“ There are entire clusters of sites created for the sole purpose of manipulating SEO tools ’ metrics – often , this is done in the form of posting lists of links and nothing more ”
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TRAFFIC
“ There are entire clusters of sites created for the sole purpose of manipulating SEO tools ’ metrics – often , this is done in the form of posting lists of links and nothing more ”
SEO CONUNDRUM
So what ’ s an SEO to do ?
First of all , look beyond metrics . Study a site ’ s links , ranking history and traffic . Of course this data also comes from third-party SEO tools , unless the site is controlled by you and / or you have access to its Google Search Console , Bing Webmaster Tools or server logs . Accuracy of a third-party tool depends on many things : how large their database of tracked sites and keywords is , how many countries it collects data in , how often that data is updated , etc . Ideally , data from several different sources should be used . I use SISTRIX and SpyFu for historic ranking data , and have recently added SERanking to my tool arsenal .
Also , it ’ s important to understand that SEO metrics were mostly developed with the English-speaking markets in mind , maybe in the best case with the German-speaking markets as well ( e . g . SISTRIX ).
If we ’ re looking at other , non-English speaking markets , especially smaller countries , those metrics won ’ t make much sense . My favourite example to illustrate this : UK : population 60 + million , tens of millions of sites , the biggest news site bbc . co . uk has hundreds of millions of links from over 400,000 domains vs Lithuania : population under 3 million , tens of thousands of sites , the biggest news site lrt . lt has 800,000 links from just over 10,000 domains
What can we expect for SEO metrics ? Top-ranking igaming sites in the UK will have TrustFlow 40 +, whereas in Lithuania they will rarely have anything higher than TrustFlow 20 – but that doesn ’ t stop them from ranking in their targeted market .
So do yourself a favour : stop wasting your link budget on meaningless metrics and instead look at the factors that really matter . Yes , it ’ s a more copious and often manual process , but the value you get from it will definitely pay off .
JULIA LOGAN is an SEO consultant at Irishwonder . com . Her specialities include on-site / technical SEO and SEO security audits , link profile audits , online reputation management and negative SEO investigations and private network consulting . She is also the founder and CEO of Zangoose Digital , a boutique SEO agency specialising in bespoke private networks .
16 • ISSUE 94 • iGB AFFILIATE LONDON 2024