by sam“Oh great, another search engine. Why bother? Google has it covered,” is exactly how most people would respond upon learning about the introduction of the new search engine Blekko. From an SEO perspective, however, this search engine could be a game changer. The engine aims to provide a search that will “slash out spam, content farming, and malware.” Blekko uses a new feature that they call “slashtags,” with which you can customise your search and refine your results. Not only this, but they aim to cut out black-hat SEO techniques and make almost all of their data visible to anyone. Here are some of the accessible features that the new engine boasts:
- SEO statistics
- Inbound and outbound link statistics
- IP address Search
- Page tagging
- Creating slash tags
- Duplicate content finder
- Site comparison
- Crawl stats
- Page count
- Location of Robots.txt files
- Page latency
- And many more!
So how can this help SEO? Imagine how powerful a highly successful slash tag could be. Users would actively dip into sites within their chosen niche. Additionally, Blekko allows anyone to view SEO data by clicking a button next to every single result. At the click of a button, the user is presented with a whole range of useful statistics in a range of visual representations. You can also use it for analytics on your site, for example, to find out if there is duplicate content for the page online or maybe where in the world the inbound links are coming from.
It could also be a great tool from a PPC perspective. A PPC campaign on Blekko would greatly improve the odds of your company website appearing on custom-made slash tags. Not to mention the effect it could have on social media. What if users started to combine #hashtags and/or slash tags in the way they seek and categorise news and social trends as they happen? Certain Twitter accounts could become trusted authorities on a particular hashtag topic, those who frequently mention a #hashtag topic and get a lot of responses or retweets should be considered authorities and therefore have their tweets optimised in the hashtag equivalent for that #hashtag. The potential that all of this carries is exciting!
Admittedly, Blekko won’t appeal to everybody’s needs, with its advanced interface and functions. For that reason, the vast majority of Internet users who are not search-savvy should (and probably will) stick to Google. For an online marketing company with a slightly more advanced knowledge of websites and search, however, Blekko offers a powerful tool that can give extremely useful results for any Internet marketing campaign.