Help Find What Works in Google - Solve the Sandbox

http://www.socengine.com/searchtest/

This survey is attempting to discover what factors are currently making sites succeed in the GG SERPs.

Your input is greatly appreciated, and the tool can definitely help you learn more about your site's progress and some factors that can influence its position.

Please fill it out if you have the time -takes app. 10-20 minutes and records 60+ factors about your site. You can also compare your site against your top competition to see where the difference lies!

If you have ways of promoting this outside the forum, that would be great too as we need as many entries as possible to make the results relevant. The project is open and results will be published online for all to see!

 

Done. Great info, randfish.

 

Looks like it could be good informantion, but since you don't accept subdomains, I cannot fill out your survey.

 

Great project Randfish. Thanks for the info about it and welcome to the forum. You're a familiar face (love the avatar!)

 

Mel - Sorry about the subdomain problem!

It will be tough to filter in subdomain results as it would be unfair to compare them side by side with top-level domains without having 'insider knowledge' about how GG counts the links (to subdomain only? to top level as well?).

I will try to include information for subdomains as the survey progresses. If you can think of a clever way to puzzle it out, let me know!

 

Nice one randfish - i've been waiting for you to put this page up since i saw you mention it in your March filter thread in SEOchat - Bravo!
(good thread BTW)

i'll be over in a minute to make my contribution

again - well done - lets hope it yields some good results.

 

Wow, that was intense.... Great work! How long before you start charging us

In reality, it really opened my eyes to a few things that I need to do better.

 

I just filled out my survey. Sure was a lot of work. I hope it pays off with some good data to sift through.

 

took me a lot longer than 20 minutes !- (not that i mind)

one thing that struck me is the question about the number of sites in your KW serps that are linking to you (something i tihnk may turn out to be very relevant)- and unfortunately this was one of the bits that required the most time which means people may be more likely to estimate the results -

perhaps someone with a bit of coding experience could write a little program which works this out - shouldn't take long to do and it would give precise results too. - i have experience with VB and could probably write something along these lines but i'm far from proficient and also wouldn't know how to get it online- someone with some perl/php knowledge could probably do it alot better and in a quarter of the time - and it may well become a very useful; tool in the future..

anyhow thats just an idea...
thanks again for talking the time to construct the site randfish

 

ok i added one site so far. will add more soon

just nice insitefull questions. very well thought out.

im excited to see the results.


-Dan

 

Another good idea spawned here. I will try to come up with something, but you sound like you have a good start on that tool.

 

well for my own gratification at least, i've made a vb app which does this - but before anyone gets too excited - unfortunately it has several drawbacks

1) i only have VB6 working model so that means
a) i can't make it into an .exe file.,
b) there was some kind of flaw with VB5/6 concerning the "internet transfer control" - (what VB uses to access ftp /http files directly) a fix was brought out for every version of VB apart from the working model- so that means i've had to use the built in webbrowser - which in itself shouldn't really be much of a problem but for the fact i can't for the life of me find out how to disable images like in IE. This basically means you have to wait for each page to fully download (altough i've just though i may be able to sort this out actually)

also 2) i can be a really lazy coder sometimes and forget to put annotations in and use really bad practices etc. (still works though!)

3) with it being coded in VB you'd have to Download it and run it from your PC as opposed to it being hosted on a web page.

that being said if anyone has a proper copy of VB and wants the code - i'd be happy to tidy the code up and pass it to them - they could then make it into an exe file for me - or develop it further.

if anyone knows how to disable images in VB's webbrowser i'd love to hear from them

(p.s all this is why i said it would probably be easier for a perl or simliar coder to do it !!)

 

Fluke -

It's a great idea and one that we are working on - although I'd love to see your model. My programmer is coding it in Perl to screen scrape the Google results page with 100 results on it, then scan those pages. It should be ready to go on the site in a couple weeks.

Sadly, we don't have a program that can scan the sites as a whole - maybe we can write something where people can plug in their GG API and we can use GG to do a site search for their title or url at GG?

We're trying to make the whole survey as automated as possible for the future - I have very high hopes. I don't think there will ever be a charge, though. It would be worthwhile enough to have it free and just get people to link over there.

I'm hoping the project can help out newbies too by providing an in-depth tool.

Lastly - I'm trying to get the side-by-side comparison to work more fluidly - that is a really valuable one, that even helped me out with some of my sites!

 

i'll tidy up the code when i get chance and send you it - it may be that it'll work online if it can be translated to VBscript.

 

I have been looking forward to it for some time. Just curious....