Since one of my friends Skyped me and told me about a new SEO tool “Linkdiagnosis” I’ve been researching in to websites to see if I can find and correlation or trends with SE positions. Part of Linkdiagnosis’s features shows backlinks with page rank and “strength”. I’ve been analyising how this is determined and it seems to be a combination of links pointing to that page, the age of the domain and the page rank assigned.

What I did was look at the term “SEO BLOG” and took various websites to find the data, plus seounique of course!

Here’s what I found:

I looked at 6 websites and noted their rankings in Google UK:

1. www.wolf-howl.com
2. www.estebanpanzera.com
3. www.seodisco.com
4. www.yooter.com
5. www.seotao.com
6. www.seounique.com

Using Linkdiagnosis I made a note of the total strength number of the domain, number of registered backlinks, plus took a screen shot of their PR distribution.

1. Wolf Howl

Google UK Position = 1
Strength = 772
Number of Backlinks = 3404

2. Estebanpanzera

Google UK Position = 9
Strength = 124
Number of Backlinks = 227

3. Seo Disco

Google UK Position = 10
Strength = 161
Number of Backlinks = 142

4. Yooter

Google UK Position = 20
Strength = 211
Number of Backlinks = 376

5. SeoTao

Google UK Position = 23
Strength = 11
Number of Backlinks = 141

6. Seounique

Google UK Position = 100+
Strength = 36
Number of Backlinks = 341

As you can see by these results, strong backlinks still seem to be the key in good search rankings (by strong I mean strength not page rank), especially with a good use of anchor texts. The anchor text seems to even make up for number of backlinks and quality of these backlinks when it comes to specific keywords. SeoTao has low link strength and a low number of backlinks but those links often contain the words “seo blog” in anchor descriptions, this strategy mixed with a good domain age obviously produces good SE positions.

What seems to a nice discovery about this tool is the ability to find strong backlinks that carry weight in terms of strength. After looking for a few hours it’s obvious that good blog posts that become popular and are linked too, hold a lot of weight if you comment. So as well as being friendly to people it pays to say!