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Hear what our members say about the #1 SEO Community. Here are some of our recent thread topics:
Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system...optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google's yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don't yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.
To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator - a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.
Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.
Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google's products, our calculator is starting out in beta :D
In the past I have not been a fan of certain outing policies, but of late I have seen that practice has went away...and if it stays that way how could I not recommend the above tool?
Sometimes it is hard to appreciate how spoiled we are as SEOs with cheap to free keyword data, cheap to free great link data, and lots of useful tools to help us organize and make sense of it all. And even lots of charts :)
One area where some of our tools could be better is on the usability front...we tend to presume some level of knowledge and/or the willingness to work through things to figure them out, but the presentation on OSE is very easy to grasp & understand at first glance. Part of this challenge comes from limited resources...and the most limiting one being time. It is so hard to make money servicing the SEO market (because there are so many great free options). As the market continues to open up more with more tools and options, at the same time the SEO *process* keeps getting more complex, with more competitors jumping into the SEO market.
It certainly feels like it will keep getting easier to make money as a publisher rather than a person servicing the SEO market.
But not all forms of publishing will get easier & more profitable. Companies like Demand Media and Aol sharing their results publicly will saturate some segments, but there are many areas where bullshit content won't be enough to compete. And some thin operations will see margin contraction as the investment needed to stay competitive increases.
But we are quite literally drowning in opportunity. If a person can't make money as a publisher with SEO knowledge, it is simply because they are not willing to put in the effort (or they are part of an old bureaucratic publishing company which moves slowly, is debt laden, and has a high cost structure).
I have always avoided scaling as a company, but there is so much opportunity that I might have a resolution for 2010 :D
While some members of the SEO industry encourage outing, it should be highlighted that they are not above duping their customers with launching a "new" tool that is actually a dumbed-down rehash of a tool we have offered for years here.
If you want the full version with additional features please do check out Hub Finder, as it is way better than the hyped knock-off is.
No Hype Required!
Our co-citation tool has way more options than the competition. It is better in every practical way, other than hype...and that is why we decided to make it free for you to test it for the next 24 hours.
Why Hub Finder is Better than the Hyped Knock Off Tool
It allows you to automatically pull in search results from Google, Yahoo!, or both
It allows you to enter up to 10 competing sites
It allows you to mix and match the above
It allows you to select pages that are linking to any page on a site OR pages that are linking to only the specific pages that were ranking
It shows you the exact pages the links came from AND tracks multiple links from a single site even if different pages within that site were linking to multiple resources in your industry.
Shows IP addresses
Offers lightning quick CSV export
Knock Off Marketing
How can a person roll with those sorts of business ethics (clone someone else's work and then pawn it off as their own) and then encourage SEOs outing each other (even after they have read about the caustic effects of outing multipletimes)?
How About Honesty For a Change?
If you are dirty be dirty.
If you are clean be clean.
But no point being one and acting like you are the next.
The web has too long of a memory to play those kinds of games.
IMHO.
Update
Rand edited his post to add attribution, for which I thank him. Had the whole "standing on the shoulders" bit or any sort of attribution existed originally I never would have published this post. But it was the re-packaging something that has been around forever as being brand new (without any attribution) that is inconsistent with the openness some claim to strive for.
Google recently upgraded their Insights for Search tool to include predicted keyword search volumes as well as interactive maps of how keyword search volume changes over time.
There are lots of business implications of the forecast data:
Having predictable trends for a search query or for a group of queries could have interesting ramifications. One could forecast the trends into the future, and use it as a "best guess" for various business decisions such as budget planning, marketing campaigns and resource allocations. One could identify deviation from such forecasting and identify new factors that are influencing the search volume as demonstrated in Flu Trends.
Some business categories are more predictable than other categories
Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
Nearly half of the most popular queries are not predictable (with respect to the model we have used).
Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%), Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).
Some categories have particularly low fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Entertainment (35%) and Social Networks & Online Communities (27%).
The trends of aggregated queries per categories are much more predictable: 88% of the aggregated category search trends of over 600 categories in Insights for Search are predictable, with a mean absolute prediction error of of less than 6%.
If you were to launch a brand new business from scratch it might make sense to target a less predictable category since it would be more open to new market entrants & they would not appear on the radar of competitors as quickly.
And Google now make their Insights for Search charts embeddable in third party websites via iframes. :) Given that, I just added those data points to our keyword tool below the keyword data our tool returns, which is like having an instant second opinion on the keywords.
