Aaron’s Backlink Analyzer tool updated

Aaron Wall (seobook) has updated his Backlink Analyzer tool. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should. First of all, it is free, and free is always a good thing.

What is Back Link Analyzer?
A free link popularity / link analysis tool. It shows what anchor text is linking into a page or site. Essentially, it does anchor text analysis. It’s a Windows-only download for now, and presents results in a spreadsheet type format.

So what’s new?
Aaron says:

I added PageRank to it (hopefully that doesn’t piss off Matt too bad), made the search term feature more reliable for deep backlink analysis (ie:…

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Google is broken theory

Came across a forum thread today that I thought was interesting, concerning one man’s opinion that Google is broken.

Ah, the old “Google is broken” thing again. How many times over the years have people said that? I’ve even said it a few times, I’m sure. So, normally, I wouldn’t link out to yet another Google is broken thread, but this time I thought it was worth reading and discussing.

Joeychgo uses a specific example of a search term - vbulletin - and compares the search results across the big 4 search engines. Clearly, using Joeychgo’s logic, Google is the loser. He…

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Offtopic post - Windows Vista

As many of you know, I run a Windows Vista forum and have been testing the Vista beta operating system for a while now. Since SEO’s are generally geeks who are interested in such things, I thought I’d share my opinions of Vista so far.

My computer doesn’t have enough graphics oomph to display the Aero glass theme, so I can’t comment on that from personal experience. I’m running the Vista basic theme, and even it is beautiful. The icons, toolbars, windows, etc. are a huge improvement.

Some of the things I like best about Vista are the improvements on the geeky side…

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Google updates

Just a quick note for anyone who hasn’t been following the forum discussions. Google has done some sort of tweaking over the last couple of days that has changed the SERPs (in a different way than the rolling changes we’ve seen on a daily basis for the last few months). It also appears to be going through a Toolbar PR update, although it may be one of those minor kinds of updates, where only new pages gain PR (so say some).

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Reports of sandboxed sites being released

There have been a sprinkling of reports of sites that have seemingly been in the sandbox being recently released. From the few I’ve checked out, it seems to be those sites that are hitting the 6-7 month age.

One of those sites is a friend’s that I looked at when he first started the site, and I gave him a few tips. It is now #1 in Google for its money phrase. I was really happy to hear about that.

While I’m sharing good news about friends’ sites, I thought I’d give a shout out to a friend who had some good…

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SEO Scoop Turns 2 Today

My first post here on SEO Scoop was two years ago today, June 26, 2004. Looking back, it seems that search has both changed considerably, and yet not changed much at all. Algorithms change seemingly on a daily basis these days (ok, I’m exaggerating a bit there), but some things remain constant.

A good site is a good site, no matter how much time goes by. Sure, sometimes the latest algo may hurt a good site, but most of the time, that site will bounce back with the next search engine tweak. Think quality in every aspect of your site, and…

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5 Million Spam Pages I Found in a Couple of Hours That Google Has Missed All Week

A friend of mine, Michael VanDeMar (aka mvandemar), alerted me to a situation that highlights the sub-subdomain spam problem that Google “supposedly” fixed, but apparently has not. Here is his research and report.
***
Last Saturday, June 17th 2006, an article was posted on how to get 5 Billion Pages indexed in Google in less than 30 days. The report was based around a series of domains from one particular spammer.

Google responded that in actuality, the counts reported were simply the results of a combination of a bug in the site: command and what they were calling a “bad data push”. Here’s what…

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Some SEO Friday fun

You know you’ve been in SEO too long when…

Some of my favorites:

someone found something and you ask “on which data center?”

Your other half understands what PageRank was and now is, knows all about net neutrality, and is familiar with issues with ICANN, Verisign and the US Govt, even though they don’t care, because you won’t shut up about them.

You read through a magazine and are unable to find an article, and you begin looking for ctrl + f keys in the magazine

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Current Known Google Datacenter IP list

Members at WebmasterWorld who have been diligently watching Google datacenter changes have compiled a list of datacenter IP addresses. There are far more known IPs than ever before (519 of them within 39 separate Class C’s, if I counted correctly), and there are likely quite a few that are still unknown. You can see the list at WMW (msg #26) and contribute to the list if you know of some that are missing. At the time of this writing, here are the known Google datacenter IP addresses (which may not be live at all times).

1. 64.233.161.18
2. 64.233.161.19
3. 64.233.161.44
4. 64.233.161.80
5. 64.233.161.81
6.…

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Google ranking and trust

Although the link I’m about to give you is six months old, it’s still one that needs to be shared. It’s titled The Future of Google SEO - Trust and it’s a good read, especially for newbies, who may have been reading old, outdated information. Thanks, brandall, for putting that information out there in such a clear, understandable manner.

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Searching can be frustrating

Lately, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with search results - and it’s NOT the search engines’ fault (this time). No, this time, I have to blame business owners. Why? Because they don’t have websites! How is it, in this day and age, that local businesses can’t even have a one-page brochure website? It costs, what…maybe $15/year for a domain name and cheap hosting for a tiny site?

I’m not asking for much here. I just want to be able to find services in my local area. You see, I’m moving soon. To a bare-naked piece of land. That land needs things done…

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Google has not solved the subdomain issue

Although Google has manually nuked the billions of pages that Mr. Spammer got indexed, it has obviously not solved the problem algorithmically. Would you consider Craigslist to be a spammer? No, of course you wouldn’t. Yet the rankings show some very obvious problems that Google is having with subdomains (sub subdomains actually) by looking at certain search terms (here and here). For those two terms, Craigslist (using sub subdomains) gets 97 of the top 100 search results and 50 of the top 100 results.

By doing a handjob on Mr. Spammers domains, Google only attempted once again to hide the problem rather…

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Google is seriously f’d up

Have you had your site’s pages de-indexed? Hmmm…maybe it’s because a world-class spammer has filled Google with BILLIONS of bogus pages - and Google has been stupid enough to be duped into indexing all of them!

Think it’s no big deal, because after all, it’s one thing to get indexed, but yet another to get ranked? Think again. This spammer is ranking for just about anything he wants - beating out the New York Times, and even getting ranked FOUR TIMES in the top 10 in some cases.

How has this spam king accomplished this? I don’t claim to understand the exact…

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