The Website Grader Challenge

Hey, I work at the company that provoked the blog and offered Primal the challenge. I'm here to say that their contributions have been tremendous, that a lot of the good score is due to their efforts, and that we value them highly as a partner.

No doubt, Hubspot's Website Grader is definitely "a corporate self-serving marketing tool."

And I agree, some of the metrics they use to compute the score are flawed: we've seen the grader fail to "see" blogs that exist, and after years of trying we have yet to get our listing posted to DMOZ Directory, one of the off-page SEO factors they rank. Even just a few months ago the results were all over the place.

But it really is a great tool to get a snapshot of how well a website is doing from a marketing perspective.

We like it because it gives our clients, who often can't "read" code, a way to verify some of the technical factors of SEO. And the simple tips and advice for increasing a site's effectiveness are a great place to start.

I am the partnership manager at HubSpot.

I've been here for a little over a year.

I've heard a bunch of negative stuff about website grader and a bunch of positive stuff. I've seen people that have really improved their traffic and leads generated by following the free advice website grader provides.

I've seen web designers and seo consultants lose business because Website Grader demonstrated that they weren't that good. And some have been very vocal about it.

Website Grader is not perfect and probably never will be, as it relies on gathering data from around the web automatically without human checking. But we are constantly trying to improve it. We do recognize that dmoz is almost impossible to get into, but SEO consultants still think it's important for SEO. We have not perfected how we detect a blog - we simply look for the word "blog" and try to confirm by finding an RSS feed. That doesn't always work, obviously. Scores sometimes fluctuate even though people don't change much on their site, as we are constantly changing the factors that go into the score, as an effort to improve it.

As far as it being self serving, HubSpot has certainly benefited from the exposure that we've received. I believe it's deserved as the tool has helped many people learn the basics of how and how not to build websites.

As far as Primal Media and your challenge, you've beaten us to it. We've thrown around having competitions, but haven't had the bandwidth to pull it off. Kudos to you for fully groking the value out of the report and using it to construct a solid site for your clients.

It seems as though you may have implemented our more advanced software for a client too. And it looks like you probably understand that online marketing simply begins when the site is launched. If that's the case and you'd like to talk about our new partnership program designed for web design and marketing firms, please email me. We're looking for good partners.

I love website grader I go to the site at least 2 times a day and run my site through. Even though I have no experience making websites I think ive done a decent job, when I run the site through the grader I feel like im doing the best I can and the results are seen through website grader I show a dmoz listing in firefox seo lookup tool that website grader didnt see. Any way I started out I think It was a 39 and now im at 89 so I get a thrill everytime I see it go up and I dont have any communication with website grader at all I dont have any money and there is absolutely no advantage to the website grader staff giving me a better score so I think it is a very good tool and without it I would be unsure wether I was doing the right things to get ahead. With the Items that the system checks it actually helps you identify what you need to do to get ahead in the rankings I have done pretty much everything I am supposed to do and now am recieving 50 to a 100 visits a day and my website was only started a month and a half ago. So thanks to all of you at the website grader office you provide an invaluable service for the little guys with no cash if I ever make any money I will send you guys a couple hundred donuts. And shame on anyone trying to downgrade a free service that helps alot of people.

George. Give it some time. Although you can run the report as much as you want, we're not getting "fresh data" every time you run it. It's a free tool and 1,000s of people use it every day. Your score and report should be updated shortly. Give it a week or two. If you don't see changes, call HubSpot and ask them to take a look at what you've done to make sure you've done it right. As discussed above, the tool isn't perfect either.

DMOZ is flawed in WG Well to just touch on the DMOZ comment, the Website grader is technically flawed. For example if there is a listing in DMOZ for: widget.com If you plug in widget.net, widget.org, widget.info, widget.us into the grader the grader will say that there is a DMOZ listing for that site when there really is not.

The tool is very broken in a lot of ways. The Zoominfo portion is broken, type hersheys.com or johndeere.com into website grader and see if it finds them on Zoominfo, then go to zoominfo and type in hersheys or john deere, plenty of listings with the websites. So that is broken. The DMOZ portion only searches DMOZ on the first half of the domain name, so if there is a listing on DMOZ for widget.com, website grader will match DMOZ if you put in widget.com, widget.net, widget.org, widget.info So its a good basic tool but some sections cannot be scored because they simply don't work.

If you think hubspot is great, but find the price a little high... give our software a try. www.rhinoseo.com It provides the same tools as their $500 a month at a much affordable rate. They also have pricing available for those who need to monitor multiple domains.

started using seoautomatic when it first came out, and I instantly though, “Here’s something I can give my development people so they stop bugging me about little things.” SEO graders are great for the SEO beginners or ignorant. There is no replacement for human intelligence, but it has cut down on the number of questions I get from our development team before we launch a site.

I like websitegrader, but I doubt that a score of 82 is really better than a score of 81. It's just not that accurate - however, 60 will be better than 40.  Our score is 92 these days, which is pretty amazing, although our main competitor is at 85 and seem to be found more easily than us. However, our site is newer and that seems to make a difference that WG can't take into account.

It is nice to get a higher score, but there's no point in looking at WG more than once a week or so.  Also, google doesn't like massive changes in sites, it would rather see incremental improvements as I understand it.  So make a few tweaks and improve gradually and both WG and google will like it. I have tried rhinoseo and they did come up with some useful stuff that WG didn't stress, so I use both.

Through some pretty straightforward strategies, I was able to get a 87 without much effort. I don't even have a DMOZ listing either.