Discrepancy in backlink statistics - November 28th, 2006

One of the ways in which you might get a suggestion of the popularity of a site is by checking what is called backlinks. As the name suggests a backlink or an imbound link is a link to your site from another site. Backlinks are an important part of the search engine optimisation process as they are used by search engines to look at the importance of your site. The thinking here is that sites with more links towards it will be of more relevance than sites with no links.

Note that it is not just the number of backlinks that you have, but also their quality. Hundreds of links from low page rank sites will act like one link from a page with high page rank. You can check your backlinks this through just about any search engine using the command "link:www.yourwebsite.com". This will show you a list of the websites that contain a link to the searched website.

However, there seems to be a major discrepancy between different search engines. When checking the backlinks to our own site the different search engines different by an enormous amount.

Google = 314
Alexa = 362
MSN = 8,715
Yahoo = 13,651
AllTheWeb = more than 10,000
Altavista = more than 10,000

So if any of this data useful or worth trusting? I think it depends on what search engine you look at. Yahoo, AllTheWeb and Altavitsa display all of the links, no matter where they are from, so for this type of search they don’t look at the quality of the link. Google and Alexa display links from quality sites. So for an accurate picture of how your site is linked to externally I would use Yahoo. However, from a search engine optimisation point of view it might be more beneficial if you only look at the Google backlinks as this would give you a better idea of how users might be brought to your site (i.e. through quality web sites).

Phil Norton
SEO Engineer

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Difficulties of maintaining multiple domains from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective - November 27th, 2006

Many companies will register many different domains, one for each brand name which they may own, whilst all related to the same product. From a search engine perspective there is not an issue with registering all of your domains, and from the customers perspective this makes it simpler for them to find the products they want. In a ideal world these domains will not be interlinked, or have any content duplicated between them.

However most companies will have pages within the domain where duplicate information will be in place, for example a brief introduction to the company may be located on both domains; and things get even more complex when it comes to the same product being branded with a different brand name, the sites then become duplicates of each other. However we have wrote many blogs on duplicate content in the past.

This blog is about why a company with a single domain, will usually get better results than a company with multiple-domains. For the purposes of this blog we will not take into account the duplicate content issue as posted above, or the duplicate product information that could become a issue and we will focus on the other issues.

• Search Engine Optimisation takes time - Many smaller companies see there website as a child of the business, and nurture the site. This attention to every small detail off the website makes for a stronger website, where less work is required to make it search engine friendly. However in a lot of cases the companies with multiple sites see the internet as a major way to provide income, which in this day and age it is: However they try and push there products through badly structured websites which search engine spiders find hard to navigate, and re-use code that should really be refactored before re-use to save on the implementation timescales for the website, simply reskining there other websites with a new domain.
• Updates - Multiple websites require a lot more time to update, It is virtually impossible for a small company to come up with fresh content on the timescales that the search engine spiders view your site.
• Flash Content - Many off the larger sites on the internet make extensive use off Macromedia Flash content. Whilst search engines are becoming more advanced, and are now able to perform some simple spidering of flash content, the time it takes them to perform the extra processing will almost certainly limit the number of pages the spiders can crawl. Plain standards compliant HTML, whilst not as visually exciting as Flash content is always better for the Spiders.

If you want your website to be successful in the Search Engine Results Pages, it is highly advisable to get a search engine optimisation specialist in to analyse your website and make the required changes.

Regards,
Nathan Hall
SEO Programmer

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