Late last month, one of a handful of open questions I asked here on SBS was about how DomainTools.com determines that “SEO Score” you see when looking at a domain record.

Looks like the DomainTools gang talked about this very subject last month on their own blog (using MattCutts.com as a not-so-good example!):

It is important to note, the SEO Score is only calculated for on-page information found on the front page of a website, so it is possible for everyone to achieve a perfect SEO Score of 100%.

DomainTools also has a FAQ page that gives more details about the “SEO Score,” and has a lot of background on their “SEO Text Browser” tool, which is pretty interesting to use. I imagine some folks will be alarmed that a domain resource is offering SEO advice, but as long as what they’re offering is good, what’s the problem?

Well, this domain, smallbusinesssem.com, gets a 93% SEO Score, which I’m fine with. When using the SEO Text Browser, I’m told the home page is being penalized because some of the links have query strings in the URL. Well … query strings are not universally a bad thing where SEO is concerned. Crawlers only get antsy when a URL has more than 2-3 parameters in the query string. It would be nice for the SEO Text Browser to make note of that so as to not lead users down the wrong path into thinking all query string URLs are problematic.