This allows you to instantly estimate the seasonality of a particular keyword. And if our search volume seems somewhat inflated and/or you are uncertain if it is accurate then you can look at the search volume graph for more data. If the keywords graph is quite spiky for a non-seasonal keyword (or if it has no data returned) then there is a good chance that there is a bit of noise in the data.
SEM Rush does a great job of comparing sites head to head, but is a bit top heavy in the search results (only searching through Google's top 20 search results).SEO Pivot is more for just looking deeper into 1 site at a time, however it does use a smaller keyword database of 500,000 top keywords. It can help you uncover some broad keywords that you rank better than expected for.
Who knew we ranked #97 for price fixing, #98 for invisible hand, or #32 for dark art? The 3 examples I used were more of an attempt at humor than useful data, but we also rank for other valuable phrases.
Between this tool and SEM Rush I still like SEM Rush way more, but this is another useful tool to add to the toolbox. Look at deeper search rankings for such broad keywords...
can help give you a good idea of how strong a particular site is
help you see the unlocked ranking potential of a site that is currently poorly optimized
perhaps can help you rethink making some site structural changes like promoting some pages a bit harder in your link structure and/or using internal 301 redirects to combine some related pages
WordTracker recently announced the launch of a new free Firefox extension that aids you in doing keyword research while blogging. The keyword tool works with any publishing software, and helps you ensure you work selected keywords into the content. The tool sits to the left of the browser window, and as you type, it will search your post and does an analysis of the text in your content to see if any of the phrases appear.
How to Use It
You can manually select keywords that you think would be highly relevant and then try to work them into the content. And when it is not possible to fit in a whole phrase naturally, you can always try to sprinkle those keyword modifiers that make up the phrase into your post's content. For instance, in the above post I worked in the words software, free, search, and generator into the content quite naturally in only a 4 sentence blog post.
“Bloggers often don’t take the time to do keyword research for each article they write – they just want to get their story out there. Now, bloggers have instant access to relevant keywords so they can easily produce optimized blog posts. That’s sure to bring them extra traffic.” Said Ken McGaffin, CMO at Wordtracker.
A few days ago Google sent me the following email, which somehow sent me keywords for other websites.
Google did a follow up email appoligizing for the first email sending me the wrong keywords and sending me a new list of keywords.
Almost every time I start a new AdWords campaign I am impressed by new features that recommend more keywords inline during the sign-up process. This is sorta where there is great risk in data sharing with ad networks. The more data you feed into the network the more likely that data is to pour right back out into the hands of competitors & higher market prices.
Majestic SEO just released free graphs tracking link growth rates, which can be used to compare the overall link profile of competing sites, and how they are growing month to month
Such data can be used to compare sites against traffic growth of sites.
These data points can by synched up to help evaluate if a site is particularly strong or weak in any area, and how to address that weakness or build off that strength to further grow a site.
Have way more links than competing sites, but few pages? Create content.
Have way more content than competing sites, but few links? Work on link building.
I recently created a video walkthrough of our competitive research tool, which is powered by SEM Rush, and has a couple extra data points added in. It is about 8 minutes long, and should give you at least a couple good ideas for how to use competitive research tools to make more money from your websites.
I have been a big promoter of the SEM Rush service because I think it rocks. As an extension of that, I partnered with with SEM Rush to license their data and offer the organic search piece of their service as a free bonus to our SEO training & community members.
You can use it to find the most valuable or highest traffic rankings for competing sites
Page Specific Competitive Intelligence
You can use it to find the most valuable or highest traffic rankings for a specific page
Similar Keyword Audience
You can use it to find sites that have a large overlap in search rankings / audience
Easily Export Data
The columns are sortable and it is easily to export 1,000 listings in a couple of seconds.
Advanced Uses
On the competitive research tool page I list 10 high powered ways to use this tool. I would share them publicly, but if you only find one of those tips applicable to your site & situation you should still be able to make far more than $300 from it - making the cost of the subscription free.
Try it Now
If you are a subscriber try it now. If you are not a paying subscriber you may want to join. We keep trying our best to add new content and goodies each month :)
I have had a very well known SEO company dust one of best link building strategies (outing it directly to a Google engineer) because I was trusting enough to mention how effective it was inside our training program, thinking that a competitor would not out it, but I was wrong! At least I know what to expect, and can use that knowledge to mitigate future risks.
