We reviewed LinkAssistant and received some negative feedback from one reader, so I wrote to Dan Richmond and asked him to reply to the points raised by the dissatisfied customer. Here is the original feedback and Dan ‘s responses:
LinkAssistant user’s feedback: The top website on Google for a search term with over 551,000 competitors was given an overall SEO score of just 41%! The report then went on to say that if I followed the advice in the report I could go on to command the top slot in Google! WTF??!! What a joke!
Dan Richmond’s response: WebSite Auditor is a relative analysis tool that compares a given site to the top 10 ones for the given keyword in the given search engine. When you start a project for a #1 site it gets evaluated against sites #2-11, itself being excluded.
SO, being compared to sites ranking WORSE a #1 site is VERY likely to get a bad score. Only because it is compared to sites probably optimized worse than it. WebSite Auditor is great for sites not ranking at all or brand new sites, as on-page optimization is the initial stage of SEO and needs to be done first. However, due to the mentioned nature of the tool it ‘s not that useful to work on a site already on the first page.
Moreover, the fact that a site is already on the first page means it only needs some more backlinks to rank higher, but changing the page elements might harm the site, most SEOs know that.
LinkAssistant user’s feedback: Some of my competitors pages were linked by Yell.com and Yell.com don’t take too kindly to automated scraping of their page content. The net result was my fixed IP was banned from using Yell.com!!
Dan Richmond’s response: We do not even have Yell in SEO SpyGlass as a search engine or a ranking factor or in any other way. So I do not really get the essence of this complaint. As for the search engines – naturally they engines will block your IP temporarily (for up to two hours) if you query them frequently and excessively, but that happens to anyone doing SEO and we have a set of search safety settings in our preferences that help avoiding that.
Another thing – an IP block will NEVER harm your site or business. For instance, if you check ranks of your site in Google for 1000 keywords then Rank Tracker just loads the results pages for these keywords, without loading any sites or “clicking through ” any results. If that happens unnaturally fast and is not slowed down with the human emulation delays we have in the preferences – then Google blocks your IP address for up to two hours to unload their servers.
But there is absolutely no way Google can know what site you are interested in when you check ranks. Same way your IP is not where your site is located. So it ‘s an inconvenience but it ‘s absolutely safe – otherwise Microsoft would be querying “Apple ” thousands of times per second to get them down on Google.
LinkAssistant user’s feedback: So, the long and short of it is this. It’s free and you obviously get what you pay for, although I would say if you sign up to their paid service you are a mug. IMHO you are much better spending your time and money on creating (or buying) decent, genuine articles for a blog, load it with backlinks and get the articles syndicated to other blog/site owners via RSS. Was there a link to some article submission service under that by the way? 
Dan Richmond’s response: That is just one way of building links out of the wide available scope. Using our software properly you can find tons of other links and tricks but it definitely all comes down to eagerness to learn and work for own benefit. I ‘d say it is much more dangerous to pay for cheap SEO services (because most are expensive) and not know how your site is being promoted, risking a REAL Google index exclusion, than to get your home/office IP address temp blocked a couple of times. Moreover there are always exclusive paid proxy servers you can use to stay 100% safe in case you have doubts.
Dan Richmond’s final remark: Generally I would say this criticism is rather shallow – spending some more time with the tools and reading the knowledgebase/consulting the support guys would have all these issues solved.
