If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.
Getting blekko’s SEO data
It’s simple to get the SEO data from blekko. First you need a blekko account. Then all you have to do is type a URL into the search box, hit the spacebar, and add /seo (what they call a “slashtag”) at the end of your search string.
One of blekko's most distinctive pieces of data is “Host Rank”. This is not so much a ranking of websites but a measure of website authority- like Domain Authority or PageRank. Unlike these other metrics, Host Rank is on a linear scale rather than an exponential scale. Typically a linear scale is a little easier to wrap your brain around. For example, while you might be tempted to think that a website with a PageRank of 4 is only a little bit better than a PR 3 website, we need to remember that this is an exponential scale and the former has a significantly higher authority than the later. In other words the difference between a Host Rank 30 and 40 website is simply 10 points but the difference between websites with Domain Authority 30 and 40 is not 10 points, it is 10 to the power of X points (it is an exponential scale- what's the exponent? ask Mr. Fishkin). Host Rank also avoids a maximum value on its scale unlike the coveted PR 10 website (or comparatively strong DA 100 website).
There's much more to blekko besides another number to compare websites. The /seo slashtag also provides a nifty pie chart outlining what countries the links tend to come from. Although there is nothing wrong with a link from India, for example, if a website is based in the United States and the audience is primarily in the United States, the origin of the links can be indicative of some (shall we say) risky SEO techniques.
I also find the “co-hosted with” list at the bottom of the /seo page very interesting. Does this website have dedicated hosting? If not, that’s not necessarily bad thing but if it is co-hosted with some (shall we call them) questionable websites, that might be a neighborhood you wouldn’t want to be associated with.
Blekko’s data gets even more specific. You can also slashtag a URL with /domainlinks to find a list of inbound links (you can also access this from the right sidebar of the /seo page). Now this list of links most closely resembles the defunct Yahoo! SiteExplorer in that it provides a very long list of links that you have to manually filter through to be useful, but it does a good job giving you an indication of the source of this website’s link authority.
I also like to take a look through a websites /sitepages. This gives a list of all the pages on a website, as sorted by Host Rank. This is a great way of seeing how Host Rank (and presumably PageRank or even Domain Authority) flows throughout a website. Of course, the homepage of any website will always have the most authority- but does any authority flow to interior pages on the website?
Let’s get a little more concrete with this data. We can use blekko’s SEO data to evaluate a couple of web directories to see if we should submit our site to them. Starting with SEOmoz’s directory list, let’s take a couple of authoritative directories (as measured by Domain Authority) and a couple of low authority directories.
The Yahoo! Directory (Domain Authority 100): https://blekko.com/ws/dir.yahoo.com+/seo
Anyone with (shall we say) the means to afford $299 a year has probably submitted their website to the Yahoo! Directory. For a while Google’s Webmaster Guidelines even suggested it. Is it worth the cost? What will we get out of this listing? Let’s use blekko’s SEO data and find out.
/seo
- With a Host Rank of 2,054.9 we clearly see this is a very authoritative website (at least in blekko’s mind). Although this number doesn’t mean much in itself, I bet it’s higher than your personal website.
- Most of the links are from the United States (64%). Not to be so Amero-centric here but there’s nothing in the geographical distribution of the links that would make me concerned here. This is an international directory, after all.
- The site is co-hosted with (wait for it) Yahoo!. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve used Yahoo!, that’s a neighborhood I wouldn’t mind being associated with.
/domainlinks
- Websites actually link to the Yahoo! Directory (who knew) and these seem to be authoritative and clean. It seems like a legitimate and natural backlink profile to me.
/sitepages
- Authority seems to flow very quickly into the directory listings and the Host Rank doesn’t seem to drop-off very fast. If your website falls into one of these top ranked categories you’d definitely want to be listed there.
- One of the top-ten pages, according to blekko, is the list of newly submitted websites. FTW!
The Better Business Bureau (Domain Authority 99): https://blekko.com/ws/bbb.org+/seo
Got a brick-and-mortar along with your website? Why not submit it to BBB.org?
/seo
- This site, according to blekko, actually has more authority than the Yahoo! Directory. It has a Host Rank of 2,948.4. This is tempting!
