As most of you may know, Blekko is a new search engine that's getting a lot of momentum and discussion in Silicon Valley. Regardless of what you may think of the search engine itself, it enables us to take SEO one step further.

Blekko is a search engine that attempts to remove spam by creating something called Slashtags.

blekko is a better way to search the web by using slashtags. slashtags search only the sites you want and cut out the spam sites. use friends, experts, community or your own slashtags to slash in what you want and slash out what you don't.

Essentially users, and the wisdom of crowds will help remove spam. Although the Slashtags that they provide currently can enable us to be one step ahead of everyone else.

How to Blekko "slashtags" to stay ahead of the competition:

Link Checker

Head over to Blekko.com, and you'll be presented with a typical search form. Enter http://www.techcrunch.com /links into the search form.

The search "http://www.url.com /links" enables you to view all the links that Blekko has come across. This is like Yahoo Site Explorer and will become more relevant once Blekko grows and indexes more of the internet.

Advanced Backlink Checker Searching

Blekko.com takes it one step further and allows you to dive deeper than any search engine in regards to backlinks.

Blekko allows you to sort the backlinks a website by date! Now you can stay on top of your competition and the new backlinks that come in.

Search the following on Blekko; http://www.techcrunch.com /links /date

Again that takes backlink monitoring one step further. But wait! There's much more that Blekko enables you what you to do.

Monitor Backlinks through RSS

That's right, Blekko enables you to monitor backlinks in real-time via an RSS feed. The RSS feature can be used on many different slashtags, but here are a few.

Search the following on Blekko: http://www.techcrunch.com /links /rss

This will give you a RSS feed of links in no particular order.

Search the following on Blekko: http://www.techcrunch.com /links /date /rss

This is HUGE, you can get an RSS feed of backlinks for any website and how they come across them in real time. For the blackhat in us, think about that for a minute. Get your backlinks indexed even easier by plugging this RSS feed into popular backlinking tools. Submit these feeds to popular RSS feed applications. Blast them out to Twitter for some social aspects. The possibilities are endless here.

Competition Analysis & Analyzing your own data

Search the following on Blekko: http://www.techcrunch.com /seo

This will give you a breakdown of exactly what Blekko see's. Who cares about optimizing for Blekko (atleast for now) but use this data while they still are around as it will help you do competitive analysis and analysis of your own site. Plus, imagine putting some of these images on an SEO report for potential clients? They'll be really impressed, let me tell you.

Blekko will give you the following information from from the SEO slashtag

• Hostrank - Like PageRank, but based on the domain itself and on Blekko's algorithm
• Inbound Links - Self explanatory
• Site Pages - Indexed pages in Blekko
• Inbound Links Hostrank Breakdown - This will show you the top incoming links to a website, and their "hostrank"
• Links by Domain - How many links are pointing to the site from that domain?
• Links from States - Shows you the incoming links by State, this could be helpful for diversity
• Links from Countries - Same as above, this could help you understand why a competitor ranks better in another Google country specific search engine
• Crawl Stats - This is great because you can see how the Blekko bot sees your website, and how often it comes, and the last time it was at your site
• Site Pages - Find out each page that is indexed by Blekko and the "rank" associated with that page. Rank is Blekkos PageRank.
• The compare tab - See Below

Easy Competitive Analysis

Best of all Blekko makes it even easier. Once you load up the details mentioned above you can hit the "Compare" tab. This allows you to compare websites to better understand why they have rankings.

When comparing notice the following details:

Common links - This will allow you to compare the links of two sites to find similarity. This is a great way to determine if you are effectively getting your competitors links, or if a competitor has been copying your links.

Conclusion:

Unfortunately I don't see Blekko being popular and growing to critical mass. The search engine unfortunately requires too much work from the searcher, and remembering/building Slashtags is too much work for normal users.

Until Blekkos demise, they are throwing a lot of money towards talent and servers. Which means they should build a rather nice index of the internet. While they are still here, take advantage of the slashtags that I have mentioned above and stay ahead of the competition.

Nice writeup beachbum. I've played with Blekko slashtags and I'm wondering when the big G is going to implement them.

