The SEO Mantra: Tips, Tricks & Musings

A google query for custom t-shirts gives me some interesting new startups in this space. Let us try to review their SEO efforts.

Note that this the data below is very dynamic, and note that this post is written in July 2008. Also, the search ranking position in Google is dynamic and personal. So it varies a little for every search. I’ve used Google.co.in with “search only Indian sites” setting.

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1. DilseBol:

• Pages indexed on Google = 128 (That’s clearly too less guys!)
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 241 (this doesn’t happen usually, Google is way faster in crawling!)
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 10
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 122
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 1-2
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
• Alexa rank = 495,102

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2. Myntra:

• Pages indexed on Google = 44,600
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 16,178
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 27
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 8,816
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 3-4
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = 1-2
• Alexa rank = 29,709 (Wow! that’s really great!)

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3. Pringoo: They are a relatively new entrant, from my lovely home Pune…

• Pages indexed on Google = 14,400
• Pages indexed on Yahoo = 968
• Pagerank = 4
• Back-links given by Google = 20
• Back-links given by Yahoo! = 1179
• Google Position for “buy custom t-shirts” = 2-3
• Google Position for “t-shirts online” = Not on first page
• Google Position for “custom tshirts” = Not on first page
• Alexa rank = 142,758

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So with my very preliminary research, it looks like Myntra is leading, and Pringoo is fast catching up! Here is the Alexa comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know Alexa is not a great tool for Indian traffic… …but in this case, it should be a fair comparison as all these sites belong to India and target pretty much the same consumers.

Alexa comparison for online tshirts sites

I thought guys from Dilsebol need to do some catching up in terms of getting more pages indexed by search engines. This helps a lot in attracting long-tail traffic.

For example, search for Diwali t-shirt designs yields Myntra and Pringoo on first page, but not Dilsebol!

Here is a features based comparison review on desistartups blog (a little dated).

I looked at some of their inner pages…and dilsebol clearly has a long way to go in making the site use friendly in terms of navigation! The other two also can improve on their Title tags…(putting t-shirt category in the title might help significantly!) For example, the cricket t-shirts page on myntra, does not have the word cricket in the title tag at all! It is a generic title text…of course the amount of work these guys have done to create a community, create tie-ups and get more and more designs online, is tremendous!

I must have missed a few startups in the same space here…may be you can put some more stats in the comments…

Do you buy custom printed t-shirts online? which site you like the most? By the way, you can buy a tshirt of Puneri patya, from myntra… …a little shameless sales is not so bad!

Disclaimer: Business is lot more than how many pages are indexed on Google…so this comparison is not necessarily translating into proportionate profits! I am not associated with any of these companies, and am not getting any money for telling you one is better than others :). I did this out of sheer curiosity.