With Blekko officially launching this week the new search engine is getting a lot of attention particularly in the search marketing community because of SEO data it provides.
There is a good overview of Blekko’s SEO Tools on Search Engine Land so I won’t go into detail on that here. But I was curious to compare the data provided for major news sites. I’d previously done this for SEOmoz domain authority and page speed so I thought I’d add Blekko to the mix.
To access Blekko’s SEO data for a domain or a specific URL click the “seo” link within Blekko’s search results:
Or simply type the domain or URL into the search box followed by “/seo”:
You can also access the SEO data through the Blekko toolbar.
For the purposes of comparison I pulled the hostrank, inbound links and site pages data for 30+ major news sites. As usual I picked a cross-section of news outlets that cover national/international news including newspapers, magazines, TV, wires and Web-only properties.
In the table below the news sites are ranked by hostrank. Blekko doesn’t provide information on how the hostrank scores are calculated but think of it roughly along the lines of Google’s PageRank or SEOMoz’s mozRank (though on a different scale).
| Hostrank | Inbound links | Site pages | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BBC News | 7,660.6 | 5,841,700 | 1,642,485 |
| 2 | The New York Times | 7,487.4 | 11,147,062 | 5,841,700 |
| 3 | The Guardian | 6,498.4 | 4,618,439 | 1,313,891 |
| 4 | CNN | 6,442.1 | 5,508,435 | 435,464 |
| 5 | The Washington Post | 5,577.6 | 4,618,439 | 1,076,024 |
| 6 | USA Today | 5,361.7 | 6,726,137 | 747,573 |
| 7 | Telegraph.co.uk | 4,420.7 | 2,690,257 | 344,277 |
| 8 | BusinessWeek | 4,321.4 | 1,681,534 | 239,188 |
| 9 | Time | 4,170.9 | 2,920,850 | 605,082 |
| 10 | NPR | 3,924.9 | 2,309,219 | 507,319 |
| 11 | ABC News | 3,881.8 | 2,364,120 | 456,416 |
| 12 | Reuters | 3,841.3 | 3,208,683 | 1,088,740 |
| 13 | Yahoo News | 3,779.8 | 7,476,279 | 1,182,060 |
| 14 | Los Angeles Times | 3,735.3 | 3,171,208 | 320,845 |
| 15 | The Wall Street Journal | 3,728.0 | 4,618,439 | 672,564 |
| 16 | Forbes | 3,703.2 | 1,701,406 | 598,015 |
| 17 | The Boston Globe | 3,600.2 | 2,392,058 | 756,408 |
| 18 | Fox News | 3,561.8 | 2,886,736 | 360,842 |
| 19 | The Economist | 3,403.9 | 1,051,036 | 233,634 |
| 20 | The Huffington Post | 3,255.6 | 6,342,415 | 378,204 |
| 21 | Daily Mail (UK) | 3,226.0 | 2,229,249 | 956,753 |
| 22 | San Francisco Chronicle | 3,222.7 | 2,029,275 | 525,518 |
| 23 | CBS News | 3,177.1 | 1,783,268 | 570,562 |
| 24 | The Financial Times | 3,008.0 | 1,495,146 | 306,116 |
| 25 | The Christian Science Monitor | 2,823.6 | 688,554 | 69,664 |
| 26 | Newsweek | 2,695.6 | 1,825,665 | 281,949 |
| 27 | Chicago Tribune | 2,587.2 | 1,936,119 | 212,676 |
| 28 | New York Daily News | 2,419.8 | 2,448,929 | 1,329,418 |
| 29 | MSNBC | 2,224.2 | 747,573 | 25,364 |
| 30 | Slate | 2,038.7 | 3,402,811 | 2,005,574 |
| 31 | San Jose Mercury News | 1,736.4 | 721,684 | 484,030 |
| 32 | UPI | 1,725.6 | 1,224,465 | 1,141,124 |
| 33 | AP | 983.2 | 420,384 | 4,563 |
| 34 | AOL News | 870.1 | 4,106,512 | 51,934 |
BBC News and The New York Times lead the pack with The Guardian, CNN and The Washington Post not too far behind. It is interesting that BBC News beats out the NYT despite having significantly fewer (reported) inbound links and indexed pages.
A large group of sites have hostrank scores in the 3,000s or 4,000s so there is not a lot of separation between the news organizations in the middle of the pack.
The AOL News hostrank figure seems strangely low but I doubled checked it and that’s what Blekko is reporting:
Side note: when I compared news sites on social media engagement there was a question about which domain was used for MSNBC. As with the PostRank data used in that post, even though the MSNBC site is on msnbc.msn.com the Blekko data for msnbc.com shows larger figures so I used that domain instead.
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