- It makes sense that 86% of the links come from the United States- this is for US-based businesses, that’s how it should be.
- WOW! What a list of sites are co-hosted with the BBB! Well, it’s co-hosted with pearljam.com so it’s gotta be a good neighborhood! (By the way, did you see Pearl Jam 20? Highly recommended)
/domainlinks
- Sites linking to the BBB seem to be very similar to the Yahoo! Directory and they are all from legitimate and authoritative websites. You wish you could have a backlink profile like this site!
/sitepages
- Unfortunately the first business I found was on the 6th page of blekko’s /sitepages results. Most of the authoritative pages are designed to get you to sign up or are content pages. Getting a listing on this directory won’t pass much authority to your site.
- Clearly the authority of the homepage does not transfer well to listings. The first business listing has a Host Rank 1/100th of the homepage. Sure, you might get some eyeballs from a BBB.org listing, but I wouldn’t count on it for link building efforts.
Sporge (Domain Authority 33): https://blekko.com/ws/sporge.com+/seo
With a name like that, who wouldn’t want to be in this directory? (I’m not much for branding but I’d recommend a name-change in this case). Still, it might be worth something. Let’s see
/seo
- The Host Rank of this website is 20.2. Now you start to see the value of a linear website ranking scale- the Yahoo! Directory is 100x more authoritative that this directory.
- The geographical distribution of the backlinks is actually fairly similar to the BBB’s website. Nothing unusual here.
- Also similar to the BBB, there is a massive amount of websites co-hosted with the Sporge directory. Most of them seem benign.
/domainlinks
- Most of the links to Sporge.com come from other web directories. Could this site be part of a directory network. Is there any value of submitting to this directory as opposed to any of the others? If I submit to this directory, should I even bother to submit to any of the others linking to it?
/sitepages
- The Host Rank ends very quickly, but there’s not much authority to this website to start with in the first place. At least what little it has is able to get to the directory listings easily.
The Brick Wall (Domain Authority 22): https://blekko.com/ws/thebrickwall.com+/seo
This is the least-authoritative directory, according to SEOmoz’s list. Is it even worth the 10 minutes it would take to submit your website?
/seo
- The Host Rank is a whopping 4.3. This is another good illustration of the value of a linear ranking for websites. If you only looked at the Domain Authority of this website (as compared to Sporge- why do I blush when I say that?) you might think, “hey, that’s not so bad,” but blekko doesn't think very highly of this directory.
- The links to this site come from four “other countries.” I can’t seem to find that on my globe. This is a little fishy.
- It’s co-hosted with a few other UK-based websites. Nothing seems too bad among these websites.
/domainlinks
- There really isn’t a large number of links to this website. Where is it getting its authority (what little it does have)?
- There it is! Many of the links to this directory are reciprocal.
/sitepages
- This little directory doesn’t have much authority to share, but if it did it seems it would get to the directory listings fairly efficiently.
Now blekko’s search market share is (shall we say) still growing, but the data they provide can help you do SEO in other search engines too. As with any third-party tool, you wouldn’t want to rely on this data exclusively- obviously neither Google nor Bing are using this data to determine how they rank webpages- but this information can still be a big help to any SEO attempting to evaluate websites for potential authority and value.
Hello David, That's a great post for those folks who are still unaware of Blekko. Infact there are so many resources about it on SEOmoz but very few are actually actionable. I liked your way of representation of the slashtag of seo. Infact we can create our own slashtags for more specific tasks but for that a person should have a good Hand on Experience of using advanced custom search of Blekko(that's probably not a tough job but an interesting one to do). Apart of that if a person has a good reputation , he can apply for being an editor in Blekko! Oh Yes I forgot.. We can easily compare 2 websites in terms of their seo factors and we can get an easy analysis of our Target website! Thanks David that was much much interesting post for me! Thumb Up to you!
Just wanted to add that Blekko is a great search engine for finding out if any sites have plagiarized your website content. Just use the slashtag /duptext (for any URL) or /domainduptext (for the whole domain) after your site's URL and it will list every off-site URL with even portions of the same content.
