Yahoo Site Explorer does the same thing. It’s free but it doesn’t tell you about dofollow, anchortext, or pagerank. You have to look that info up manually.

The problem with SEO Elite is also its advantage: it works out of a database that the company compiles once every day and a half or so, instead of directly out of Yahoo Site Explorer. That’s good because it’s fast–obtaining this data is very browser-intensive, so a temporary Google and Yahoo IP ban with the captcha is a sure thing if you use other tools. Link-Assistant has a lovely little tool called “SEO Spyglass” that tries to do everything Callen’s tool does but better, running directly over Yahoo Site Explorer instead of a private database. And it does–except that the search takes literally all freakin’ day (sometimes two) if you don’t want your IP to get banned. The same goes for all the other free tools (SEO Book, SEOquake, SEO for Firefox) that run over Yahoo Site Explorer.

The bad thing about SEO Elite? It’s not complete. I bought it in January, relied on it as complete, and then in March I started digging around in Yahoo Site Explorer and found several high-PR sites backlinking to my competitors that SEO Elite never showed me. I was still within the refund window and I almost sent it back, but I weighed my options and realized there is nothing else out there that gives me a competitor evaluation in a reasonable time frame.

So I use SEO Elite to screen niches and individual keywords for competitiveness. It allows me to eliminate 90% of the ones that are too competitive, then drill down into the ones I’m on the fence about by using YSE. Here’s how: With SEOquake or SEO for Firefox, you can sort all of the backlinks to the site in question by their PR. If the competing site is a 4, then it probably has a couple of 4s and 5s backlinking to it. For all the 4s and 5s backlinking to your competitor, you should look for that backlink on their sites and determine (1) whether it’s dofollow or nofollow, and (2) whether the backlink is anchored on the keyword you’re competing for. SEOquake will put a strikethrough on nofollow links if you set it up that way in preferences, but for anchor text, I usually end up going into “view source” and looking at the HTML. It’s a time-consuming process.

I work in “borderline” niches with a lot of PR3 and PR4 competition–the ones Mark and Court say “maybe” on, because their earning potential is so much higher than the low-hanging fruit with only PR1 and PR2 competition. If it’s too competitive, SEO Elite will probably let me know, and I’ll reject that niche. If it passes SEO Elite, I do the final step of running a manual check in Yahoo Site Explorer before I commit to the niche and buy a domain name for it.

SEO Elite is still a valuable tool used by many internet marketers that I respect, including Griz, Splork, and Justin Briggs. If you buy it, get the one-time purchase for $167 instead of the $47 a month recurring subscription. You can do this by changing “index2″ to “index1″ in your browser window when you reach the buy page. The interface is clunky, the tutorials are useless, and the support staff is surly and hard to deal with, but in my opinion it’s still the best tool out there to do what we do.