One of the common concerns about the SEO Toolbar is something along the lines of "does it phone home" or "are you spying on us" or "what data is it sending you". Some SEO companies offer a huge EULA and do spy on the people who use their toolbars, but we do not do that for a number of reasons
I felt rather angry when that well known SEO company outed my site (and haven't really trusted them since then)
I never really liked the idea of spying on customers, and going down that path could harm our perceived brand value
knowing that information is kept private adds value and builds trust
we are already under-staffed (running quite lean) and have more projects to work on than time, so we are not in need of new projects
It is pretty obvious that the trend in software (since the day I got on the web) is that open source software is commoditizing the value of most software products and tools. Providing tools that require limited maintenance costs and provide access to a best of breed collection of SEO tools makes it easy for us to evolve with the space and help our customers do so, without building up a huge cost sink that requires raising capital and having to listen to some icky investors. :)
The reason we can (and do) provide so many free SEO tools is because I feel doing so...
extends opportunity to more people around the globe (anyone who is just fresh starting out like I was ~6 years ago could use the help)
commoditizes the value of some bloated all-in-one SEO software (many of those products generally lack value and misguide people)
makes it hard for con-artists to sell hyped up junk (by commoditizing the value of their offerings to all but the most desperate of get rich quick folks)
helps to educate potential future customers (when we did a survey recently about 80% of our customers have been practicing SEO for over a year)
is an affordable distribution strategy for brand awareness
builds trust by delivering value for free (rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of potential customers)
is a big differentiator between us and most SEO websites
In addition to all the above points, most of the tools we create are tools I want to use. So the cost of building them would still be there even if we did not share them. Sharing them gets us lots of great user feedback to improve them, and does not cost us much relative to the potential upside.
Small Industry, Lightweight Strategy
Rather than centralizing things, we like to rely on a distributed software strategy which has a much lower cost structure.
That strategy allows this site (with a popular blog, an array of tools, some videos, training modules, and an active community) to run on 1 server. We find the Plenty of Fish story inspiring, though doubt we will need his distributed computing skills anytime soon given how small our industry is. After 5 years we are still millions of visitors and over a billion monthly pageviews behind Plenty of Fish :)
Though we are doing ok in our little corner of the web :)
We have analytics on our website to help us see where we are getting coverage, and to measure and improve conversions (an area ripe for opportunity given our brand exposure and site traffic). We may add relevant affiliate links and offers to some of our SEO tools to help pay for the 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars we spent developing our various tools (for example, see how we integrated a link to our Wordtracker keyword guide and the Wordtracker keyword research service in our keyword tool). But we have no need or desire to spy on users who download our tools. Spying and outing are poor strategies for professional SEOs to employ....they erode trust and value.
I thought it would be worth highlighting a few of the advanced features in the SEO Toolbar. Some of the highest value ideas do not consist of looking at one data point, or boiling things down to 1 arbitrary and meaningless number (like many "professional" SEO tools do), but consist of looking at many data points across multiple sites, and hunting for inconsistencies that help you build new profitable traffic streams. Along those lines, I thought I would run through a few ideas to get your juices flowing...there are dozens more like these :)
Earlier today I called an older version of the SEO Toolbar that does not have the update option built in it. If you downloaded it earlier today, please download again from http://tools.seobook.com/seo-toolbar/
The current version should be 1.0.1 (rather than 0.1). Sorry about the error on the updating part...but you won't have to download it again after this time...the update feature will work, and it is safe to just download it now as it will write over the earlier version of the extension.
What would happen if you smooshed together many of the best parts of Rank Checker, SEO for Firefox, the best keyword research tools across the web, a feed reader (pre-populated with many SEO feeds), a ton of competitive research tools, the ability to compare up to 5 competing sites against each other, easy data export, and boatloads of other features into 1 handy Firefox extension? Well, you would have the SEO Toolbar.
Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? If so this is the Firefox extension for you. The SEO Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.
Want to learn more? Watch this quick intro video, and read on
Download & Installation Instructions:
You have to be using Firefox to get this to work. If you have not yet used Firefox go download Firefox, and then come back to this page using Firefox as your web browser.
After you install the SEO Toolbar and restart your browser you may want to configure the extension settings to fit your preferences.
The Theory...
