The Need for a New Gauge: Moving Beyond Visual or “Toolbar” PR Rankings - There are other ways to evaluate Web pages
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So what’s a responsible webmaster to do? Reciprocal linking and text link advertising are not going away, so there needs to be a more sane method for evaluating Web pages. Here is my suggestion:
The SEO community as a whole must take steps to change the current mindset and move away from utilizing PR as the predominant method for establishing the SERPs value of a specific Web page. Until someone comes up with a more comprehensive third party tool, or Google decides to improve upon the current visual PR concept, here is a checklist of things to look for when evaluating a Web page:
- Backlinks (link:http://www.yourdomain.com) – Yahoo is the best place to look. Disregard Google’s data. They purposely offer incomplete backlink data when you use the link command in their engine.
- Link location – Is the link on the footer? Is it on the left or right rail? Is it up near the top or the center of the page? This is an important factor because Google and the other engines are beginning to award varying weight to the content on different regions of a given Web page.
- Number of indexed pages (site:http://www.yourdomain.com) – Make sure to run this query in Google. The more pages indexed, the better.
- Freshness of page or site as a whole – Does content get updated often or does this site have the same content that it had in 1997? The fresher the content, the better.
- Google’s site flavor tool – If your not familiar with this tool, go to this url for more info: http://www.google.com/services/siteflavored.html
- Relevancy and traffic – This one is a “no brainer.” Does the site have solid traffic and is it relevant to your site? Use your common sense here.
- SERPs for specific search terms – This is critical. SERPs are the true measure of a Web page’s search engine “potency.” They also give good insight into the relevancy of the Web page.
Next: Developing a third-party tool >>
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