Google’s poor link: query operator has taken a huge beating from the SEO community for the past few years. The query operator’s reputation has been dragged through the mud so much that most people now use Yahoo! for link research (which is equivalent to asking Monaco to handle your national intelligence initiatives).
Here are the basic limitations of link research:
- Not all links pass value
- You have no way of seeing only the links that pass value
- You have no way of knowing in advance which links will pass value
- You cannot ever under any circumstances use search engine A to study link profiles for search engine B
- Search ranking, indexing, and crawling algorithms use links in different ways (within each search engine)
Given those limitations you can still do the following:
- Use Yahoo! Site Explorer to see which links Yahoo! is willing to report
- Use Google’s link query operator to see which links Google is willing to report
- Compare site A’s Yahoo! link profile to site B’s Yahoo! link profile
- Compare site A’s Google link profile to site B’s Google link profile
- Track a site’s Yahoo! link profile over a period of time
- Track a site’s Google link profile over a period of time
- Compare trends in growth and decline between the Yahoo! and Google link profiles
Link analysis should be relatively quick, simple, and painless. If your objective is to find links you’re doing it wrong. You can get links from all sorts of wonderful places and you don’t need to know how many links the other guy has. The purpose of link analysis should be to determine which links are passing value and what their anchor text is.
It’s the anchor text part that is most challenging in link analysis. There are few tools that actually attempt to report anchor text and those that do report it have to scrape the linking sites, so they can be blocked or fooled by people who play games with links (and there are a fair few people who play games with links).
So it’s way past time for the SEO community to fall in love with Google’s link: operator again. You’re actually getting better information from Google’s random selection of links (with respect to what may be influencing Google’s search results) than you are obtaining from Yahoo!’s endless lists of internal links, Javascript links, randomly duplicated links, and other worthless link information. If Yahoo! could only tell you things like, “Google has indexed this link and is allowing it to pass value” or “Microsoft has indexed this link and is allowing it to pass value”, etc. But Yahoo! cannot tell you that and it’s completely unfair to Yahoo! that the SEO industry has wasted so much time and effort scraping Yahoo!’s link reports for worthless SEO analytical tools.
Which is not to say you cannot use Yahoo!’s link reports for analysis beyond Yahoo!’s index. In fact, you can and should be using Yahoo!’s link reports to estimate growth patterns in vertical linking relationships. In other words, as you build a query space you want to know who will be the most aggressive players in that space. Yahoo! can tell you that (although it’s possible and pretty easy to hide links from Yahoo!, and some people do).
Watching a Web site accumulate links through Yahoo! can be an eye-opening experience. That quiet little grandmother whose blog you just knocked out of the top ten search results for “pajamas in Panama City” could be hanging out in SEO forums and hobnobbing with SEO buds at conferences because she sells copywriting services and freelances as a Web designer. Don’t underestimate the power of grandmothers to rally masses of links to their bloggy little causes. They’ve been promoting Web sites like professionals (and better than professionals in some cases) since the Web began.
In addition to the link queries you can use on Google and Yahoo! (and maybe Microsoft, which I still consider to be iffy), you should also become intimately familiar with site. If you see that someone’s “About Us” page is dropping lower in their site searches, chances are pretty good they are following bad SEO advice and using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links. If you optimize your site correctly you’ll never see your “About Us” page be a problem or embarrassment in your search results. So when you see “incidental” pages dropping in site searches you know you’re running up against someone who doesn’t understand search engine optimization well enough to get it right.
Hobbling a Web site’s search visibility by restricting the flow of its PageRank is equivalent to sacrificing territory in a land war. If you’re Russia fighting off Napoleon or the German army you’ve got enough lands to cut your losses and run, forcing the other guys to overextend their supply lines and endure harsh Russian winters. If you’re running a Web site with fewer than 1,000 pages you’re cutting your throat by trying to sculpt PageRank.