The SEO game is getting more complex, and it is requiring more effort to keep up with the changes. More and more tools are being released. Some are worth buying, some are not. The idea of this toolbar was to put the best competitive research data and the best SEO research tools at your fingertips - free of charge.
This tool was designed to make it easier to evaluate how strong a competing website is. The SEO Toolbar pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from your browser. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this toolbar also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data.
First Things First:
If you are casually surfing you may want to turn this extension off. To do so, click on the SEO Toolbar logo, then click on the "Turn Toolbar off" link at the bottom of the menu.
If the toolbar is off then you will see question marks near all the data points, likeso
To turn this toolbar back on, click on the SEO Toolbar logo, and then click on the "Turn Toolbar on" link at the bottom of the menu.
SEO Toolbar Features:
As you surf the web the SEO Toolbar pulls useful market research data right into your browser, including:
Link Information
Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
Under the advanced information button you can also see details like
Uniqe linking domains: this comes from the fine folks at Majestic SEO
.edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
.edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
.gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
Directory Information
Dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not
BOTW: is a site listed in the BOTW Directory or not
Other Competitive Details
PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org's spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
Advanced Information Button
Clicking on the advanced information button allows you to bring up a lot of SEO related details, including
Site background information
Site links
Page links
Directory listings
Traffic estimates
Social media information from popular social bookmarking and social news sites
And you can easily export all this data.
Competitive Research Links
Provides links to a variety of competitive research tools, including...
Compete.com
Alexa.com
Google Trends for Websites
Quantcast
SEM Rush
Additional tools/features...
IP address: IP address of the host
Search for sites on the same IP address: search Live Search based on IP address
Whois data: find out who runs a site
Server header checker: is a link being 301 redirected? 302 redirected? how many jumps are there? find out using this tool (you may need to use it combined with the user agent switcher on some complex dynamic sites)
User agent switcher: change your useragent to detect how bots see a page or site (may require clearing cookies and restarting browser)
Highlight Nofollow Links
Highlight nofollow links. You can turn this on or off with the click of a button...this button
Rank Checker
We built our popular Rank Checker directly into the toolbar. Access it by clicking on this button
We built in our popular on page SEO analysis tool - SEO Xray. This allows you to look at things like on page headings, internal links, external links, and gives you access to our keyword density analysis tool.
Keyword Research Tools
Want access to keyword research tools right from your browser? We allow you to select your favorite tools from a list of a dozen different keyword tools! Simply put a checkmark next to the ones you like, then enter your keyword into the search box and you will see a number of tabs open, with 1 keyword tool in each tab.
We also link to our keyword density analyzer, keyword list generator, and keyword list cleaner at the bottom of this menu.
Highlight Keywords on a Page
The highlighter between the book and the green globe allows you to highlight keywords that appear on a page.
Ask SEO Questions & Find SEO Answers
The green globe next to the search box allows you to search SeoBook.com for answers to your SEO questions. Anytime you have an SEO question you can search our site, as we are likely to have answered most SEO questions at one point in time.
If you are a paying subscriber you can also use this search feature to find our training modules and to search our exclusive member's only forums.
Built in Feed Reader
We also built a feed reader directly into the toolbar, pre-populated with a bunch of great SEO blogs. You can delete any of these blogs from the list, and you can easily add any blogs you want to subscribe to.
Compare Websites
Want to compare 2 or more websites? We allow you to compare up to 5 at a time. Just click on the comparison button
Then double click in the URL box you want to add a site profile to. Proceed to the next box until you have listed up to 5 sites.
When you are done entering sites, click the get data button in the lower left corner. Once the data is pulled in you can
compare it within the window
click on any datapoint to go to the source
export the data to a CSV file
A Plug in With More Data & Easier Access
Options Panel
This tool has a built in options panel, accessible by clicking on the SEO Toolbar logo.
You can chose to turn data points on or off, change highlighting colors, add user agents for the user agent switcher, and change a few other settings.
Unrivaled Flexibility
This toolbar is designed to be exceptionally flexible. Lets say you wanted to add the spell check from the Google Toolbar into this toolbar, and you wanted to replace our PageRank dispaly with their PageRank display. To do this you would
right click near the top of your browser
select customize from that menu
select things to add or remove from the toolbars by dragging and dropping them. additional buttons will also appear in a "Customize Toolbar" window.
click done at the bottom of the "Customize Toolbar" window when you are finished.