I ran one today and contacted a few webmasters who had stolen some of our content. Several responded right away, apologized, and removed the content.
Thanks for showing all the cool stuff Blekko can do for SEO!
Mike
I've found the /duptext and /domaindupetext slashtags a little too agressive when they characterize something as a duplicate, but you bring up a great point.
If anything duptext is too conservative! You need a big hunk of exact duplicate text to make it go off.
If you use SEO Tools for Excel* from Niels Bosma then you can also pull Blekko data straight in to that. This lets you mash it up with data from other sources (not seomoz yet though)
*If you aren't, you should be!
AWESOMESAUCE!
I didn't know you could access blekko's data externally! I'll have to check this out.
Yet another program which will get you banned from using blekko by our abuse detectors. We have an API and rules for accessing it without triggering our defenses. Software authors can contact [email protected] for details.
I really feel that blekko doesn't get the attention it deserves from the SEO community (myself included). Be sure to click through to the links David has provided. The results pages are really useful, and the screenshots here don't begin to do it justice for all of the information you can find.
"blekko doesn't get the attention it deserves"
+1
But it will come. People tend to gravitate toward the good.
/rank is another useful Blekko tag. It gives you the SERP data for a given query.
Today blekko discontinued their public SEO data! I sent them an email and they say that ALL their SEO data will now be behind a paywall:
https://sunburntseo.com/blekko-paywall-their-seo-secrets
Does anybody know of an alternative to Blekko Rank which shows domain authority on an UNBOUNDED LINEAR scale?
Thanks
BREAKING: apparently Blekko is now charging for this service.
I am waiting for my comission check.
Using blekko to evaluate web directories looks like an interesting method which I am going to be getting having a play with. I have briefly used blekko, but maybe not given it the attention it has deserved, this article has however motivated me thanks David! Also nice to see Greg from blekko giving some input on this post! Any other tips or insights you would like to share with the community??
I'm not quite understanding one thing. You say:
"Unfortunately the first business I found was on the 6th page of blekko’s /sitepages results. Most of the authoritative pages are designed to get you to sign up or are content pages. Getting a listing on this directory won’t pass much authority to your site."
But the 6th entry has a host rank of 129, much less than the home page, but is that the relevent comparision? If the scale is linear (with no upper bound), then 129 should be compared to all options possible options, or am I missing something?
Blekko is great, but it's helpful in valuation of mostly North American and European links. It's almost useless, let's say, on Israeli market. It shows data related to the biggest Israeli portals only. It needs to go long long way before it'll get super powers of Majestic.
Blekko is actually an amazing search engine that is capable of making vertical search for our topic of interest with the help of their slashtags.ScoutJet, the crawler for this search engine provides only quality content by slashing out spam, content farms, and malware. The Built-in Slashtags are very helpful in making a relevant search. Its simply awesome!
I haven't used it much though (since it is not that popular) but now I am more eager to know what it is capable of doing. All thanks to David for the encouragement.
I would definitely try the duptext slashtag to check if some other website is using my site's content.Thanks for telling "nmutbone".
Started using blekko recently and really appreciate this search engine. Transparent, excellent user control and great SEO tools.
Informative article about blekko SEO tools.
Grazie per questo ottimo suggerimento!
Cercherò di studiarlo bene per capire se può essere + utile di tanti strumenti Seo.
Checked it out; very neat. Thought I should point out that Blekko is probably much like SEOMoz, in that their link index isn't 'complete' (although no one's is). That means sites that have very low rank could actually have very low rank, or due to an algorithmic oddity they just haven't come to Blekko's attention properly yet. Make sure you check that 'last visited date' and 'last crawled' stat when looking up sites. Obviously if a site hasn't made a case for inclusion that's one thing, but I'm guessing there's probably quite a few authoritative 'niche' sites that haven't gotten the Blekko touch yet. Theoretically editorial oversight can overcome some of this, but until the wikipedia style crowd gets involved you'll have to live without a /yu-gi-oh slash list.
I was so stoked to find out about Blekko as a Seo Tool, but then I realized that it's nearly useless for German sites. My was last crawled about 277 days ago. And the SERPS for the german term "hochzeit" (wedding in German) show blekkos Seo data about a competitor as the 4th result. I guess they are just not crawling German sites that much (or at all).
