Getting Granular: The DigitalGrit Blog

Link Wars: Yahoo Site Explorer vs. Google Webmaster Tools

When talking to clients about link building, one of the first things I bring up is why Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools are the best sources for comprehensive backlink data.

I go on to explain how Google purposely offers random and incomplete data when you run a link: command on their search engine. I also explain how MSN's link: command turns on and off as if it where controlled by The Clapper (dating myself a bit with that reference, I know).

I then go on to explain that the link: command in Yahoo, which automatically sends you into their Yahoo Site Explorer section, delivers a very comprehensive set of backlink data that can be sorted and filtered in a variety of ways. Google Webmaster Tools offers a similar level of detail, but the data is organized in a slightly different manner; it actually lists every URL that has inbound links pointing to it, and includes the actual number per URL.

Note: Just in case you didn't know, in order to access this backlink data, you must first register your site with Google Webmaster Tools and then submit and verify an XML sitemap. Once you've completed that process, Google delivers a wide array of information including this detailed backlink data I'm referring to.

So client education aside, what's the absolute best tool for conducting research into the backlink portfolio of your site? Should you go with Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer?

Let's start by comparing the numbers.

I checked a number of sites that I have access to via Google Webmaster Tools, and compared the backlink data. Interestingly enough, Yahoo Site Explorer reported more backlinks than Google Webmaster Tools for every domain I checked.

Incidentally, in order to compare these numbers, I filtered the Yahoo data by choosing to view "inlinks" (that's Yahoo's term for inbound links/backlinks) and choosing the "Except from this domain" drop-down option as well as the "Entire Site" drop-down option.

So it would appear that at Yahoo Site Explorer has the upper hand, but as with most things in life, quantity does not necessarily equal quality.

The next thing I chose to analyze was the usefulness of the data being presented, or better yet, the usefulness of how the data is presented.

On the surface, it would appear that Google Webmaster Tools has the upper hand in that they deliver detailed backlink data organized by URL, allowing you to easily identify what pages of your site possess the most backlinks as well as exactly where those links are coming from. Yahoo's data is delivered in the form of a search result, simply listing the actual backlinks pointing to either the homepage or the entire site.

But as my favorite college football pundit, Lee Corso, likes to say, "not so fast my friend." Thought it is difficult to prove this empirically, it appears as if Yahoo Site Explorer lists the backlinks in order of their potency. In other words, the most powerful links are listed first.

If you don't believe me, check it out on your own sites (and don't just base it on the PageRank assigned).

Anyhow, back to the task at hand. Admittedly, there are various other factors to consider when evaluating these two backlink analysis tools, but I'm writing a blog post, not a thesis. I'll definitely follow up on this topic, but for the time being, I think I've come to a conclusion.

If you're analyzing the backlink portfolio of your own site(s) both Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer offer uniquely valuable insights. So in this respect, it's a tie.

However, if you're looking for competitive insight, it's a no-brainer. Google Webmaster Tools limits you to just your own site, but you can analyze any site under sun in Yahoo Site Explorer. So if you're looking to see what you're competitors are doing (and you definitely should be doing that) it's all about the big Y!

Bonus Fun: In Yahoo Site Explorer, you can actually run a backlink query for both www.yahoo.com and www.google.com. Let's just say that their backlink portfolio is a bit humbling.

Tales from the hosting provider crypt: PhinHeaven.com

Do me a favor. Visit the following URL and tell me what you see?
http://www.phinheaven.com

Those who have had this happen will immediately know what's going on there and will emphatically agree with the following statement:

Having your third-party hosting provider drop the ball can be the worst thing that ever happens to your business.

Now I'm not just talking about downtime, like what occurred to thousands of RackSpace customers a few weeks back, when a truck hit a transformer feeding power to its Dallas data center. I'm referring to the utter collapse of a website due to gross negligence on the part of its third-party hosting provider.

As many of us know from experience, sites are often the target of all sorts of malicious server attacks. Reliable hosting companies, like RackSpace, are not immune to this type of attack but are typically well-prepared to handle such emergency and quickly restore data and functionality to the stricken site.

I know this because I've worked with companies that employ RackSpace's services and have quickly gotten back to normal after suffering through some sort of internet malady. I've also worked with companies that chose to go with less reliable hosting providers only to find out after the fact, that their server was not properly backed up or otherwise protected.

The result is lots of lost data, suffering search engine rankings, and in some cases, the utter collapse of what was once a great online portal.