How to Update The SEO Toolbar:
This extension also will periodically update when we add new features. There is no need to reinstall this extension to get it to update. To update this extension
While in Firefox look at the menu across the top of your browser. Click on the tools link.(or hit Alt T)
From the tools drop down menu click on extensions menu (or hit Alt E)
At the bottom of the extension box click the find updates button. If there is an update available for any of your extensions there will be an Update Now button to the right of the extension.
Update Log
Updates will appear on our updates page located here
Other Useful Related Firefox Extensions and Goodies:
SEO for Firefox is worth a look. It pulls in similar datapoints as the SEO Toolbar does, but it puts them inline with the search results.
View a list of related useful extensions on our SEO extension page.
Conflicting Extensions:
There might be a few conflicting extensions. If this extension works on Yahoo! but not Google then check to see if you have some other potentially conflicting extension that is customizing Google. If it works on nothing then throw your computer out the window or read comments left by others here. If you still have questions you can ask them here.
In Mike Grehan's New Signals to Search Engines he highlights how personalization, social media, and universal search may help move search beyond text and links.
Mike also contended that ranking reports are dead. While clients should see the end effect of optimization in their analytics and sales data, ranking reports still have good value to professional SEOs. Below are a couple examples of why and how ranking reports are still important, even as Google crowds the organic search results with universal search stuff.
New Sites
Track Your Growth
When you build a new site from scratch you get to see how effective your link building strategies are as the site's rankings improve. You have to get in the game before you compete...ranking improvements give you an idea of how your site's trust is growing even before you rank well enough to receive much stable traffic.
This early feedback data can be used to guide further investment in link building efforts, and prioritize which websites get the most effort and investment.
Show Clients Baseline Rankings & Growth
If you sell services to clients and they have a brand new site with limited traction then a ranking report shows baseline rankings and proof of growth, even before top rankings yield lots of traffic. This helps customers have confidence in their SEO provider, even if their SEO investment loses money before making it back.
Page 2/3 Rankings
If you rank on page 2 or 3 for some high value keywords you might not see much traffic from them. But if your keyword rankings let you know that you are close to the top you can consider working on link building and altering your site structure to improve the rankings of those pages.
Services like SEMRush also help give insights into such ranking improvement opportunities.
Algorithm Changes & Penalties
How Are Search Algorithms Shifting?
Is Google putting more weight on authority sites? How much does the domain name count (if at all)? Is anchor text becoming more important or less important? How aggressive should you be with anchor text?
When major algorithm updates happen, tracking a wide array of sites and keywords can help you hypothesize what might be gaining importance and what might be losing importance.
What Happened to My Google Traffic?
Sometimes sites get filtered out of the search results due to manual penalties, automated penalties, automated filters, algorithm changes, or getting hacked. Sometimes the issues are related to particular pages, particular folders, whole sites, or keywords closely related to (or containing) another word.
Seeing a traffic drop gives you some clues that something may be wrong, but one of the easiest ways to isolate the issue and further investigate is to look at ranking reports to see what keywords and what pages were affected...then you can start thinking about if it was a glitch, something you can fix, or something you can't.
Such lists should be taken with a grain of salt, but at free one can't complain about the price. As time passes free and good enough is going to force those selling tools and information to offer something that has a sustainable advantage over free.
At the same time...
the sea of information will become increasingly hard to navigate, increasing the value of filters (particularly those built around a shared perspective or bias)
hyped up salesmen will be able to build many business models out of selling such recycled information to the uninitiated, forcing others who sell information to add even more differentiators between themselves and the competition
The Inside AdWords blog announced the beta launch of Google's Search-based Keyword Tool. To some degree the tool is a Compete.com knock off, but with a number of exceptions
this tool is free
Google has more search data than Compete.com does
this shows bid prices and search volume estimates next to keywords (like the Google Traffic Estimator)
this shows your current page titles and keywords
this shows the % of organic and paid traffic going to a URL
For any keyword, the Google Search-based Keyword Tool will show up to 800 related keywords with cost and search volume estimates. This tool also works to show you 100 keywords related to a site, and if you own a website they will show you thousands of keywords that they think you could bid on which are not already in your account. In addition they show your search share of voice (via ads and organic search results) for keywords. This data is easy to export using a handy export button.
