Forum Moderators: martinibuster
If that's enough for you:
The good:
you can mantain a database of your linking sites once is set up (a lot of work anyway) you can update your link directory with a little effort.
The bad:
Everything is too manual, link sending link requests and link checker doesn't help at all: you must enter the exact url where your link is (yes for every link you get you must enter that manually)
Link checker does his work badly and you can loose a lot of linking partners or have not reciprocating linking partners. The program is very deficent on that.
If your link partner moved your link, it will appear as not linking and you probably will exclude (but he is linking to you in other page).
If your link template changes due to a change in your site, you must build it again.
If you know other way tell me, I use it but I spend a lot of time with poor results I guess.
I find that all link software requires a smart human operator to be effective. If you can set the Arelis spider up properly, it can be worth using.
<good conscience moment> However, do not use the automated e-mail template feature. It's cheap. Spend the time to contact each webmaster individually. If you really want their link that bad, show them a bit of respect! </good conscience moment>
I don't use it for managing links, checking existing links or for publishing link directories mainly becaused it is workstation based only allowing one person to work on getting links for a single site at a time. I prefer a web server based management solution because then I can have multiple linkers (persons) work on getting links for one site at one time, reviewing sites and contacting them if they meet whatever criteria has been established for the target site.
I too am using Arelis. All the above ideas are true for me too.
There are limits of course - For example I wish Arelis would permit data mining (i.e., finding potential partner sites) by key terms *within the URL itself*. In other words, I would love to be able to search the SEs and find the www.widgets.com/add-your-url.html pages sorted by keywords "widget" "blue widget" etc. Right now the keyword filters extract 3:1 unusable sites to usable sites (in my industry)
On the plus side - if you've set up hundreds of link exchanges for site A you can easily duplicate or export site A directory to a new site B and apply all the info you have accumulated for A to the new site. This is elegant for my purposes
I previously used Excel spreads for this and once I got past 100 exchanges, managing the thing became unwieldy. I use arelis daily.
Howver, ALE has its share of problems too. One of them is its price, $120 a shot, though you can bargain it down if you buy a bunch of them. The link tracking/monitoring function works better in ALE than it does in Arelis, but not much better. So, I use Reciprocal Link Checker to monitor links. I started modifying ALE right away, to add user management functions so that I could pay the linkers on a performance basis, so that it tracks their statistics. I think I used it for one site before I started adding functionality. Uh, I disabled the bulk mail, every site has to be manually reviewed, only a single mail can be sent at a time. Basically, we've rewritten the full functionality of the program to better serve a more industrialized process.
Do I recommend it? I would recommend that you do a little more research than I did. There are some other good scripts available that you can find by searching for link management php scripts that are probably better but not as well marketed.
3:1 is the right ratio. I think we actually use about 30% of the sites that Arelis collects. However, it takes only about 30 seconds to review each site sufficient to know whether to delete it or not. The problem is that in a DB of 20,000 sites or so you might hit a patch of 1000 links and do nothing but delete sites, hardly a feeling of accomplishment.
While duplicating link directories is certainly a possiblity with this script, I don't do it. I do take link friendly subset DBs and scramble them and then use them on other sites, but each time the directory is created with the theme of the target site in mind so that no two link directories end up the same or even noticably similar.
yeah, 100 sites in excel is about the most I could manage too.
I do use search strings in Arelis such as
"add-your-url.html" +"blue widgets", along with about a hundred other search strings.
Here's a tip: searching in keyword mode, using such terms as the above finds you sites that do engage in linking and have similar content to what you may be looking for. However, I've found my best spidering DBs come from taking a list of domains that have successfully traded links with me, and then using competitor mode to find other sites that link to them. Because, after all, I'm not just looking for sites that just engage in linking, but sites which actively engage in successful linking relationships.
