Ok so I have been testing a few of the reciprocal link management and gathering tools that are on the market. I figure I might as well share what I found for those that are insterested. I have listed them in the order I found them the most useful. Arelis - This is by far the best of the three in my honest opinion. It allows you to of course search the web by keyword or by your competiton backlinks. You can keep track of the status of a link exchange, as well as categorize them how you see fit. It also allows you to generate a webpage with the resutls of the links. Generally I find myself simply exporting the data into a xls, then importing into a Database for ease of use. You can also filter out certin websites, country extensions, which I find extremely useful. A down side is that you have to click a button to send each email. All in all Arelis seems to be the best choice. LinkAssistant - This tool felt like a slimmed down version of Arelis(reverse engineering anyone?). I did not find a filter for the search, nor did I find any export function. The plus side of this tool is that it gives you the options to search and return the websites google pagerank as well as the SERPs from google, yahoo, and msn. Another plus is that it sends all emails at once. Unlike Arelis though, editing them email is no where near as easy. PR Prowler - The simplest of the three tools. OR in other words, a complete waste of download time. It feels like it was made as a high school programming assignment. I guess that may be a bit harsh, but this is my review. I hope that in the future Arelis will pick up the two pluses that LinkAssistant has on it. IT truly does save me a lot of time. If anyone knows of a better tool, I would love to know about it. Oh and as is always said, dont abuse tools like these. Everything in life should be done in moderation.
Just my two cents into the comparison of Arelis and LinkAssistant... Firstly, I can't understantd what was so difficult for you while editing emails. Perhaps you were looking at some early versions. AFAIK since 1.3.1 they have improved thier email client a lot - you may take a look if you wish to... Secondly, the thing I like about LinkAssistant is that it is being constantly improved, providing new features from one version to another (and new versions are available every two weeks or so). They are young - and that is their promlem IMO. But they are willing to be the best - and I feel that they'll implement export, search filters as well as many other things quite soon. At the sane time the latest Arelis update was released more than a year ago - seems like developers have just forgotten about this tool and are not going to improve it any more (though there are still a lot of bugs in Arelis) Finally, LinkAssistant allows to promote as many domains as you wish to - for just $79, whereas Arelis - for $300. See the difference? I agree with you saying that Arelis is better for the current moment. But I may bet it won't be the best in a couple of months or so.
You are very correct LinkAssistant does feel like a "Diamond in the Rough". If they keep on top of its updates its shows great promiss. When I posted the above, I had just downloaded their lastest release, 1.2.1. I will redownload and check it out again. I had not relized that the latest of Arelis was so old. Bad show on Axandra's behalf.
Don't forget this little free resource. It is a link exchange that lets you view a list of sites that are ready to exchange links with you. The contact name, email address, and other information is already provided on the list of available sites. You can base the list off of your keywords. You can then click a box to have the system automatically send an email to the contact person to request a link exchange. If you want FREE and GOOD then check it out.. Value Exchange http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/webinv.html -Jon
I'm evaluating the trial version of Arelis. Right off the bat, I noticed that in outputting a directory to html for upload to the server, you cannot customize the name of the html file. It's either underscores or hyphens. So if I have an existing link directory that's fairly well along the way and, for example, the naming structure goes like this: business_it-consulting.html business_it-consulting2.html etc I can't output pagenames like that from Arelis. Therefore, there's no way for me to switch from my existing software to Arelis. It seems to me like such an obvious feature to be included; the ability to customize a particular filename for each category name. For example: Category name (link text): Business > IT Consulting Corresponding filename (a href): business_it-consulting.html Seems that if they would add such a feature, it would allow anyone using any other link management app to seamlessly switch over to Arelis. The potential for increasing their customer base could be huge. As it is, the only way I could use their app to replace my existing app would be to write a batch file that runs in the output directory of Arelis, and renames each file one by one, each time I add links to the directory. Basically, I need an app that will allow me to output the filenames of my choice, so that I can continue using my existing link directory and keep adding to it. min.
I bought Arelis a couple months ago. I wrote and asked about the PR feature, they said it will be in the next release. I have not tried link assistant, but I will to find out if it's a better product. Edit: I just checked:
try hitting all the directories at http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php and then follow all the listed sites form the ones that require reciprocal links.
I've got Arelis, and found it really good for getting prospective link partners and filing information on partners. I didn't like the HTML link pages it generated, but they have an export facility which dumps all the info from the database into a text file. From there, if you know a little about programming, it is not difficult to write your own text conversion program which will generate the HTML pages exactly the way you want them.
i am tending to agree, a few well written google queries and a personal written request work wonders.