. Of course you can do this by hand yourself but after a few sessions of this you would've easily paid for ARELIS with the time you could have saved. Another huge benefit that I'm loving about this program is that it keeps track of these sites/links. If you come back to it later you won't have to wonder "Have I already emailed this guy or submitted my site to his page?" This reminds me a lot of the IBP link popularity tool, except it works SO MUCH BETTER. I think the guys over at Axandra realized what they had with that feature in IBP and split it out into another product.

This program also gathers a lot of detail about the sites that is adds to your list, including email address, traffic info (alexa?), pagerank, etc. This software is intended to be used to create your own links directory on your site, but there's no reason you'd need to do that. I would really really like to see a plugin for it to allow it to manage a phplinkdirectory site. It has reciprocal checking built in also so it can check all your link partners and make sure they still link back to your site.

Personally I think this program kicks serious ass, and did I mention they have a free demo (which isn't nearly as limited as you'd expect!) It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to see this thing crawling all these pages and collecting sites for me.. My computer finally has something to do in its spare time. :)

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