A Look at Coste.net

By mgray
In SEO

Print Post

Email Post ADD TO STUMBLEUPON

Sphinn It

Tweet This

There’s a thread over at Digg.com where Steve of Coste.net is complaining Google is Broken because they don’t rank for [privacy service]. While there may some problems with Google in this case the problems are really with Coste.net. This is by no mean a full on total analysis, it took me about 15 minutes to pull this data in using freely available public tool. I looked at the data and noticed the problems right away but it took another 20 minutes or so to pull the data into a spreadsheet and clean it up so it’s in a human readable format.

Conste.net seems to be under the impression Google is more of a “textbook SEO” type engine, when in reality it’s more of a link based algorthym. So if you want to rank for a “term x” you are going to need “term x”, “word term x word”, or possibly terms that are very semantically similar to “term x”. Looking the backlinks for Conde.net we see about 91 active links, here’s a breakdown of anchor text:

Cotse.net 14.29%
http://www.cotse.net/ 14.29%
Privacy Watch – Email And Usenet 6.59%
COTSE 5.49%
Cotse.Net Privacy Service 5.49%
Service Details 4.40%
News stories about workplace privacy 3.30%
Privacy Watch – Cellphones 2.20%
DocJeff 2.20%
The Missing Amendment – The Right to Privacy 2.20%
Privacy Watch – DATA PROTECTION 2.20%
I R A Darth Aggie 2.20%
Sign Up 2.20%
432. Cotse.Net Privacy Service 2.20%
Privacy Watch – Online Speech 1.10%
Privacy Watch – Freedom Of Information 1.10%
Privacy Watch – Spyware 1.10%
Cotse.net Private Web Surfing 1.10%
Doc 1.10%
Privacy Watch – Chat 1.10%
Privacy Watch 1.10%
Login 1.10%
Privacy Watch – Free Press 1.10%
Drsnoid’s Mail2news Gateway Picker. Check it out. It’s very cool! 1.10%
[IMAGE] 1.10%
Testimonials 1.10%
Home 1.10%
Privacy Watch – Terrorism 1.10%

If no one is linking to them with the words [privacy service] there’s not a lot of “indication” that that’s what the pages are about, despite the text being featured on the page.

Next up there are the backlinks. According Yahoo there are about 150 links that used to be there that aren’t anymore. Looking at some cache data … well some of what I see is a little iffy looking. Not sure if you were part of some co-op advertising program, or someone was spamming on your behalf, but you may want to read up on the concept of link-churn. Looking at the link’s that are still live, there are some decent ones in there, but there are lot’s substandard links, and lots of link exchange pages. I also see some questionable on site content like this, this and this.

Here’s the cliff notes version, disassociate yourself from any questionable linking schemes you may have participated in. Focus on getting quality inbounds from reputable sites. Cluster your inbound anchor text with terms like “computer privacy service”, “internet privacy services”, “business privacy services”, “computer privacy”, “internet privacy”, “privacy software”, “computer security services”.

There’s a freebie for you, if you’re looking for a more detailed consultation and advice contact me.