Forum Moderators: buckworks
Does anyone use and/or recommend IBP? Just got yet another ad for it and i figure for $250 it might be worth a shot. Is it just a reporting tool or does it actually make effective and intelligent suggestions?
I do not think much of it, the idea on the optimisation side of things is to compare your site to the top 10 results for a given keyword.
But those top 10 sites are generally the major players - amazon, wiki ect.
What is the point comparing the title text of an Amazon page with your own for example - none at all, it is self evident why all these pages are high on Google, site age, backlinks ect.
The other part of the optimisation process is again to compare the backlinks of the top 10 sites for your keyword against your site - again totally pointless, we all know more links are better, the trick is getting them I think - there are some really good tools for looking at backlinks that are free on the internet and are way more advanced than what IBP does.
Arellis is now included so you can send link swap requests - a little pointless now but a link is a link I guess.
There is also a page which shows how each of your pages ranks for a given set of keywords and can be used historically - I run it once a week and compare how many top 10 listings I have - this is genuinely an excellent feature, if you have more than one site it can be very useful.
The final feature is a submitter to submit your pages to all the different search engines/directories, I was quite keen on this feature but now I can see that it is pretty pointless as the only 3 that matter are the big 3 and these can find you without submitting through your links.
So all in all I like the Ranking feature - it is good, Arellis might be useful also for linking, but I do not think much of site optimisation abilities.
Also price wise the $250 is for 1 years use, after that you have to pay something like $80 per year to keep using it, this is a ripoff I think, if the company disappears - which software companies of course do then your software is dead, also I do not like the way the software constantly "phones home" - I do not trust software with this ability as I do not know what data is bening sent back.
Just my opinions, hope this helps.
cheers.
