Page 240 -

230 Managing Customers Through Economic Cycles

16. Quality of backlinks – Counting backlinks can be
meaningless unless they are quality backlinks. This can
be determined by measuring how many outgoing links
the linking page has. Whether it has PageRank or is an
old authority domain are also indicators.

17. Google cache date – Many SEO specialists fall back
to checking the cache date in Google (Google saves
most pages in a “cache”) for determining the quality
and success of a website in Google. If the cache date
is older than one month the site is either dead (old
content) or has a very low authority/relevancy with
Google.

18. Google bot (robot) visit frequency – A cache may
be one week old, but if a Google bot visits the cache
daily, it’s relevant. Most server side web analytics tools
(those relying on server logs or PHP) can provide this
data.

19. Last time Google bot visited – This is similar to the
above example, the difference being that if there is a
new content page and the bot visited yesterday and
the site doesn’t show in the Google index something
might be wrong (like duplicate content problems).

20. Pages indexed – Determining the value of pages
indexed is more complicated than just assuming that
“the more pages indexed the better”, unless you are a
smaller site. If there are 50 pages online but only 20
indexed, the site is not successfully spidered by Google.
A site:yoursite.com search in Google will assist with
this measure.

21. PageRank “pass rate” – Google PageRank is passed
via the links on a website. A home page with PR 5
should have subpages with PR 4 or at least 3, otherwise
there are too many links and/or the internal link struc-
ture is broken.