uISV Class 07 - December Grades

I'm going to run WebsiteGrader each month to do a status check on us and see how we are doing. Here's how were were doing when I initially ran it last month.

Here are the results for this month:

Site	Score	Page Rank
chatspring.com (was steplively.com)	31	0
http://www.thinklife.co.uk/	40	3
joelmarcey.com	48	4
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/	76	4
http://www.sportavista.com/ note1	N/A	N/A
http://www.sendalong.com/	12	0
catchthebest.com	76	0
http://www.heliumfoot.com/	39	0
http://www.lokad.com/	95	4
twistedwave.com	73	5
http://www.omnicustomersupport.com/	35	0
http://www.webworkschedules.com/	28	0
http://www.sixproducts.com/	30	0

I noticed a major issue of using www in the urls. In particular catchthebest.com vs. www.catchthebest.com and twistedwave.com vs www.twistedwave.com. I know google treats those as different sites, which is why you need to have a redirect in place. I also noticed that WebsiteGrader also treats them differently. For Catch The Best, the score difference is 76 vs 58 and 73 vs 51 for Twisted Wave. To keep it consistent, I'm using the URL that I get directed to if I go to the site. So the URL in the table is the URL I used in WebSiteGrader. This also affected the reported PR score. Also the following warning is displayed for the Google Page Rank scores on the report page:

Note: The Google Page Rank is dependent on external sources and may not be reported correctly. If you receive a Page Rank of 0, the rank may not be accurate.

The highest ranking was Lokad with a 95 still, second month in a row. The best improvement was joelmarcey.com with an 8 point jump.

Gentle nudge to Jon of SendAlong to update his meta-keywords and description tags and I think we would see his score jump 10-20 points based on my own experience.

So that's it for this month. I'll run them again next month.

Note 1: WebSiteGrader was unable to run on
www.sportavista.com. There was no errors when I ran the report, but I'm able to browse to the page, so I'm not sure what the issue is. The big concern here is that Google and others may be having a similar problem that WebSiteGrader is.

Updated 12/10 - Aded Ian Howson's blog from www.sixproducts.com

uISV Class 07 update

I ran WebSiteGrader on each member of the class of 07 to see how we stacked up.

Here are the high level results:

Site	Score	Page Rank
steplivelynow.com	69	4
www.thinklife.co.uk	40	3
joelmarcey.com	36	4
www.smallfarmcentral.com	76	4
www.sportavista.com	13	4
www.sendalong.com	9	0
catchthebest.com	89	5
www.heliumfoot.com	37	0
www.lokad.com	95	4
twistedwave.com	70	0
www.omnicustomersupport.com	29	0
www.webworkschedules.com	28	0

If you have not run WebSiteGrader on your site yourself, I would encourage it. It only takes a few minutes and there is no cost and no signup. Just enter your url and hit go. One thing that I noticed is that some people still don't have the redirect from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com which is important from the SEO perspective because those are treated as two different sites to google. You are potentially splitting your links between them and thus reducing your incoming links.

The highest ranking for our class was a 95 by Lokad and the highest page rank was a 5 for Catch the Best.

UPDATE: For the life of me I can't figure out why the big space is above the table.
UPDATE 2: After seeing a 10 for Omni Customer Support, I looked at the detailed report and fixed a few EASY things (meta tags, descriptions, improved title) and bumped the score up to a 29. It took all of 10 minutes to do.