I love Blekko.
Hold on, please. If you are thinking that any person who professes love for a robot should be plucked out of society and thrown in the loony bin, I understand (and perhaps you are right). But before you lock me up and throw away the key, maybe I can sway you around to loving Blekko too.
Like any good love story, I guess the best best place for me to start is at the beginning.
I used to love Google. Really, truly, deeply (sexually?). ‘OMG’ I thought, when doing my first link:domain.com search way back when, can you believe how great Google is? All this incredible marketing intelligence is just one or two advanced link operators away. ‘This is so much faster than doing it manually’ I thought; ‘how efficient. Google is really, really great.’ I concluded, and my love developed from there.
Unfortunately and like so many relationships before it, the Google I met all those years ago changed. It didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen – and the old adage is true: ‘you always hurt the ones who love you the most’.
Now, only a small selection of the links to a site are shown publicly by Google and truth be told I have my doubts about the accuracy of Webmaster Tools link data too. What happened to you Google? You used to be so willing to share important information openly, but now I feel like the best parts are kept away from me – and for what? Why deny me of something so easily given? What happened to that search engine that I used to know and love?
Then, like a 23 year old Pamela Anderson moving to the house next door, Blekko stole my heart.
If Blekko were a woman…
Why is Blekko awesome, you ask?
Blekko is all about transparency. Transparency in how sites are ranked, transparency in link counts, transparency in everything. How? Just by adding [code]/seo or /rank[/code] to a search query. For example:
What can Blekko do for SEO’s?
Give you what you want, free, and with a large and soon to be up to par index:
- inbound links
- crawl stats
- site pages
- comparisons with other sites
- duplicate content
- search results by Facebook ‘likes’ (great conceptually, but not very useful based on the results I am seeing ‘as is’ now; add ‘/likes’)
- results based on publish date (add ‘/date’)
- find out why search results are ranked in the order they are; add ‘/rank’
Sick of reading?
Great, here’s a video about how to use Blekko:
Oh yeah, and the official three reasons are :
- Transparency – thank you Blekko for just being cool, building your brand on the value proposition of open information
- Courage – Blekko has the cojones to get into the search arena with something new. I hope it breaks the current duopoly (monopoly?)
- Sorry, there is no three; but scientific research shows that three points always look at least 50% better than two.
Credit for point three goes to Lindsay Camp, an absolutely hilarious persuasive writer (if you ask me, which you didn’t).
GO on, visit blekko.com and get your SEO on!