Blog by Paul Humphreys - PaulH

The Best SEO Blogs

PaulH — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:18:01 +0000

I keep my news reader subscriptions to a minimum, regularly adding and removing sites depending on signal to noise. I look for sites that inform or spark ideas, though some are just entertaining ramblings of a northern monkey. – I actually subscribe to dozens more dormant sites(the infrequent postings mean i don’t unsubscribe) but the list below are ones with activity in the last 3 months.

0toCash
Andrew Girdwood
Bill Slawski
Blogstorm
Church of the customer
David Naylor
EarlGay
Eric Enge
Esrun
Hobo SEO
Irish Wonder
John Andrews
John Battelle
Kissmetrics
Level 343
Link Spiel
Lyndon Antcliff
Ryan Clark
Sebastian’s Pamphlets
Seth Godin
SEO Gadget
State of Search
Tim Grice
The Google Cache
Vinicius Vacanti
Wiep Knol

Life After Yahoo Site Explorer API

PaulH — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:19:33 +0000

I have a tool that helps evaluate the quality of domains. When there are millions of old domains to buy you can’t look at them all manually so you need something that can filter out all the crap.

For the last couple of years i’ve been a big user of the Yahoo API. Lots of accounts and proxies meant our domain tool was performing 50,000+ backlink checks a day. Amusingly, you could generate your own API keys without the need to register, just add lots of proxies - http://www.packetflip.com/

Finding a good alternative to the yahoo API proved tricky. Yahoo allowed us to grab the first 50 backlinks of a domain with a single call. The bonus was these 50 tended to be the best links so were enough to quickly evaluate a domain. This proved perfect for what we wanted.

So i turned to the SEOMoz API, quick and simple to get running and so far hasn’t complained about out aggressive use. For me the problem with SEOMoz was the metrics “Domain Authority” and “Page Authority” . These are far too often flagging domains as good when a quick glance at the links shows they are some spammers cast offs. (still a bloody brilliant API and for FREE)

Next i turned to the Majestic SEO API, for this we needed a Platinum account – at £250 its a bit pricey, but for that you also get much larger reporting quotas. Problem here was similar to SEOMoz, Majestics AC Rank often scored some nasty domains far to high.

The good news is if you combine both “Domain Authority” , “Page Authority” and “AC Rank” you suddenly get most of the low quality domains removed. We could do further analysis on the links of each domains but these 3 simple metrics are proving good enough for what want.

All you need now is a big list of domains to check, but that’s another post.

is this thing on?

PaulH — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:50:37 +0000

2 years without a blog and nowhere to post my ramblings – so here we go again.

Deleted the old blog as i had this constant nagging to post something, but can resist no longer, i need to post and make the web a better place and add more drivel.