Hey everyone - at our SEO firm we use Arelis to organize our link partners. I think we're outgrowing it, however, and was wondering if anyone had an idea for an alternative. I've looked at some of the various programs out there but haven't found one that does the main thing we need: A SHARED DATABASE Our basic problem is that we have 6 people working on SEO - and we need to have multiple people working on the same site at once. For example, widgets.com has 5 people working on it, which means 5 copies of Arelis (at $300 a pop) - which is actually 5 different versions of the site's data. So we have to export-import each other's data a couple of times a day in order to be sure we all have the same set of data. Annoying, huh? Does anyone know of a kind of program that allows multiple users to share a database? (through networked computers in our case)
Just out of curiosity, I'm guessing that Arelis has worked pretty well for you in finding linking opportunities?
Ask them to custom upgrade it or permission to get an upgrade written. Can't see it being hard to incorporate that kind of an upgrade.
Good call, it'd be much easier for you to do that than to have to relearn a new software program (as long as you're happy with Arelis otherwise). Also, it makes the software that much better and I'm sure Axandra will appreciate that. -Brian Renner entrepreneur7
Actually mopacfan - all 13,000 of our link partners were gathered by hand, we just use Arelis as a glorified spreadsheet to keep track of them and email them from. We tried that - twice. I've contacted their customer service deparment multiple times about making this change. I too think it would be a small fix - but they're not open to any customization opportunities. I'm almost to the point of hiring a hacker to modify it for us - but then I doubt we'd be able to recieve future upgrades.
Very interesting, wouldn't excell be easier? I've been considering purchasing the product and just wasn't sure if it was worth the hundred bucks. That has got to be very frustrating.
They have probably built into their security that each licence is only valid on one pc or something like that... which is the mental block in moving forward to multi users. It does depend on how they wrote it though. I live with a software developer who has written a few programs for me and it's crazy getting him off one way of doing something sometimes. A talented, but stubborn bastard. You just need to motivate developers. Try telling them it can't be done, that usually works (look at Shawn!). lol ... It's ok if you can't do it, I just was interested to know if it was possible that way. ... Wait 5 mins. ... Hear the explanation of why it can't be done that way. ... Then leave him for a few hours or days ... Then the email reads... 'I worked it out for you, here is the upgrade.' ...
*Hilarious!!Dominic, i know a engineer who is the same way* As of recently we started using IBP here. it is frustrating not being able to share data easily, even though I am the only one currently using the program, I wont be in the future and this is going to pose a problem for us. another problem i see is aside from performing auto queries to search engines, which is not allowed (of course they do not mention this before purchase and after realizing this i questioned them and they told me 'just do not use it a lot’ meow! excuse me!) also you can only perform one search or check at a time, which is time consuming considering we have over 11,000 client sites. some checks can take up to a few hours to complete for one site. it does have useful, helpful features as well like the reports that auto created, unlimited projects can be managed, analyzes keyword density, optimization and it has a spider simulator etc as far as the link popularity improver, that is helpful, i haven’t had a chance to fully use it yet but im thinking it only applies to sites that have a page which you can request reciprocal links? not sure. anyway, short review but my point is we are also looking for a similar product which has sharing capabilities and does not offend search engines.
mopacfan - Very good question. The advantage to using Arelis over just using Excel boils down to two basic features: 1. Emailing Arelis has built-in mail-merge like functionality - so we can email link partners from within Arelis without changing programs. This is extremely handy. 2. Page generation We use Arelis to generate the link pages for all of our sites. Again - very quick and handy. There are quite a few functions in Arelis we don't even touch. The "link-finder", check-links function, and the built-in browser are never used. We could find auxilary programs to fill the emailing and page-generation functions perhaps - but at this point we're a little too far under the covers with Arelis. The other problem that I haven't even mentioned yet in this thread is the sheer size our databases our approaching. With 13,000 sites in one "project" in Arelis, switching from one project to another can sometimes take 3-5 minutes.....very long and frustrating in computer time
SS, thank you very much for the reply. I think I will probably purchase the software for my own use since I'm only working with one site. I think for what I'm doing, this will be the best use of my time and limited resources. Thanks again for such a great explanation.