Dave Naffziger's Blog

Last night SEOMoz announced LinkScape, a link-based tool that maintains a self-generated index of 30 Billion pages. Yes, that’s B of Billion. It was only 3 years ago that Yahoo announced an index size of 20 Billion pages.

Almost equally impressive is that this service was built on $1.1 million in venture funding (yes they did have revenue, but that was still less than a million a year). Internet companies and products are being built for far less now than they have ever been.

The enormity of this accomplishment cannot be understated, and I’m certain it will revolutionize the typical approach to SEO. SEO has long been more of an art form than a science and I expect LinkScape will be the first of many tools that will decidedly shift the balance towards science. The search engines have always held their core algorithms close to the vest, but the impacts of links on those algorithms will shortly be a solved equation.

Update:
Well, I wrote too soon. It has since come to light that Linkscape does not operate its own crawlers and instead leverages the many crawler APIs. This intentional error of omission definitely lowers the magnitude of the accomplishment, but it doesn’t change the value of the service.