Altavista is my favourite tool for checking links and here’s why:
1. It shows more results then any other link checking tool (not including Google webmaster tools, but you can’t check competitors with that) – You can see a maximum of 1,000 separate domains linking to a URL or domain.
2. It only ever shows 2 results from one domain so the results you get don’t get swamped with a couple of site wide links.
3. If your IP address is based in the UK the results show the links with the most juice on Yahoo UK at the top so you can find out which links are helping you most on Yahoo. From the testing that I have done I have seen that generally Yahoo rates the same UK sites Google does – the links that rank high on Altavista’s link command will be from sites with good PageRank.
So there you have it, if you like checking on who’s linking to your site or blog go to Altavista.com and give it a shot.
You can check how many links a page has by searching for link: and then the page URL and you can check how many links a domain has by typing in linkdomain: and then the domain you want to check without the www. Just like on Yahoo site explorer but better.
Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
I remember about 3 years ago when you could actually use the allinanchor search command on Google as an SEO tool.
The allinanchor command basically shows you the search results according to links only, so content is not a factor. 3 years ago you could do a regular search and then do an allinanchor and work out things like this website isn’t ranking as high as it should do because it hasn’t got enough anchor text links or it hasn’t got the right keywords in the content.
Unfortunately at sometime around February 2006 the command seemed to stop working. Now I don’t believe Google actually disabled the tool, because if they did I think it just wouldn’t do anything. Allinanchor searches on Google will still bring up results, it is just the vast majority of the time they are no different to the regular results.
I believe the command stopped working because the algorithm changed, on page factors are no where near as important as they used to be and lets face it most of the time when people get a lot of links on something they are optimised on page for it.
So what can you use the allinanchor search command for?
OK so here it is, the allinanchor command is a Google Sandbox detection tool. If you want to get a rough estimate of where a sandboxed site should be ranking according to the links it has then use the allinanchor command.
Here is an example, one of the brand new sites that I am working on KoshCreative.co.uk is currently ranking nowhere in the 1st few hundred results for its main phrase design agency even though it has lots of links with that anchor text. If I do a allinanchor search on Google UK for design agency, I can see the site coming up on page 6 – Link
I believe that the position result is roughly where the site would be ranking according to the links it has if it were not in the sandbox.
With a little testing I think you could make a pretty good Google sandbox detection tool by using this command. If any of you know anyone who could make something like this up for me I might be willing to pay to try it out.
Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
Thanks to the post that our writer Shaun did about interestingly shaped communities on Google maps there have been many thousands of visitors on this blog in the last week, it went really viral. Altogether the post has had over 67,000 unique visitors and many of them clicked onto the view larger map links to go and see a bigger map on Google.
I ran a report using my premium MyBlogLog account to see how many readers clicked onto the Google.com domain from this blog in the last week and then I ran one to see how many readers came from the Google.com and Google.co.uk domains, here are the results:
- This blog sent Google – 2097 visitors
- Google sent this blog – 1794 visitors
So in a bizarre case of role reversal this week I have sent Google about 15% more traffic then it sent me.
The vast majority of the Google traffic came from Google reader not from search, I wish this blog got that much search traffic.
Posted in SEO News By David Eaves, a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 19th, 2009
The introduction of mapping applications such as Google Maps (undoubtedly the most popular example of all) and their subsequent widespread use around the world has resulted in an enormous amount of people taking up an interest in an interactive view of the world which previously was very difficult to obtain. There are millions of incredibly interesting sights to experience which, when living at ground level as we do, are rarely seen in the flesh.
As an example, here are some intriguingly shaped communities which take on a new appearance when viewed from the air, along with those same areas pinpointed in embedded maps. Take a look around.
Trails West, Arizona
Image Credit: © 2009 Alex S. MacLean / Landslides – www.alexmaclean.com
View Larger Map
(Above) To begin, here’s a small mobile home community called Trails West just outside Tuscon, Arizona. The interesting thing about it is the shape as there aren’t many towns or communities with such a distinctly triangular boundary.
