We've been looking closely lately at what we call 'referral scoring' by using Google Analytics and another referral tracking tool. Referral scoring is more or less the score Google gives to your website from any refering source - a .com, .org, and yes, those .edu's.

Over the past two months weve been running a little experiment. We have several websites with between 30-80 .edu links on each of them. We have not built any links to these websites over the past few months nor taken part in any other linking campaigns. Many of the .edu links to these websites are on the resource pages of .edu's, such as pages where a student might recommend or list certain websites for other students looking for external sources of information.

Our experiment was simple. We wanted to see if having our more valuable .edu links clicked on more regularly would help our rankings in Google. Google is certainly tracking refering websites and counting their 'vote' for your website within their Analytics and rankings. After all, by using Google Analytics you are essentially giving Google real-time data to help their ranking algorithms - especially for very time-sensitive information like celebrity gossip or news.

Here's a recent snapshot of what we provided to a recent client. It's amazing all of the endless server issues, redirects, loops, and loss traffic problems plaguing some large websites. Most of these reports we send to clients average about 20-30 pages of in-depth data on problem areas. Under all of the items in the analysis we provide detailed advice on how to resolve issues. Here is the "table of contents" of a recent SEO Analysis we sent.

Section 1: Site Architecture & Server Related

• Robots.txt 301 Redirecting For SE’s
• Linking to Dynamic (Non-Rewritten) URLs
• Self-Linking via Direct Links & 301 Redirects
• Endless Redirect Loops
• Consistency of URL use
• Custom Error pages (404, 500)
• Duplicate Pages
• Internal Duplicate Content
• Further Exclusions for Robots.txt