I’ve been getting a lot more used to blekko’s SEO tools recently, and I have to say I am very pleased with the information they provide as well as blekko’s transparency. However, there are a few things that aren’t quite clear to me.
- Does blekko completely ignore the nofollow attribute
- Are 302 redirects counted the same as direct links
- Are links tagged as excluded completely dismissed
Take a look at the screenshots below and you’ll see exactly which links blekko marked as “excluded” and understand what I am talking about.
(Numbers in green are links that blekko didn’t tag as excluded, and red numbers identify links that are marked as excluded. Also, links highlighted in pink have the nofollow attributed assigned to them.)
Detailed Link Attributes
1. Internal
2. Internal (excluded)
3. Internal, Image
4. External
5. Internal (excluded)
6. Internal (excluded)
7. Internal (excluded)
8. External
9. Internal/External (excluded)
10. External, 302 Redirect, NoFollow
11. External
12. External, 302 Redirect, NoFollow
13. External
14. Internal (excluded)
15. Internal (excluded)
16. External, NoFollow (excluded)
17. Internal (excluded)
Anything stand out to you here?
One thing that immediately stood out to me was that blekko seems to exclude most navigational links regardless if they are internal or external links. I don’t believe Google completely excludes navigational links. However, they are likely discounted in some way.
What’s also interesting is that blekko seems to completely ignore the nofollow attribute and 302 redirects. Take a look at links 10 and 12 above. Both of those links are nofollowed, 302 redirected affiliate links and neither of them were excluded.
Does blekko Count Web Directory Links
Now let’s examine how Blekko treats outbound listing links coming from the top 5 directories recommended in the screenshot above.
* DMOZ.org – Counts!
* BOTW.org – Counts!
* JoeAnt.com – excluded
* Business.com – Counts!
* Yahoo! – Counts!
It appears a listing and backlink from 4 of the top 5 directories I’ve recommended count towards ranking in blekko. JoeAnt is the only one whose listings are excluded – which is interesting, because JoeAnt might be the strictest directory of the bunch. Probably an oversight on their part.
Additionally, I found that “most” listings in the blogs.botw.org directory were excluded, except for listings that didn’t include any additional site links such as: [RSS], [AUDIO], [ATOM], [XML], [VIDEO]. Note: blogs.botw.org is a sub-domain and separate directory from the main directory at botw.org. Listing in the main directory are counted. Probably another oversight because links from both BOTW directories should count – in my opinion, anyway.
I believe the engineers at blekko have manually gone in and allowed links from these directories because other directories I checked had their links excluded. But the great thing is you can always check each directory before you submit to them.
Just keep in mind, blekko, Bing and Google don’t use the exact same algorithms and technology. Google may count links blekko doesn’t and vice versa.
Dofollow Blog Comments, Comment Luv and Top Commentator Links
I think most of us assume Google and the major search engines are smart enough to identify, discount or exclude all dofollow blog comment links. However, I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how blekko looks at them since that data is available to us. So I found a site that allows dofollow blog comments and uses the CommentLuv, KeywordLuv and Top Commentators plug-ins.
Detailed Link Attributes
1. Internal, NoFollow (excluded)
2. External (excluded)
3. Internal, NoFollow (excluded)
4. External, NoFollow (excluded)
5. NOT FOUND
6. External (excluded)
7. External (excluded)
In this case blekko excluded every link related to blog comments even if they were dofollow links. I also noticed that blekko didn’t find the URLs listed in the drop down option menus on this site.
Final Observations
blekko appears to be extremely strict in regards to which links they count. Navigational links and links that are grouped together are typically ignored while contextual links are usually counted regardless of their attributes, i.e., NoFollow, 302 redirect, etc..
What have you observed about the way blekko looks at links?