You probably have (or not) heard about a new search engine recently debuted that goes for the name of Blekko. To be honest, I am still not quite sure what to make of it but having had the time to research and play with Blekko a little bit, I found some features that could be of certain interest to some of you (specially SEO fanatics). This is therefore a small introduction to Blekko and you should know, before I proceed that one of my main source of information about Blekko came from an article I read on DotSauce.com.
[note]UPDATE: August 2012: Recently, Blekko announced that their SEO tools will be a paid service, as reported on searchengineland.com. If you are looking for other alternatives, try using Bing Webmaster Tools, or these ones here.[/note]
Here are some interesting “toys” that you can find on Blekko.
Blekko’s Open SEO Data
Most likely the reason why I gave the title, All-In-One SEO tool, is because after doing a search on Blekko, you will find under the results, links that are worthwhile clicking at (see image below). The links are:
tag, SEO, links, cache, ip, AdSense, spam
Accuracy aside, If you click on the SEO link you will be taken to a page where you will find many information regarding a websites data. Note that under normal circumstances, you will either need a “special” software or several tools to get these type of information. The closest I can compare to get these type of information will be that of Alexa, but with some differences. Anyway Alexa is not in play here, and following a search performed on Blekko, the SEO data that you can access to with a single click are, hostrank, inbound links, site pages, crawl stats, duplicate content, charts of links by country, state and more.
These are information readily available to a user and with the exception of HostRank, which I do not know exactly what it means, all other data can be used to analyze competition, your own pages, etc. I used Blekko to find out “what is HostRank” and the result it gave me on the number 1 position is pointing to a “parked” domain, so that’s that :). Another thing I still figuring out is understanding AdSense link. Hovering on that link will reveal the publisher ID and right now I am not even sure if that is good or bad.
Blekko’s Slashtags
Hopefully DotSauce.com won’t mind me using an excerpt of their post and I encourage to read the full story about Blekko on their website to find out more about the slashtag feature, and head back here. You can also watch a video demonstration of Blekko here (removed). As for the excerpt:
Blekko’s premier feature is a query modifier called slashtags. These are custom made filters added to the end of your search that provide an extra level of refined results.
A directory of slashtags have been created to represent topics. A wide range of slashtags have already been added and users are invited to create their own. Here are some examples:
- /technology – Results filtered to popular tech destinations
- /health – Only known health authority sites are shown
- /movies – Browse just the top movie information sites
- /liberal – No articles from Fox news here
As you see, there are some interesting features Blekko offers and as far as their future is concern, it is still very early to predict anything. For now, I am not sure that Blekko will substitute my favorite SEO Tools, but for a “rapid” analysis, this certainly comes in handy.
As I said, this is just a small introduction of Blekko and I will be running my “experiments” to find more information about it. Questions such as, how to optimize for Blekko and if it is worth it, remains unanswered. While we are at it, if you have any particular question you want to ask, let me know so I can include this is my research and future posts.
So, have you used Blekko before? What do think about it?
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Melinda
I hadn’t heard of this site. I checked out the stats on my website there. Interesting. I need a whole day on your site to learn more about SEO. I look forward to hearing about your findings. Who started that site?
Sharat
If I am not wrong, DiTesco is founder of this blog 🙂
It would have been nice if I were the founder of Blekko would it not 🙂 Sadly, NO. The person behind Blekko is Rich Skrenta. He has a nice interview here, where he says that Blekko’s main purpose was to defeat SEO spam.
@Melinda. Don’t forget to click on SEO links and then on URLs. It really has good info.
Patricia@lavenderuses
Hi DiTesco
Thanks for sharing about this new SEO tool. I have a techie friend who is going to sort my SEO for me. Says I need some lessons on it lol So far with my small niche blog I’m doing okay with Google. Not sure how so just keep on keeping on with my content rich posts and publishing regularly.
Will be interested if you write anymore on SEO cos I’m sure I still have heaps to learn. Thanks for sharing with us.
Patricia Perth Australia
Hi Patricia. It is so good to know that you are now starting to worry about SEO and stuff. Look at you, that’s a big leap, lol. Still remember your early stages. Anyway, that’s the spirit and I hope that in a way, you have learned something by visiting my blog.
SEO tips? Got tons of them here, which is for all levels. Just hit the “SEO” button up there on the nav bar and you’ll see them. There is one guide that is perfect for all levels and I highly recommend you to read it, if you find the time. It will at the very least, get you familiar with some of those “nasty” SEO terms, haha. (click the link below)
Best SEO Tips
Search Engine Optimization Resources
Pankaj Gupta
Hope they will do something better than other search engine. It will take time to fight with Google 🙂 Let see what happens 🙂
Hello Pankaj. It is normal nowadays for people to say that something “is the next Google”. Quite frankly I find that hard to believe, simply because it is not just the “service” in itself that counts, but rather “peoples” habit and that is one though cookie to beat. Blekko sounds promising and they may go somewhere. I just hope that they do not fall like the others and keep up. Maybe they should focus on what they believe in and simply forget the “fight” with Mr G.. Will that be a “David and Goliath” scenario? Only time will tell.
