Hey guys,

Hope you are all enjoying the weekend.

There are quite a few people here on the forum wondering how to find backlinks without Yahoo! Site Explorer. We regret the loss, but life goes on.. So I wanted to share with you some settings that help increase backlink count in SEO SpyGlass projects. There's nothing really new about them, but probably some of you haven't tried them yet.

Adjust SEO SpyGlass Settings

* Data сenter rotation - OFF



* Visiting search engines' homepages - ON
* Making pauses between queries - ON (1-3 seconds)



* Random User Agents - ON



* Proxy Rotation - ON
* Automatic proxy search - OFF



* Captcha display - ON



* Search engines API keys - OFF



* Number of parallel tasks - 15



Note on proxy rotation settings.
Once you enable the feature, please click Search and let Rank Tracker make its list of proxies. Go through the list and remove all proxies that are dead, timed out or slow-to-respond.

You should end up with a clean list of some 100 proxies (you'll rarely need more than that).

Create Project for Site
1. Click New. Enter a URL. Enable expert options.
2. Choose a group of 5-15 search engines, for example Alexa, Blekko, Dogpile, Exalead, IceRocket, several versions of Google (e.g. Google Blog Search, Google Australia etc.) and several regional search engines like Vinden.nl or Web.de. These needn't necessarily be search engines from your country (quite on the contrary, the idea is to combine results from multiple sources). The more search engines you select here, the more backlinks SEO SpyGlass will be able to find. However, choosing too many search engines (or - no way! - ALL of them) can make the search process soooo long that it can seem endless.

Rebuild Existing Project
Keep rebuilding all of your SEO SpyGlass projects on a regular basis. You'll be discovering more results with each subsequent project rebuild (if they exist of course). It's a good idea to rebuild a project several times on the same day. You can vary the settings too (e.g. turn proxy rotation on and off or change the list of search engines).

I understand that searching for backlinks the way I suggested isn't a matter of a mouse-click but it's effective. The process will require less of your interference as our developers synchronize SEO SpyGlass with the new database (see this blog post for details). Thank you for your patience and understanding with the matter.

By the way, if you guys have any settings that you often use for backlink retrieval, please share them here. Any fresh ideas are greatly appreciated!

Would you suggest a different configuration for a really fast pc and internet connection?

You could increase the number of parallel assignments to the maximum (25).