A few notes about today’s video. Like I said this was some what of a rant that was spurred by a conversation with someone on another forum who’s providing a service selling links from a network of websites and using Page Rank as the main selling point for their offer.
As you’ll see from the video I have my opinions about Page Rank. I basically think it’s a crap metric. It’s too easily spoofed and expired domains are bought and sold daily with a little bit of the green pixie dust still showing in the tool bar even though the link profiles of those domains no longer exist to support it.
So what should you be paying attention to instead of Page Rank?
As I mentioned in the video, there is no “perfect metric” when it comes to SEO and checking back links.
Google doesn’t show backlinks at all (I know they show a handful but it’s a fraction of the total), tools like SEOSpyGlass use outdated data, and most other tools pull data from other imperfect sources.
The two sources I suggest you use in the video are OpenSiteExplorer.org which is a service offered by SEOMoz (I am not affiliate with them in any way I just use their tools a lot) and Yahoo Site Explorer.
Yahoo is moving further and further away to become a distant second to OpenSiteExplorer (OSE) in my Tool Box. Why? Well OSE has their own crawler which trolls the web and creates their own database of backlink info. They’re also the only tool that allows you to effectively see a listing of more then 1000 links to a page from a variety of URL’s.
I’ll be doing a video in the future on OSE so watch for that, but for now check it out and look at the Page authroity, number of unique domains and overall number of links.
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