There are a variety of cool extra filters that can be applied on this tool, including...
minimum or maximum search volumes
bid price range
low, medium, or high competition
keyword in URL
combining URL and keywords as filters
keyword + general category
negative keywords
Using a variety of different combinations for these filters you can see many different sets of 800 keywords even within the same subset. Export these different lists a variety of times and you can quickly build a list of thousands of high value keywords.
A sweet new competitive research tool by the name SEMRush has hit the market. It can be seen as a deeper extension of the SEO Digger project (adding PPC data and tracking AdWords keywords), and a competitor to services like Compete.com and SpyFu (which recently launched SpyFu Kombat).
SEM Rush vs Compete.com
The big value add that SEM Rush has over a tool like Compete.com is that SEM Rush adds cost per click estimates (scraped from Google's Traffic Estimator tool) and estimated traffic volumes (from the Google AdWords keyword tool) near each keyword. Thus, rather than showing the traffic distribution to each site, this tool can list keyword value distribution for the sites (keyword value * estimated traffic).
Normalizing Data
Using these estimates does not provide results that are as accurate as Compete.com's data licensing strategy, but if you own a site and know what it earns, you can set up a ratio to normalize the differences (at least to some extent, within the same vertical, for sites of similar size, using a similar business model).
One of our sites that earns about $5,000 a month shows a Google traffic value of close to $20,000 a month.
5,000/20,000 = 1/4 = 0.25
A similar site in the same vertical shows $10,000
$10,000 * 0.25 = $2,500
Disclaimers With Normalizing Data
It is hard to monetize traffic as well as Google does, so in virtually every competitive market your profit per visitor (after expenses) will generally be less than Google. Some reason why..
In some markets people are losing money to buy marketshare, while in other markets people may overbid just to block out competition.
Some merchants simply have fatter profit margins and can afford to outbid affiliates.
It is hard to integrate advertising in your site anywhere near as aggressively as Google does while still creating a site that will be able to gather enough links (and other signals of quality) to take a #1 organic ranking in competitive markets...so by default there will typically be some amount of slippage.
A site that offers editorial content wrapped in light ads will not convert eyeballs into cash anywhere near as well as a lead generation oriented affiliate site would.
SEM Rush Features
Keyword Values & Volumes
As mentioned above, this data is scraped from the Google Traffic Estimator and the Google Keyword Tool.
Top Search Traffic Domains
A list of the top 100 domain names that are estimated to be the highest value downstream traffic sources from Google.
You could get a similar list from Compete.com's Referral Analytics by running a downstream report on Google.com, although I think that might also include traffic from some of Google's non-search properties like Reader.
Top Competitors
Here is a list of sites that rank for many of the same keywords that SEO Book ranks for
Overlapping Keywords
Here is a list of a few words where Seo Book and SEOmoz compete in the rankings
Compare AdWords to Organic Search
These are sites that rank for keywords that SEO Book is buying through AdWords
And these are sites that buy AdWords ads for keywords that this site ranks for
Once Upon a Time...
I was going to create a tool similar to this one about a year ago, until I hired a programmer that was EPIC FAIL. The guy who managed that program is no longer selling programming services - and that makes the world a better place.
I actually had 3 attempts at such a tool. I bought a GREAT domain name, spec'd out the project, then planned on doing it...
investor backed, who decided to back out
self funded, but I hired... 1.) a programmer who mid-project decided he needed to make double what I make working part-time, then 2.) the worst programmers ever.
combination of heavily self funded with the guidance of a bad ass VC, but I backed out due to a need to focus on this site
I spent most of this year focusing on trying to build our community and raise our editorial quality (both goals are going well, but require significant maintenance). We have had 4 strong hires in a row, so it seems like our luck has changed on that front. Recently I started working with a programmer who really clicks with me, often taking my ideas and making them way better than I intended.
If these guys had not made this tool I was going to try to take another run at something like this early next year...which brings up a good point that a friend (and wicked intelligent open source programmer) named François Planque told me. He said all he had to do was think up a good idea but not do it, and within 6 to 12 months if he had not done it, someone else would have already launched it.
Entry cost is so low that a lot of great tools are going to get made in short order, but it is hard to win by sitting on a good idea. ;)
Wordtracker released a new keyword tool based around keyword questions. The information is quick and easy to export. Ken McGaffin said, “This is a fun tool that is a great source of inspiration for web content writers. You need never be short of creative ideas again." And it is a cool idea - good job Wordtracker!
