DIY SEO and discrepancies

There are companies which will work hard on SEO for you, but there is also a lot you can do on your own just using browser extensions. For instance there's one called Chrome SEO. Can you guess which browser it's for?

Anyway, pointing it at this blog, I discover that Ask, Bing, Google and Yahoo all currently have zero pages indexed here. But wait - MajesticSEO has 3,576,791,630! Wow, I didn't even know I'd written that many! ... Oh, never mind, that's just the number of pages they've indexed on the whole of blogger / blogspot. There's no backlink information and no ranking information to be had either, again with the exception of MajesticSEO, and the only social activity is a couple of tweets, probably both by me.

Let's compare that with an established and popular blog. For convenience, I'll stick with the one I mentioned yesterday. AdrienneSmith.net has 66 pages indexed by Bing, 462 by Google, and 13,664 by MajesticSEO. There are 76 backlinks according to Alexa, and 49,594 according to MajesticSEO. Her PageRank (which you may remember had inexplicably gone down from 4 to 2) is now 3, and her Alexa ranking is 83,292 (meaning that Alexa reckon her site is the 83,292nd most popular in the world). Overall, quite impressive! Rather than try to match that, I think that for now I'll stick with my existing goal of getting this blog on Google's front page for its name.

One thing that's worth mentioning is the discrepancies. 462 vs. 13,664 for instance is a big difference. I can't imagine how MajesticSEO gets such large figures - no doubt there'll be an explanation on their website, which I'll look into, but for now I don't see how there can be 13,664 pages to be indexed in a blog that has just 309 posts. That's something for a future blog entry.

Similarly, there's a big difference between Adrienne's Alexa ranking (83,292) and her Compete rank (2,294,583).

Why does this happen? These rankings are based on estimates of site traffic, and different services have different methods of estimating. They have to do a lot of extrapolating based on the little information that they do know. And that's another reason not to get too hung up on Google's PageRank. PageRank is supposed to be a measure of a site's "authority" rather than its popularity, but volume of traffic should surely have at least some bearing on that; and while Google probably have a better idea than most, nobody, not even Google, has a complete worldwide picture of how many hits there are each day to each site. Their guesses might be more informed than most, but they're still guesses.