In our SEO Search tools we trust

[wonderpunter]

So I thought I would start a thread though i feel the diehard's will never see things how I do, however for the new guys it might give you some insight on all these glorious tools mentioned in thousands of SEO articles all with a cookie attached to the link that they click. Someone mentioned SEMRush to me for those of us that gets a decent amount of traffic knows how useless these tools are, they do not match up with any WMT or Analytic, official goolge keywords figures which would include thousands of other different words, mispelt or not but still show the same result as many of you already know. Then we have Ahrefs, Majestic, etc that all rank based on their version on what Google page rank would of been But... They rank based on links.. how do they know what is worthy or not? spam penalised etc? Content and Rank Brain "Yes I am talking about it again" but they leave out these two big Signal drivers but will still rank some payday loan site with 1000 visitors over a site pulling 6 figures?

So rather than me try and explain "Which I cannot fully give a reason to why they are not accurate" I found a pretty detailed expermient by Moz, which also includes their own moz testing tool. you can read the results here. https://moz.com/rand/traffic-predict...xa-similarweb/

[RacingJim]

The best SEO tool we have is our brain and our experience.

[MrBinaryAff]

Great post wonderpunter, will have a read tomorrow!

[universal4]

Any tools that suck down entire copies of competitors websites and return zero value should be banned. And they are even worse when they refuse to follow robots.txt or do not identify themselves properly.

And even worse than that, are the so-called seo websites that spider, scrape and then store other people's websites in their database so that their competitors can look through the code etc.

Think about it, if you are able to go to a website and do this, then that website is re-publishing that content, in order for you to be able to "view" it. Don't forget, if you are doing it to your competition, they are gonna do it to you.

I have nothing against a search engine, indexing my content in the hopes of sending future traffic, but an seo site that databases my website is NOT a search engine, and is NOT going to be sending traffic.

I am guessing there have been many time many of you have been performing keyword research when you have seen some of these seo type websites that will show in search results on keywords, NOT for any of their OWN content, but for having pages of OTHER websites in their databases.

Don't you feel really really good when some of those pages are yours? Showing up on someone else's websites.

It could be that rankbrain type of ranking is more of the future, but I do think it depends on whether those types of tools look at the real publishers of the content and figure out ways to reduce of not completely remove all re-publishers such as the seo type sites.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

And even worse than that, are the so-called seo websites that spider, scrape and then store other people's websites in their database so that their competitors can look through the code etc.

I block every main seo spider that I find hitting my site except for major search engine (Google / Bing etc) that have a public search function.

[MrBinaryAff]

So, I mainly use SEMRush and Majestic for SEO purposes. I use it to see how my website is developing as well as looking for good website, which I can collaborate with.

SEMRush gives you a good idea if traffic is genuine of what website owner is saying, and I don't see how Rand from MOZ could analyse the traffic from website vs what SEMRush is showing. SEMRush shows only organic search traffic, so he should've done a separate research on that...

Majestic is not there, but it helps to track backlinks, and analyse the websites trust. Since there is no PageRank, how else could you know if website is great and not spammy with low quality links?

[wonderpunter]

So, I mainly use SEMRush and Majestic for SEO purposes. I use it to see how my website is developing as well as looking for good website, which I can collaborate with.

SEMRush gives you a good idea if traffic is genuine of what website owner is saying, and I don't see how Rand from MOZ could analyse the traffic from website vs what SEMRush is showing. SEMRush shows only organic search traffic, so he should've done a separate research on that...

Majestic is not there, but it helps to track backlinks, and analyse the websites trust. Since there is no PageRank, how else could you know if website is great and not spammy with low quality links?

I don't use any of those tools.. only analytics "Precisely measured including sub 30 second one page visitors" and WMT, it's the only true accurate way to determine. everything else is theoretical calculations based on a tiny fraction of data the big G uses all packaged up then pushed out in affiliate articles to sell to those seeking large amounts of traffic. Google: The Top Three Ranking Factors Are Content, Links & RankBrain

Now if this is the case how do sites like majestic value content and ranking based upon RankBrain? "I know some of you still do not believe it exists".

These are two big signals that everyone should be paying attention to yet is massively ignored..

[MrBinaryAff]

Wonderpunter, with links everything is clear, Majestic kinda gives you the rank and there other tools which calculate so-called trust based only on the quality of the backlinks. Content can't be really ranked, it's what RankBrain is probably going to do, but we yet don't know how exactly it is going to work.

Personally I know how to create good content on my websites and analyse your own website, but when it comes to other websites, they might have only 2% of good content, other thing is spam and you can't really evaluate it, so here comes TrustFlow etc...

In Russia for example it's completely different story, as most of the traffic comes from Yandex (Russian "Google") it ranks you completely differently, content is more important there than links. You can have **** website, but really good article and you will be in TOP5 easily, but that's hard work

[universal4]

Majestic is a perfect example of a bot that is used to scrape competitors sites that returns no value to the competitor.

You may think it is ok, but why should a site owner allow a bot like that to scrape and index their entire website? The competitor gets nothing back for it, the content is not being indexed for a search engine.

Often the majestic bot is also manipulated to not follow robots.txt also, although their developers claim it is written to do so.

Rick
Universal4

[GCG]

Negative SEO seems to work fine....

[wonderpunter]

Negative SEO seems to work fine....

The latest round of penalties was focused on outbound links,, perhaps it's a thing to come for the new update when it lands? rather than kill of the businesses just take away pushing power? it would effectively make negative seo a thing of the past and the collateral damage to other sites wouldn't be too bad for anyone caught in the cross fire