On Monday, John Straw announced a new product, Influence finder which uses MajesticSEO’s Enterprise level API as a significant part of its algorithms. His presentation rocked the room and hours earlier the product just PIPPED MajesticSEO in a survey of link tools by the highly respected Link Builder, Weip, who gave MajesticSEO 90% and Influence Finder 92%. Before I go too far, let me say that MajesticSEO will work hard to try to catch up on the missing 2% in Weip’s comparison.
His presentation was really interesting and was based around a case study with econsultancy (who gave us first prize in their technology and innovation awards earlier this year).
John set out to build a system which solved the problem of having huge numbers of link targets, when a company really wanted to know a few that would be worth developing a meaningful relationship with. His model would take the best dataset of links around, then run a series of extra algorithms on the data to filter out those which gave off poor quality signals.
So his first challenge was to decide what dataset to use. Since Yahoo only gives up 1000 results, he had really only had two datasets to choose from and compared these with Google’s WMT list for econsultancy. So what did he find?
Well he found first and foremost (from our perspective) that MajesticSEO showed more links than Google WMT. We found links from 8,448 referring domains whilst Google found (or at least reported) links from 5,189 domains. The commonality chart above shows only about a 30% overlap – so this needs explaining. about 18 months ago, e-consultancy.com changed to econsultancy.com and I suspect (but have not yet tested) that Google and Majestic report these differently.
Influence Finder then goes considerably further, by applying several algorithms such as their “heartbeat” algorithm to find sites that are active – but not hyperactive and therefore better prospects than sites which either are left decaying on some far flung corner of Blogspot or alternatively collect all their data through RSS feeds and have no relevent human involvement.
In order to do this, of course, they need to actively go and spider the sites in our dataset, to pick up new quality signals. This is the sort of added value that we have been working with our Enterprise API partners to deliver. Influence Finder is still in its embryonic form – but it is VC backed and has an impressive pedigree of people and contacts behind its management.
The resulting list of sites were a small; set of high value blogs and news sites with a natural affinity to econsultancy, rather than 8,000 initial target sites.
It will be interesting to see how the algorithm progresses.
I urge you to give Influence Finder a run through with their free seven day trial if you have a chance, if you are one of those people that gets overwhelmed by MajesticSEO’s data and would like someone or something to do the analysis and data crunching for you.
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John has posted the full presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/influencefinder/straw-john-linkbuilding-outside-of-the-box-updated-4136049
May 23, 2010 at 9:36 pmHi,
will you publish in the future SEO info products? I am sure that you have done a lot of tests and research with Majestic SEO. Of course the question is: exactly what to do to achieve top rankings as soon as possible, and exactly how hard is to rank for a specific keyword?
There are a lot of SEO advice out there, but you have a very unique database, so I expect original research from you. I would buy SEO advice from you.
May 24, 2010 at 3:17 pmIt’s worth a shot – I signed up for the 7 day trial. I’m a little concerned it will be too in depth to yield great benefit but we’ll see!
June 16, 2010 at 7:07 am