Rahul
it’s a nice tool, Ditesco. i think it has added a new dimension to search engine. i found many useful things there and most of them are unknown to me. we all have to wait a bit to see what’s going to happen next. by the way, Ditesco, thanks a lot for introducing this new fascinating tool to us. and please keep noticing us about blekko regularly.
Hi Rahul. Yeah, Blekko sounds very promising and there are still many things to explore. Will do my best to keep you guys updated and should you find something interesting about Blekko, please do share it with us.
Mitchell Allen
Great find, DiTesco! I’m always curious about backlinks to my site, but can never remember how to format the query in Google (you would think I’d have a save search or something, but I’m north THAT curious 🙂 ).
But, since we’re on the topic, I find it very interesting that Blekko quickly returned 802 inbound links for my site’s name, vs. Google’s 13 for my site’s URL. Something’s outta wack :o/
Still, Blekko looks like fun. Thanks for sharing!
Cheers,
Mitch
Hi Mitchell. Google returns very low amount of inbound links to any website when using their search engine. This is because they want to keep certain info confidential and normally they filter for results which they think might be duplicate, hence the lower number. If you use Google’s webmaster tools, you should be able to see all your inbound links as Google sees it.
Blekko on the other hand provides you with all these info at a click of your mouse. Obviously, I can not at this time couch for its accuracy as there are differences with some of the test I performed. Nonetheless, I think it is just a matter of time until they get all those “sweet” info near to 99% accuracy. We’ll see and do play with it. Let me know later what you think. Don’t forget to click on the “URL” link under the SEO tab. It gives added valuable info.
It seems that a lot of new search engines are starting to appear lately. Although this is cool I don’t know how much success will all this new search engines have.
The adsense publisher link can be found in the webpage code and the blekko offers you the chance to find other websites that have the same pubkisher id (spy on the competition).
Their link analysis is quite up to par compared to yahoo api, but it looks cool!
Hello Alex. Good thinking on the AdSense publisher id, although I am not convinced that that is the “true” intention of Blekko, i.e., snoop around publishers for competition. That’s an interesting thought though 😉
Michele Welch
Very interesting tool DiTesco. You can really narrow down your searches using specific keywords. I really have to play with it a bit. Not sure exactly how the slash tags work and how it would benefit me. I wonder if these are real time results?? That is, where are these results pulled from and how are they ranked? Are they inline with Google SERP’s?
Not sure if I’m making sense … I guess I have to look at it a bit more. 😉
Thanks for the heads up on this tool!
Hi Michele. I think you are making sense, lol. If I understood it correctly /slashtags are used for filtering results. If you use the /date, it is suppose to return results almost in real time. Say, you are looking for online business tips and you want results only from “WAH” blogs, then use the /WAH and it will return results only from sites tagged as WAHs.
As far ranking is concern, I made a comparison between Blekko, Google, and Bing and the results depending on the search etrms may differ substantially. One main reason for this is that Blekko’s purpose is to defeat SEO spam and supposedly eliminates sites which are spammy in nature.
Anyway, that’s what I have right now and will be exploring it more.
Nope, never heard if it DiTesco, but I hope they do very well because anyone that can give Google a run for it’s money is tops in my books. They have way too much power for my liking, and perhaps if they were made to work for their money us publishers would get a better deal.
I second you on that Sire and I do hope that Blekko gets a bite of the action. I think that having more players will is always good for competition and at the end of the day, better for users, no doubt about that. We’ll see
If this is a new Search Engine, then there must be a lot of things to learn about it. I just tried searching for my website and unlike on Google or Yahoo which shows links in around 900 this search engine showed only 20 links, pretty weird. Also it seems to be enhanced by yahoo.
Hi Mayur. I’m not sure about being Yahoo enhanced (don’t think so) as that would be a breach on MS/Yahoo deal. Anyway, Blekko is relatively new so it will take a little more time to gather all the billions of data out there. Maybe they prioritize their database based on certain factors that are still somewhat unknown. I checked mine and they pretty are the same with that of Google.
Richard, Leeds SEO
It’s a very good idea to market a new search engine to a niche market.
No one is ever going to take on Google for a general search, but that’s much better than Google for people who are into online marketing and SEO – which is a lot of people.
That said, a lot of the data I looked at whilst playing with it didn’t seem very accurate yet.
Hi Richard. You are right. I think that Blekko will be primarily used by SEO enthusiast and that their data is not quite “complete” as yet. I guess this is normal for “start ups” and the more information they gather on the long run, the more “near” to accurate they will get. Thanks for stopping by
Excellent article. Just got some time to go through blekko’s page. I really enjoyed it especially how it handles SEO and related info. Will surely make use of the same to get more details and information related to my site. I know we cannot compare it to the Great Google but it is definitely not bad. Hope it gets more and more popular. Thanks a bunch for this info. Keep writing 🙂
Hi Aswani. You are right about Google, although Blekko in this case is ahead as it provides information that Mr G does not. Like you, I do hope it gets more popular and that the information they gather on their database gets better. Thanks for stopping by.
sandinfo
Hi DiTesco
Thanks for sharing about this new SEO tool. Will be interested if you write anymore on SEO cos I’m sure I still have heaps to learn. Thanks for sharing with us.. please more suggestion
SandStrom Infotech.