Majestic SEO did a major update, claiming to have crawled about 52 billion URLs and has nearly 350 billion unique URLs in their anchor index. Here is a list of their top URLs with inbound links.
They also did a comparison between their link counts and those found by Yahoo! Site Explorer and LinkScape. They claim to have more links in their database than Yahoo! is showing, but I have to wonder how they could do that economically, if they are counting more duplicates, and why they haven't bought a site design that reflects how much they must be spending on data.
A few years back search engines were in an ego based contest about who has the biggest index, and I find it a bit ironic that a couple SEO companies will likely be engaged in such a data war...but the marketplace competition should be good for all SEOs.
We recently added an SEO X-ray feature to SEO for Firefox. You must use Firefox 3.0 or above to see these features, but if you want to see...
how the on page optimization of any page looks (headings, meta description, page title)
the keyword density of the page and popular phrases on the page
how many links point into a page (total links, or links from external resources)
how many links point out of a page (as well as the anchor text of these links, nofollow vs follow, internal vs external - all exportable in CSV format)
then this new feature makes it quick and easy to do all of that. Simply right click on the page you are viewing, scroll down to SEO for Firefox, and click on SEO X-ray.
That will show you an overlay on the screen like this
We are planning on doing another update in the next couple days, and may add...
the IP address of the site (and links to other sites on the same IP address)
character and word counts for page title and meta description body content
a link to the domain tools overview page for the associated site
If you are using Firefox 3 and SEO for Firefox please give this a try and let us know what you think.
So my timing on that last post was a bit off, but I still think the general thesis is valid. But now that there has been so much negative feedback I figure it is my job to play devil's advocate and highlight reasons why most SEOs do not need to be too worried about Linkscape.
Cool Features
Unique Linking Domains
One of the coolest features of this tool is knowing the number of unique linking domains pointing links at a specific site, but that feature is for paying members only.
A competing tool by the name of Majestic SEO allows you to see that data as part of their free overview. Click on the image below for an example.
If your competitor has high authority links then you need more than just quantity to compete, but if most of their backlinks are garbage then this is a good stat to have, along with many other stats you can get from tools like SEO for Firefox.
Spam Reporting
Not that I advocate spam reporting (as the official guidelines have departed from reality so much that almost everyone that ranks is spamming and/or spammed in the past to get to their current market position), but for professional SEOs that own dozens of sites and like doing spam reports to Google this might be a good tool for outing competitors, since it makes it easy to find some noscript links, links from off the page, inbound 301 redirects, but the average webmaster probably does not need to worry about that.
A Bit Top Heavy
One of the biggest limitations in Linkscape is that you can only go 500 results deep unless you want to buy a custom report. They allow you to see various lenses of 500 at a time through search features and filters, but a big recommendation I can make on this front is for them to allow you to see all that data, even if it requires exporting data to CSV...they already spent the money to collect the data, so if you're a customer they may as well give it to you...it helps nobody if nobody sees it.
Majestic SEO appears to have a similar sized database as Linkscape, and they allow you to do a full data export for your own domain free of charge. Other domains they charge a scaling price for depending on the number of links to the domain.
More Cool Features?
Nick Gerner promised more features in the next version of Linkscape, but unless they start buying usage data and become more like Compete.com I am not sure if it will be a game changer. On to explaining why...
Personally, I'm not too worried. You want to compete with me and get links in places where I'm listed? We get listed in places where editorial rules. So just knowing where we're at doesn't get you in the door -- you have to be good enough to walk in. And if you are good enough, well, good I guess.
The highest quality links typically tend to be editorial in nature, with many of those being driven by social relationships. No matter how much one decides to analyze link patterns, they can't re-create most of the link relationships if they don't already have the content quality, market exposure, and awareness. And if you copy someone's idea after they already did it you need to greatly improve upon it to get credit for it.
2. Tons of Alternative Data Sources
Common link analysis questions...
How do I Get a Basic Competitive Overview of the Search Results?
Search Google with SEO for Firefox turned on. Make sure you are pulling data in the automatic mode while searching.
I Want to do Anchor Text Analysis. How do I Analyze Links?
Some options include...
SEO Link Analysis - a free Firefox extension that adds anchor text to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
Backlink Analyzer - a free desktop based tool I had created a few years ago that pulls data from the Yahoo! API. Make sure to watch the video on the download page before using it.
