Could Cuil be a useful tool to check on-site SEO effectiveness?
Earlier today the new search engine Cuil was officially launched. While it’s obviously got a long way to get anywhere near competing with Google what I find interesting is that it’s been developed by former Google engineers and that it “ranks pages by content, rather than popularity”.
This means that rather than ranking a page based upon the quality of it’s backlinks, Cuil will list the webpage’s which it’s algorithm feel are well-optimised towards a specific query. This probably isn’t great news for Cuil itself (as many well-optimised but untrusted websites will rank highly in it’s search results) but I would imagine a lot of the same on-site optimisation factors which are relevant in Google have also been applied to Cuil.
This could make Cuil a very useful indicator of how effective your on-site SEO will be in Google. For example, a search for SEO will display websites containing relevant content as opposed to the trusted authority domains ranking in Google:
Providing domain for sale websites in the SERP’s such as seo.co.nz doesn’t really provide users with the results they are looking for, but it does show that using the targeted keywords within title tags, h1 headings and paragraph tags works as an effective method of on-site SEO.
So while there are already many opinions from about Cuil (both positive and negative), perhaps it should be taken seriously by SEO’s to help reassure yourself that a site’s content is well-optimised and heading in the right direction!