For the record, yes I'm a fan of the Miami Dolphins (insert tasteless jokes here). The site I've referenced was considered to be, by far, the largest online fan forum for that team.

Sadly, their decision to go with a lackluster hosting provider has rendered them null and void for over a month, and has likely resulted in hundreds if not thousands of defections to competing fan sites and an overall drop in SEO presence.

Hosting is not a facet that lends itself to penny pinching. Make sure that your provider is up to the challenge of handling potentially disastrous situations. If it's not, spend the extra money to make sure that you're covered.

Otherwise, your site might be the next to find itself in the hosting provider crypt.

IndexRank vying to oust Google's little green bar

For years, enterprising webmasters have attempted to build a reliable third-party gauge for measuring the strength of a specific web page. The rationale is simple. Currently, toolbar PR serves as the default gauge for the value of an inbound link from a specific web page. Sophisticated webmasters have devised more effective methods, but for the most part, the valuation of an inbound links (reciprocal, paid, or otherwise) has been PageRank.

Clearly, there should be a more effective tool for evaluating the value or “weight” of a specific web page, and coming up with that tool would render Google’s PR useless, once and for all.

Unfortunately, building an alternative to Google’s little green bar has proven to be an elusive undertaking. Currently, the best alternative that I’ve come across is the Page Strength offered up by seomoz.org. Sadly, I feel that this tool falls short of

Rand’s original vision, which he shared with me years ago, and I haven’t seen any better alternatives out there.

Until now!

As many of you already know, Michael Jensen from soloseo.com recently released his IndexRank tool, which analyzes the frequency with which Google indexes a site’s new content. While far from perfect, the tool does provide a fairly systematic way of analyzing the aforementioned “weight” of a specific web page by utilizing one of the most definitive pieces of Google data available. Furthermore, Jensen’s tool relies solely on Google index data and avoids some of the potentially useless information that the seomoz.org “Page Strength” tool relies upon (example: “Page Strength” takes factors such as Alexa ranking into account).

Again, I do see some fairly significant shortcomings that plague Jensen’s “IndexRank.” For example, it does not seem to have any reporting/exporting features, which would allow a webmaster to easily transfer the data to a separate document for further analysis.

 

Also, the tool is limited to domain queries, so you cannot gain insight into the weight of specific pages outside of the homepage.

Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming stems from the IndexRank algorithm itself. Jensen’s algorithm being used seems to favor sites that have a high ratio of newly indexed content compared to total indexed content. In laymen’s terms, established sites with an extremely high number of total indexed pages will get a lower score then sites with less total indexed pages even if they get more content indexed on a regular basis.

Here’s an example I pulled directly from the tool:

                                                                               

				Pages   Indexed
Domain	2 Weeks		1 Month	3 Months	6 Months	1 Year	Total	IndexRank
www.nfl.com	859		1430	9780	9790	9750	50500	6
www.realfootball365.com	130		246	417	581	1390	18500	9

The fact that the second site, an independent football portal that has is getting much less content indexed on a regular basis, is benefiting from the fact that it has way fewer total pages indexed.

Those were the first two shortcomings that popped into my mind, but I figured that it might be a good idea to ask the guy that turned me on to this tool – Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com - if he spotted any other potential bugs.

Here are Aaron’s thoughts on the matter. “I can see Google going out of their way to obfuscate this data, especially for site: searches...such that they make it hard to get any value out of such a specific tool.

There are lots of ways to bolt on data and add features, but the key is figuring out how to do so without straining your server beyond its limit or getting so well known that Google ends up blocking the site or obfuscating the data.”

Aaron definitely had some interesting insights on potential pitfalls, but it wouldn’t be fair to point out IndexRank’s faults without giving the creator a chance to respond. Here is an excerpt of my conversation with Michael Jenson:

Q: Do you plan on adding any reporting and/or exporting features?

A: We plan on integrating IndexRank with our other tools in SoloSEO.com, such as in our SEO statistics tracking for client domains and their competitors. We are still working on improving the algorithm, and depending on the interest from the community we would take it to the next step with exporting, widgets, etc.

Q: It seems as if IndexRank favors sites that have a small number of total indexed pages relative to the amount of pages being indexed within the last two weeks, one month, etc. Are there any plans to further refine the algorithm, so that more established sites with an extremely large number of indexed pages don’t suffer?

