Article Surfing Archive

There's a cool new tool available to help you build links. It is called PRASE and in this article I will explain why it's good at helping find sites.

Further I'll look at some of the other features to see if there are other uses for this tool, such as competitive intelligence gathering and deep linking opportunities.

Really, this new tool offers so much more when you begin to look at what it can do. And that's what I'm writing about today.

So as I was scanning through my ever expanding list of feeds on the industry I came across a post that caught my eye. It was about this new 'link building tool' called PRASE. PRASE stands for 'Page Rank Assisted Search Engine' and while it is limited to some basic queries now, the people that put it together hope to turn it into a full fledged engine as time goes on.

This tool has the ability to search Google, Yahoo! And MSN together, remove duplicate results and then sort them by Page Rank.

Further, you have some options you can chose before you launch your query. For example, you can specify a Page Rank range you want to search for. Only want to find PageRank 7 to 9 sites? Sure, you can do that. What about finding some of those jewels in the rough. Those sites with High PageRank but are buried in the lower results? Yup you can do that too.

You can tell it to start at result 50 and return listings from there. That way you can maybe find those sites which may be a little easier to get links from.

For example, a 'regular' search for just about any term, with the PR range of 0 to 9 will obviously sort by PageRank. And as we all know, it is almost impossible to get a link from anyone above PR6. They just don't hand out links like that unless they are really willing.

But, if you limit the scope of your search to either lower PageRank sites and/or deeper results who knows what you'll find.

So, let's take a look at what PRASE isn't.

Well, it isn't a full fledged engine, which means it doesn't give you the breadth of results you'd see at Google or Yahoo! But don't let that stop you from bookmarking it and using it on a regular basis (I know it's already been added to my own MyWeb page).

Now that that is out of the way let's look at what this gem can really do.

For link building it's a no brainer. What could be better than searching for site to request links from then having them sorted for you by Page Rank after duplicated have been removed? I was playing with it quite a bit this morning and it's a very handy tool for doing this.

The reason I like it is, no matter how many people tell you that Page Rank is dead, I'm here to tell you it isn't. Sure it's been devalued, but I'm here to say that a link from a PR 8 site will always be worth more than a PR 4 site, especially if the sites are similarly related to yours.

So, that being said, why wouldn't you want a list, sorted by Page Rank to work off of?

But wait that's not all. This also shows you the current rank on the engine the listing came from. This is handy to perhaps help determine why one engine felt it was more relevant than the others. You could, with some work, start to figure out why the engines consider some sites important.

In addition, you could use this tool in combination with one like Yahoo Site Explorer to begin to develop a deeper understanding of what goes into some of those links.

For example, let's say you perform a query and find a high PageRank site that seems to offer little in terms of quality. Using Site Explorer you could then explore this URL to see what its made of. Why does it have that high PageRank? Perhaps it has a few quality links from universities or government site, for example. In any case using a variety of tools one can begin to develop a pretty comprehensive list of links to request in a short time.

This engine accepts the same types of queries as you'd use on other engines: 'Link:' 'site:' and so on, so don't be afraid to experiment with it.

I know as time goes on I'll be using it more and more for so many things from link building, to deep link building to competitive intelligence gathering. Provided this tool stays free, it will be one of many in my regularly used arsenal of tools.