Last April I started working with an SEO company called SEOmoz to gather some search engine data on our members’ sites. Since then, we’ve been collecting regular data on a small group of members for testing (about 300 random members). Testing has gone well, and we’re just about ready to release a new set of tools to our members! These tools will include data about how your site is ranking, what kind of links it’s receiving and more. Here’s an example of what one of the reports will look like:
We’re in the process of running the first full analysis on all our members, which may take as long as this entire weekend. Once that’s complete, you should see a graph similar to the image above on the brand new members-only page. We plan on adding more information in the future, and have ideas for a bunch of other great SEO tools to go along with this data.
I’ll be posting more about this project in the near future. For now I just wanted to give everyone a sneak peek.
I actually managed to free up some service processing power and get everything finished up today. You can access your search engine report at http://www.nachi.org/seo-metrics.htm (members-only). Right now, most people will only see 1 or 2 data points, but as we continue tracking at full-scale that will change (we’re tracking once a month right now, so the next data point will be added in May).
The graph shows I have a total of 2634 inbound links, of which only 1881 are considered “valuable links”.
Is there a way to decipher which inbound links to my site are not “valuable links”?
As I understand stand it, and I may be wrong, inbound links can’t hurt your SEO, BUT, “bad outbound links” can.?.
I can see where this information would be helpful by eliminating link exchanges that incorporate “nofollow” or “noindex” - But I would need a way to determine which ones do.
Also is there anything in the works on getting metrics for good & bad outbound links?
Right now we’re not comparing inspectors’ sites. If we do release some details it won’t be for a few months (after we’ve been collecting data for everyone for a while), and we’ll have to think about how to keep things properly anonymous. As for Kevin’s longer question:
There’s no way to list which links are valuable and which aren’t. But I wouldn’t worry about that anyway. Nofollowed and noindexed links/pages don’t necessarily contribute to your site’s ranking, but there’s a lot of evidence that having a portion of your links from those sources can be a positive indicator of your site’s value. Basically, Google has looked at the links pointing to sites it knows to be “real” (sites that Google employees have looked at and confirmed that they’re not spam), and they’ve seen that most of these sites have both follow and nofollow links. So if a site ONLY has follow links, Google might treat that as an indication that the site is manipulating things (although, if they do, it’s only a MINOR factor).
What’s more important is that you have links pointing to your site, and that you work to grow your links over time. If you have 1881 valuable links pointing to your site today, set a goal to hit 2000 links at some point in the future, and then use our tool to check your goal. You want positive growth in rank, authority and links, and you can use our tools to track those things.
Would links coiming from the ‘Members Only’ section be considered ‘not valuable’ compared to those threads in the publiuc area? Based upon being a restricted area. Not sure if the spiders are able to roam in that area. There are some members who don’t believe in posting outside of the members only section.
Links coming from a password-protected page have no value from a search engine perspective, because search engines don’t know they’re there (just like non-members). That said, there are plenty of other reasons to use the members-only forum. But if you are posting for SEO purposes, you should be posting in public forums—particularly content-rich posts about home inspection topics, as these are most likely to receive outside links and rank well (for example, you may post 1000 jokes in ‘not for everyone’ or 10,000 "me too"s in Miscellaneous, and it probably won’t have as much SEO value as one well-thought 2-3 paragraph response in the Plumbing or HVAC sections).
This is going to vary enormously depending on the competitiveness of your market. You can use the Open Site Explorer to compare your site to some of your competitors, but you’re not going to get the mozRank number from OSE unless you pay (InterNACHI pays to use the SEOmoz tools, which is why we can display more information in our reports).
