New Backlink & PageRank Lookup Tools
Free PageRank Tool...a Brief History
Proogle was a super cool tool when it was announced back in May. Proogle was later renamed Prog and was recently bought out by SEO Chat.
New PageRank Tool
PR Search.net is a tool similar to Prog which also includes the number of backlinks in the search results page, which is one semi useful measure of competition.
One thing I would recommend doing to make the PR Search tool more useful is to allow Yahoo! Search and extract PageRank and display them within the Yahoo! Search search results.
Update on Proogle / Prog
The Prog tool which was purchased by SEO Chat is having useful features added to it. The search results can be ordered by PageRank and they also look like they are in the beginning of adding backlink anchor text analysis features.
Google has been a bit sketchy with showing backlinks recently, but sorting backlinks by PageRank is one of the easier ways to find out where some of the most important links into a site come from.
A Reminder About PageRank
As a ranking element PageRank has lost a large amount of its value. Shady backlink data and more complex algorithms are starting to make link analysis software less useful.
Competitive Marketing Forces
Since PageRank is meaning less and less and Google is giving less and less useful data (showing only some random low PageRank backlinks & not updating PageRank for months on end) this would be a good opportunity for Yahoo! to release WebRank and give tons of meaningful data.
Google is primarily mathematically driven. Yahoo! has human editors and thus can afford to show more meaningful linkage / connectivity data. If Yahoo! did then marketers like me would be more inclined to reference WebRank than PageRank and Yahoo! would get a ton of free marketing. Will they do it though?
Comments
Do you know why my page rank would drop from a 5 to a 0. It's been that way for about 2 months now. The information on my homepage has changed, but it had in the past also and my ranking never changed. Thanks in advance --Chris
I might be a bit behind, but when did Yahoo create WebRank? I hadn't heard that term before.
Re: human editing, I think that is what Google is relying on Dmoz for. Unfortunately Dmoz data is out-of-date and random in some places too.
What Yahoo needs to do for lots of free advertising is working to improve the experience for the average webmaster, and sending them more traffic. This is what made Google very popular, it seems to me: the immense traffic they sent smaller sites while other search engines were doing paid inclusion, small indexes, meta tags etc.
WebRank Beta was released in March I believe.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/3334891
"Re: human editing, I think that is what Google is relying on Dmoz for. Unfortunately Dmoz data is out-of-date and random in some places too."
Google is using DMOZ for some free human editing, but that does not stop a marketer (like me for example) from buying a high ranked domain listed in DMOZ and selling tons of ad space on it to manipulate search results.
Right here is a PageRank 8 placeholder page listed in DMOZ (or at least until a high ranking DMOZ editor reads this): http://www.wantandvote.com
What I am talking about with the editing issue specifically is that Google does not want to flag false possitives for spam. Yahoo! can set their results more coarsely (and show much more accurate connectivity / linkage data) and use editors to filter out the junk.
"What Yahoo needs to do for lots of free advertising is working to improve the experience for the average webmaster, and sending them more traffic."
You can't just create traffic from nowhere. They need to find a way to increase their market share. Their search results are not way inferior to those of Google, but Google has been branded to be synonymous with search.
The way to steal that market position is to recruit free marketers. Having quality search results will help a bunch but also showing more usable and meaningful data (which they should be able to do at little cost) will allow them to do that.
Keep in mind also that as Yahoo! shows more connectivity & linkage data it will make it easier for marketers to manipulate and degrade Google search results. Yahoo! has editors which can help maintain their result quality.
Nice find Aaron with the Pr Search.net. What a great little tool. Another facet we SEO's don't need to find through third party software, backlinks. Handy, very handy. Thanks mate.
Hi Anthony
On my home page in the right column I have links to pages with SEO forums and SEO blogs. Feel free to submit your SEO Testing Blog and your SEO forums to their pages using the comments system and I will then move them up into the blog and forums sections.
I think the tools suggested are worthwhile. I was just checking them out and there is merit in these tools (albeit limited). Kudos on this blog post.
Add new comment