A: IndexRank doesn't favor sites with a low amount of indexed pages, but rather favors sites with an increasing amount of content relative to the amount indexed in previous time periods. We realize this penalizes other sites without the same momentum or growth trend as they may have had in the past (such as larger sites), but the metric is intended to show growth not size. We realize IndexRank isn't perfect, and we are working on refining and optimizing for improved accuracy. From the larger sample sets we have looked at, IndexRank appears to be an accurate indicator of site growth.

Q: Aaron Wall mentioned that Google could obfuscate the data you are currently using to power the IndexRank tool. Are you concerned about that possibility?

A: Google is known to obfuscate other data, such as their backlink reporting through the link: operator, so it wouldn't surprise us if they did. However, with this type of data being a part of their overall search features, versus the link: operator being used primarily by search marketers, it doesn't seem like it would be in Google's interest to obfuscate their indexing data. Even if they do, our advantage is that IndexRank doesn't depend on reporting exact numbers from Google, rather it uses the relative rate of content being indexed.

P.S. Thank you to both Michael and Aaron for making themselves available on such short notice to help me pull together this piece!

 

Takin' SEO to the Streets: How communication can lead to mainstream discovery

Every morning, I engage in a rather systematic review of SEO industry sites, scouring the scene for new insights and observations that will help me improve my craft. Two of my favorites are Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Both of these portals are recognized as industry leaders in terms of both reach and influence.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up last Friday and noticed that a conversation between myself and Tristan Panasik, Manager of New Media here at DigitalGrit, made it onto the homepage of these two search engine industry giants.

How did this happen? Well that depends on your perspective.

For weeks, Tristan’s team and myself have been discussing the merits of Yahoo’s Site Explorer feature. We all agreed that it offered the most comprehensive data on a given site’s inbound links (if you have a Google Webmaster Tools account you can get even more complete and accurate data for a verified domain, but that’s a story for another day) but on Thursday afternoon, it appeared as if Tristan had stumbled upon a possible fly in the ointment.

She pointed out that members of her team were getting two wildly disparate sets of results when pulling backlink data for a specific client. After digging around for a possible cause, and finding next to nothing, I decided to go to one of my other favorite SEO hangouts, webmasterworld.com.

Most discerning webmasters know that if you’re looking for highly specialized and comprehensive information on a very specific topic, one of the first places you should turn to is WebmasterWorld. So anyhow, I posted a thread about this possible Yahoo Site Explorer discrepancy, and sure enough, esteemed member “Lord Majestic” came back with a lucid response within minutes of my initial post. It turns out that Yahoo chooses to serve a more complete sampling of data to users that are logged in to their Yahoo profiles.

Apparently, the powers that be at WebmasterWorld felt that this discussion was worthy of note, so they flagged it as an item of interest, and by morning, it had already begun making the rounds.

So that’s one way of looking at how this discrepancy became an item of public record. But here’s another.

Here at DigitalGrit, we try to foster a climate of community and interaction amongst the various departments. Tristan’s willingness to share her team’s insights with others is the reason why this topic made it onto WebmasterWorld, who in turn helped make it a public discussion, and it is a perfect example of why communication is a fundamental aspect of SEO.

Nobody knows everything there is to know, so the only way to expand your horizons is to ask questions and pass ideas along.

White on White Text Equals Black Hat SEO

When the search engines were not as sophisticated as they are now, you could stuff all your keywords in the Keywords Meta Tag and you would get first page rankings overnight. That was then.

Times have changed. If you've been doing SEO for a while, you know not to try to fool the search engines or else you could end of getting your site banned. It’s easy to forget that most of our clients don’t know White Hat from Black Hat.

Why you shouldn’t listen to Aaron Wall

Believe it or not, this is not an article bashing the creator of SEO Book. I regularly read his blog posts and hold both his knowledge and insight with high regard.

Still, something about the way he chooses to deliver his assertions just rubs me the wrong way, and I think I can put my finger on it by sampling some of his most recent bylines:

Google is Wikipedia, but Worse

The Real Problem With Half Truths & Hand Editing (same post as previous headline)

How Relevancy is Defined
·    Money to Google = relevant, good user experience

Is it just me, or does it seem like Mr. Wall goes out of his way to paint a bleak and ominous image of the world’s largest search engine? These headlines are just a small sampling, but SEO Book is filled with similarly inflammatory assertions.