Every Moz post comes with amazing and surprising facts and figures and the same is also one of them for me. Blekko search engine is a new one for me and I read about it for the first time and its really very much interesting to explore directories of other websites and its so helpful in SEO.
Great article! I didn´t know nothing about those aspects. Thank you for that helpful information.
How exactly does /sitepages work? Why should we trust that it is doing a reasonable estimiate of how much authority falls off?
Thanks - I'll be trying out Blekko real soon!
This is very helpful! I think I'll go through the rest of the recommended directories from SEOmoz to see how they fare.
Good Job David. Thanks for helping me know about blekko's seo tools.
Mike, thanks for the tip on duptext. I've been playing around with it and it looks like it could be useful. I just wish they'd specify the pages/URLs where the duptext appears. Or is that asking too much?
Hey David, awesome post. I had checked out Blekko ages back, when it was newly introduced and after going through its search quality I decided to leave it off my list. Your post has made me realize what potential i was loosing out on. Blekko's search quality is still not the best, but its SEO usefulness is definately going to get it lot of love from this community.
Im off to doing some Blekko research of my own. And Thanks for the slashtag presentation, it made my research start much easier :-)
Just checking it out right now. Never heard of it before. This tool offers some great options.
Don't know if it is just as useful in the euro zone though. Maybe in time
I love it! Thanks for the great new tool and great ideas here. I specifically like how it tells you the host crowd that you are hanging around with. This has always been a one of many details of have tried to isolate and pay attention to.
Thanks for the excellent article, David. In the case of brickwall.com, how did you determine that most of the inbound links were reciprocal? I didn't quite figure that part out...
Thanks again.
You have to spend a little time clicking around in their backlinks. Once you visit a couple of the backlinks and compare it to the content of the site, it becomes clear that this was a major part of gaining what little authority it has.
Great post David. I've used Blekko befoe but never thought of using it to evaluate web directories. I've used it for search tho and I wasn't impressed.
Thanks for the info about Blekko. This is something new that I leant from this post. Thanks alot David. I have never tried it before and would definitely try it.
I really appreciate the new the info/trends around seo in SEOmoz and is a good learning for everybody here onboard.
You can get really awesome data from blekko, I didn't know they gave this. Will use it a lot for directories and for my own websites!
Create your own account, it's really fast.
Very useful, I have not really explored blekko yet, but the data it gives you is amazing!
Thank you for this great advice
Always useful to consider another perspective and source for SEO efforts. Tried Blenko but the SERP results on the top 5 sites in my area are in no way related to host rank provided by Blenko. Would have hoped that the correlation would have been better.
Casper, like most search engines, your rank on Blekko for a particular URL and a particular term depends mostly on things other than the host rank.
Steve, please don't encourage users to use anonymous accounts. When someone abuses bmn and we ban it, it won't be nice for all the other people who are inconvenienced.
You have to remember (the introductory video shows this a little more clearly) that some of their search results are moderated by editors. What search did you try? Is there an editor listed on the right sidebar?
I got to know about Blekko recently. Thanks for this detailed article. It is very useful.
Thanks for this interesting information! I registered to Blekko and checked some data, very useful :)
Great article and free tool. This also confirms my suspicions about directory submissions. I do them, but only because I know my client's competitors are probably doing them. What's their objective worth? I don't know. I've never used a website directory to find anything, aside from local business directories or specialized directories, and then only rarely.
This is awesome! I'm off to do some Blekko research!!
Yay! I'm glad I know a good reason to actually use Blekko now. Thanks so much for the insight!
Great piece on Blekko. I too have not given Blekko as much attention as it deserves. They have lots of really good information available for free! And if you actually use the search engine you'll find some pretty decent results. Kudos again on a great piece.
Thanks David and Keri , I literally stumbled on blekko the other day(stumbleupon) and have been trying to think of some practical applications for my Linkbuilding efforts. I usually measure directories by cache rate and cache frequency to try and determine if they are worth it, literally worth it because all the good ones cost money