Originally Posted by thedorf

Nice writeup beachbum. I've played with Blekko slashtags and I'm wondering when the big G is going to implement them.

Thanks for the feedback. Blekko is a search engine that prides itself on transparency in how it ranks its websites as well as enabling users to influence the removal of spam through Slashtags.

Sure it's a great idea, but at the end of the day it won't work for everyone. That's why I don't see Google implementing this anytime soon.

thos sounds amazing, i cant wait to get home and try it out
Posted via Mobile Device

Originally Posted by haverox

thos sounds amazing, i cant wait to get home and try it out
Posted via Mobile Device

Glad you liked it, let me know how it works out for you. I'd love to collaborate with BHW to find out better ways to use these tools.

Excellent post beachbum!

Could you please explain a lil further for a noob what it means when you said "For the blackhat in us, think about that for a minute. Get your backlinks indexed even easier by plugging this RSS feed into popular backlinking tools. Submit these feeds to popular RSS feed applications."?

Just checked one of my sites and it sits at number 3.

Originally Posted by xenter

Excellent post beachbum!

Could you please explain a lil further for a noob what it means when you said "For the blackhat in us, think about that for a minute. Get your backlinks indexed even easier by plugging this RSS feed into popular backlinking tools. Submit these feeds to popular RSS feed applications."?

Thank you, I'm glad you appreciated it.

Since Blekko is another search engine altogether from Google chances are they will find completely different links altogether than Google.

Which means that you have links "not found" and can utilize Blekko's RSS feature above to help index, those links. Not to mention also increase the value and link juice of the links through the RSS feed.

You can plug the RSS feed into a variety of sources, such as "auto blogs" and getting creative with that. You can also plug RSS feeds into RSS submitters and directories.

Thankfully there are many various ways that you can utilize RSS feeds, the problems been automating this task. Blekko does that for you!

This is a great "tool" I hope some applications start to use it as a yahoo alternative, cause its displays more links.

Thank you for this contribution.

Originally Posted by zkino

This is a great "tool" I hope some applications start to use it as a yahoo alternative, cause its displays more links.

Thank you for this contribution.

No problem, I hope so too.

A tip that I mentioned above just helped a friend of mine land a client. He did a competitive analysis for his website, and used the charts to help with that analysis. The client was thoroughly impressed and hired him over the others for the job!

Great post by the OP.

This was on my list of things to post here in BHW, but you beat me to it.

Blekko is really great for digging around and finding other angles for you to exploit. Like the OP said, it's a different engine from the others, so you will get different results which means more opportunity .

One thing I will add is that since Blekko's whole thing is about "cutting the spam", they basically have made it so easy for anyone to identify sites that are relevant to your topic and that have not been exploited by other marketers yet.

Using search modifiers like "/blog", "/edu", "/gov" and combinations of these and others, you can find some great places to get drop links before your competition does.

Originally Posted by Yukinari84

Great post by the OP.

This was on my list of things to post here in BHW, but you beat me to it.

Blekko is really great for digging around and finding other angles for you to exploit. Like the OP said, it's a different engine from the others, so you will get different results which means more opportunity .

One thing I will add is that since Blekko's whole thing is about "cutting the spam", they basically have made it so easy for anyone to identify sites that are relevant to your topic and that have not been exploited by other marketers yet.

Using search modifiers like "/blog", "/edu", "/gov" and combinations of these and others, you can find some great places to get drop links before your competition does.

Thanks! That's another angle I didn't even get to, was planning on it for another time.

Either way, pay attention BHW! There's a real gem with Blekko, some true potential to really fine tuning your link building sources.

Just reading about this. On the website they describe all the relevent SEO slashes. I thought I would list them here:

/seo: web data for any website you are currently on.
/links: other sites pointing to the site you're on.
/site: do a search of the host domain of a website.
/cache: view blekko's most recently cached version of a site.
/source: view the HTML source of any website you are on.
/ip: perform a search of the IP address of the site you are on.
/rss: quickly view the RSS feed for any website.
/dup: other websites that duplicate content for a website.
/adsense: other websites using the same Adsense ID.
/rank: complete seo info for a website.