Granted, Aaron will occasionally give credit to the mega search engine, like on one of his latest posts stating that, “Google makes communication faster and cheaper, advertising more relevant and trackable, and audience aggregation more efficient. They also create a lot of cool tools that evolve the web which allow publishers to layer value over the top of them.” Unfortunately, his monologue almost always turns into a Google conspiracy/bashing session.

To his credit, SEO Book has maintained that angle since day one, but as Wall’s popularity has grown, so has his influence over less experienced and discerning webmasters. Therefore, in my opinion, he is helping to mislead many SEO newbies into the false impression that Google is out to purposely screw them.

The reality is that, like all corporations, Google is out to make a profit. Therefore, they will take any steps that they deem necessary to maintain their position as the world’s most effective means of finding information on the internet. That’s why other search engines like MSN and Ask have spent countless dollars on television ad campaigns, Google chooses to dump the vast majority of their resources into further developing their internal infrastructure. They know that if their search engine continues to be the cream of the crop, the average user will continue to use them, and they in term will continue to make boatloads of cash.

Sadly, Wall misinterprets that motivation, thinking that Google, which is a multi-level organization with a complex set of goals and strategies, is singularly focused on the fortunes and misfortunes of individual SEOs.

Frankly, Google could care less about the fortunes and misfortunes of SEO folks. They just care about having the best search engine. Yes, they have serious issues to content with, like the surprising amount of redirect/affiliate spam infiltrating search results, their Vietnam-like losing battle against paid links, and other assorted issues, but when one takes a moment to step back and appreciate the shear size and reach of Google’s search engine it becomes strikingly apparent that the search engine giant will always face an uphill battle in this regard.

Again, I’m not advocating that you stop reading Aaron Wall’s posts. He actually provides some of the most data-rich and insightful SEO (and general business) insights on the net, and some of his criticisms of Google are just. I’m just cautioning the burgeoning SEO webmaster from “listening” to his anti-Google rhetoric and taking it to heart, because I’ve found that bitterness seldom lends itself to success.

P.S. Just for kicks, I wanted to point out that I love hanging out at the Hudson Hotel. It's the one of the best New York Hotels out there.

Basic PageRank misconceptions

Posts relating to Google PageRank data are a dime a dozen. Well all know that.

However, it’s disturbing to see some of the more reputable voices in the industry misunderstanding some of the basic tenets surrounding Google’s little green bar.

For example, a recent post at Search Engine Roundtable referencing Google’s most recent directory PageRank update failed to recognize that the reason for discrepancies between the PR shown in the Google Directory and the PR shown in the Google Toolbar is that directory PR works on an eight-point scale while Toolbar PR works on a 11-point scale.

Question for Rand? What happened to the “third-party” PR tool idea?

Back in May of 2005, I interviewed I interviewed Rand as part of an SEO Chat featured articled titled The Need for a New Gauge: Moving Beyond Visual or “Toolbar” PR Rankings. The gist of our question-answer session revolved around the need for a third-party tool that is not affiliated with Google or any of the other engines, which could be used to measure the overall rank value of a given web document.

Sort of like an alternative to toolbar PageRank values.

Title Attribute: What is it and does it have any real SEO value?

No, we're not talking about a SEO media darling known as the title tag. We're talking about it's red-headed step sister, the title attribute.

According to W3.org, the “title” attribute offers advisory information about the element for which it is set. W3 goes on to state that “setting the [title] attribute on a link allows user agents (visual and non-visual) to tell users about the nature of the linked resource.”

Unfortunately, what W3 does not say is whether or not this fairly obscure attribute is of any use to enterprising webmasters. The question of SEO value, as it relates to the title attribute of a textual hyperlink, has been around for years, but to date, there has never really been any real consensus on the matter.

Matt Cutts has never directly blogged about it. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines doesn’t mention it. Even the various industry forums have rather long threads that debate the matter but don’t agree upon a specific resolution.

So what gives with the title attribute?

Yahoo's keyword tool down; webmasters at a loss

For years, Yahoo's (a.k.a. Overture's ) keyword suggestion tool has been a Holy Grail of sorts in terms of researching potential target search terms.

Recently, Yahoo decided to completely disable this tool, leaving many SEO folks in a state of keyword limbo. Discerning webmasters will tell you that this is essentially a non-issue considering that the folks over at Yahoo haven't update the Overture keyword tool data since early in 2007, making the tool an outdated resource at best.