SEO Claims About Irish Websites

Some of the recent press releases from various companies trying to flog SEO services to large companies would be comical if they weren’t so tragic. Real search engine optimisation involves a lot more than merely looking at what tags and metadata are present in a webpage. One new company trying to flog SEO to the Irish market even sent out its press release before it had its website operational. Another did a survey of what it claimed was the top 100 Irish company websites. Now how would it know? There are at least 200K Irish domains and many of them would get more traffic than some of what are supposed to be the top Irish companies.

WhoisIreland will publish a survey of identified Irish websites dealing their title / keyword / description and other metadata. Spidering the websites is the easy part. This is something that WhoisIreland does anyway to provide the stats on the front page. The hard part is developing an accurate parser because sometimes HTML is not written in a text book format.

A preliminary .ie section is already done. The interesting thing is that there are parked .ie domains but the number is dwarved by the number of active .ie websites. Some interesting patterns are emerging. Some sites use Google Adsense for monetisation but Yahoo’s Publisher Network hardly even registers. There are some 12 .ie domains that are parked on Sedo. Compared to .eu and many other ccTLDs, the .ie ccTLD is more utilised and healthier.

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Written by John McCormac on March 27th, 2007 with 5 comments.
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5 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Richard Hearne
#1. March 27th, 2007, at 7:05 AM.

Fantastic. Can’t wait to see this data.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John Paul
#2. March 27th, 2007, at 10:24 AM.

I say there is more than 12 .ie domains parked at sedo.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. March 27th, 2007, at 6:00 PM.

It is the difference between being parked on the Sedo nameservers and pointing to Sedo from other nameservers. In the sample of .ie websites checked, 12 of them were on the Sedo nameservers. But more are probably pointing to Sedo pages. Establishing this kind of parking is a bit more complex as each page has to be parsed.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Dave Davis
#4. March 28th, 2007, at 11:49 AM.

Really looking forward to the results.

It should be noted that the company who issued the press release is also running a content and search network PPC campaign with Google and their site is “Barely” functional. I completely agree, it is tragic.

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