Site queries can show you who is attempting to hoard their peanut butter, so let’s digress a moment and talk about Peanut Butter SEO (so named because Matt Cutts has recently taken to comparing PageRank to peanut butter). According to Matt (who should know), you only get so much peanut butter — er, PageRank. Now, the classic PageRank algorithm definition clearly states that PageRank is a probability distribution calculated across a Web index. Every page in the index MUST start out with some PageRank. Matt, however, is telling people you don’t just automatically get PageRank by creating pages.
Fair enough. Google has had to make a few changes in the way it implements PageRank over the years, but PageRank whether it be peanut butter or a mathematical valuation has to come from somewhere. Either Google is not increasing the size of its Main Web Index (which is the repository for pages that can accrue and pass PageRank) or else the size of the index is being increased according to some undisclosed criteria. If Google has limited the size of its Main Web Index we’ve taken a step back 9 years to the days of Inktomi’s dual-index strategy. Only pages from Inktomi’s main index were shown in search results.
Getting into Inktomi’s index wasn’t so difficult. Staying in there was the problem because Inktomi rebuilt it every four weeks. You had to have a lot of links in order to stay in, so we invented link farms to ensure that people’s sites would have a good shot at staying in the index (their ranking benefits were an unexpected side effect). It’s not in Google’s best interest to maintain a smaller Main Web Index because that will just incentivize linking schemes and games.
Still, if you’re analyzing search results and you don’t know whether Google increases the supply of peanut butter over time or just spreads the same smarmy peanut butter around as much as possible, you need to look at your query operators a little more carefully. For example, you can use the intitle operator to see who is using keywords in their title tags, the inurl operator to see who is using them in their page names, and the inanchor operator to see who is using link anchor text to build relevance.
That is, combine all three operators in one query to see who is optimizing for search. You can take that a step further by adding a negated intext (or inbody) operator to see who is trying to make irrelevant content relevant through link anchor text. (NOTE: Yahoo! doesn’t seem to handle more complex queries as well as Google but you should still be able to use a negated intext query operator with the keyword).
If you’re unable to find hyperoptimized pages in a query space you have the option of charging in like a raging bull and crushing the competition or of just gradually building up your search visibility through minimal search optimization. Why not rush in? Because you never know whom you’ll inspire to learn search engine optimization through your unnecessary heavy-handedness (I speak from experience). Greed and haste have caused many an SEO to rue a choice they cannot take back.
Date-sensitive searches are not nearly as revealing as some people in the SEO community believe. I have watched many new sites bring all their content online while Google was still struggling to bring up the home page in a date-sensitive search. Maybe that’s an indication of which pages are in the Main Web Index but it looks to me more like the date-sensitive search just doesn’t work as promised. You can optimize your own pages for date-sensitive searches by including a timestamp on them. The timestamp alone won’t fool the search engines into thinking your pages are fresh enough to be crawled daily but it’s interesting to compare those timestamps to the cache dates.
Knowing that your competitors use timestamps helps you track their cache update frequency much more accurately. In fact, knowing how often a competitive site is updated provides you with far more intelligence than knowing how many value-passing links they have. Two weeks’ worth of cache data research should tell you who all the major players are in any query space.
Now, if all these query operators are so useful, how is it that I conclude most SEOs don’t use them? Just look at the SEO tools that are available. How many actually provide you with useful information? They all pretty much focus on Yahoo! links, Google Toolbar PageRank, and similar nonsensical data. Although it may be helpful to know that a competitive Web site has lost (or gained) Toolbar PR, you have to track that data over time and I seriously doubt any of your SEO browser plug-ins capture the data to files or track data in a central database.
Remember the SEO Method: Experiment, evaluate, adjust. That principle works just as well for search results analysis as it does for Web site design and link placement strategies. If you experiment with query operators you’ll uncover a wealth of valuable competitive information that no SEO tool on the Web can possibly provide you. If you evaluate the results you see and compare them across keywords, timeframes, and search engines you’ll develop trend data that no SEO pundit will ever share in a drunken stupor at any conference after-hours party.
In short, most people are not yet tapping into the huge storehouses of information that the search engines provide to us. There is no better time than now to start developing the full potential of the resources available at your finger tips. The only problem is that you have to do the work yourself. There are no tools that will do it for you.
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