Sun City, Arizona
Image Credit: FESPM.es
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(Above) Sun City is a planned retirement community in Arizona which, due to its design and hundreds of identical houses, offers an incredible view on Google Maps. Dozens of tightly knit roads snake around the area and a even form a couple of huge circular neighbourhoods.
Ixtapaluca, Mexico
Image Credit: Aerial Photographs of Mexico City
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(Above) The town of Ixtapaluca in Mexico is full of low-income housing identical to the examples you see in the photo above, resulting in rows and rows of cookie-cutter homes which resemble a cartoon-based community. From above, the area is just as uniform and equally as fascinating.
Bourtange, Netherlands
Image Credit: Vesting Bourtange
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(Above) The beautiful star-shaped village of Bourtange was originally built as a fort in the 1500s, the shape chosen due to its highly effective defensive qualities. Today it houses a village and museum and looks incredibly unique, especially when viewed from the air. There are a few other similarly shaped villages around the world but none as defined as this one.
Harborwalk, Texas
Image Credit: © 2009 Alex S. MacLean / Landslides – www.alexmaclean.com
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(Above) Developers in Galveston decided to build a planned community on the wetlands in Galveston and came up with a strange design where houses sit on rings of land which, from above, resemble concentric ripples on the water. At the moment the town is still under development, hence the numerous gaps where homes should stand.
Palm Islands, Dubai
Image Credit: Dubai Invest
View Larger Map
(Above) The award for Most Eccentrically Shaped Community has to go to Palm Islands in Dubai, an incredibly ambitious project which will, if ever completed following the financial crisis, consist of 3 separate palm tree shaped islands off the coast. Work on the first island began in 2001 and can be seen on Google Maps. The size and scale of the project is astounding.
This post was put together by our writer/blogger Shaun Usher AKA deputy dog. Sorry it’s a little bit off topic but IMO what it lacks in relevance it makes up for in awesomeness.
June 12th, 2009
So I have been working on this air conditioning website and as you can imagine good air conditioner scoops are few and far between, so when Jeff the owner called me up with a bit of a story I knew I had to do something.
He found the story on a website called KRGV.com, you can read it here. It’s about some women in Texas who found an image that she believes is the Virgin Mary on her air conditioner.
There weren’t very many details really so I just re-worded it pretty much, blew up the tiny photo to a decent size and published it, you can see my post here.
I really didn’t expect it to go anywhere, I mean look at the image, it does in fact look more like death then the Virgin Mary, but to my amazement it did. The bait was just about crap enough to actually work. I got people talking about this image all over the web. Check out the discussions at Reddit, Propeller, Mixx and Plime.
I went to bed last night thinking oh well it’s not going to get any good links but at least it sparked a bit of discussion and sent Airconco a bit of traffic. When I woke up this morning and checked the stats, everything looked pretty normal, 1,500 from Reddit, 90 from Mixx etc. but then I saw Twitter.com 500 clicks. Now I don’t know a lot about Twitter, but that looked like a lot of traffic, my previous actual decent baits had gotten 50-100 clicks from Twitter at the most.
About an hour later I refreshed the stats. again and now Twitter had sent over 1,000 clicks. I decided to do a bit of investigating and found the URL that was sending the Twitter traffic: http://bit.ly/NVE6h, I searched Google for the URL and found Ashton Kutcher’s twitter profile aplusk.
Ashton Kutcher is a big time movie star, he was in that movie Dude, Where’s My Car and he is married to Demi Moore. He is one of the most popular Twitter users with over 2 million followers. Getting some of my work linked to by him is awesome.
The Airconco website has had 5,172 visits from Twitter.com so far and he only linked to the story about 9 hours ago – Link
Update: The traffic has started to calm down now and the post has had just under 10,000 unique visitors from Twitter.com, about 4,5000 uniques that are unaccounted for and a couple more thousand uniques from other social networks. Altogether the story has had over 16,500 visitors and there are 60 comments on the post.
Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.
June 9th, 2009
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