I Want to Find New Links to Competing Sites
If you want to find what someone's best ideas are all you have to do is subscribe to the Google Blogsearch feed for links to their site, like so. That should list many of the people who are talking about this site.
A paid option on this front is Advanced Link Manager. It costs $199 (or $299 if you package it with Advanced Web Ranking) and scrapes data from Yahoo!, keeping track of the date when the link was found.
I Want to Find New Links to My Site
This is the same as competing sites, but you can also use your web analytics and server logs to dig up additional information. You can also look inside Google Webmaster Central to download backlink reports.
I Want to Find The Most Authoritative Links Pointing at a Site
Yahoo! Site Explorer generally orders backlinks roughly in terms of authority, with some of the most authoritative backlinks showing up at the top of their results.
I Want to Get an Estimate of Unique Linking Domains
Majestic SEO offers a free estimate...though, like LinkScape, their crawl is not as comprehensive as Yahoo!'s.
I Want to Find Hub Links?
Hub Finder is a great tool for finding topical hubs.
Google TouchGraph is another great option with a cool graphical interface.
What Sites Drive the Most Traffic to My Competitors?
The best way I have found to get this data is from Compete.com Referral Analytics, though it requires a $500 a month subscription...which is a nice chunk of change, unless you are already doing quite well!
Do I Have Any Broken Links?
Xenu Link Sleuth will crawl your site and help you find broken links, showing you which pages the broken links were on.
Each search engine has its own crawling priorities and own web graph. Google has probably spent hundreds of millions of dollars building and refining their crawling sequence. No two crawls are the same.
4. Yahoo! Search Counts Link Weight Differently Based on Page Segmentation
Google's PageRank was designed based on a random walk theory, where browsers click a random link on the page. But search engines are looking to move beyond the random walk model.
The irrelevant links at the bottom of a page, which will not be as valuable for a user, don’t add to the quality of the user experience, so we don’t account for those in our ranking. All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking.
5. Microsoft May be Looking to Heavily Incorporate Usage Data
Microsoft did research on BrowseRank, which aims to use actual usage data to augment (or perhaps replace) their link graph. Be default, Internet Explorer 8 sends usage data to Microsoft...when you know what 80% of web users are doing you do not need to rely on a random walk.
Think of having access to the majority of the web's usage data like this:
If Google's algorithms are more relevant than Microsoft, then putting weight on usage data allows Microsoft to quickly catch up by weighting whatever Google is weighting
Microsoft could theoretically be better than Google at filtering out paid links, as most paid links in a sidebar or footer do not send much traffic...and thus could easily be weighted less than links in content - though with Google owning so many products they could improve significantly on this front as well, if they decided to use their AdSense data, analytics data, Chrome browser data, Feedburner data, and toolbar data.
Beyond those editors there are many search engineers inside the webspam team offering a variety of techniques to throw off SEOs, including
stripping all PageRank from a site and killing all its rankings
stripping some portion of a site's PageRank and ranking abilities
stripping PageRank from the toolbar but still allowing sites to rank
showing full PageRank in the toolbar, but killing the ability of a link to pass PageRank
Without working inside of Google and/or buying and testing lots of links across a wide array of sites and verticals it would be hard to know if any particular site passes PageRank, and how much it might pass. For instance, a link from Text-Link-Ads.com's website is one of my highest MozRank links, but I doubt Google places much weight on that link since Google does not let Text Link Ads rank for their own brand.
7. Search Engine Editorial Policies are Selective, & Constantly Changing
According to Udi Manber, Google did 450 search algorithm updates last year. Even if you could somehow catch up with all the editorial stuff search engines were doing to manipulate their version of the link based web graph, you would have a hard time of keeping up with it - let alone accounting for the hoards of usage data the search engines have.
The status of a link (and its ability to pass PageRank) may arbitrarily change based on media exposure. In the past many websites were hijacked by 302 affiliate links (this even happened to Google's site, and this is still happening today to corporate sites as big as Snapnames).
Shockingly, when asked point blank if affiliate programs that employed juice-passing links (those not using nofollow) were against guidelines or if they would be discounted, the engineers all agreed with the position taken by Sean Suchter of Yahoo!. He said, in no uncertain terms, that if affiliate links came from valuable, relevant, trust-worthy sources - bloggers endorsing a product, affiliates of high quality, etc. - they would be counted in link algorithms. Aaron from Google and Nathan from Microsoft both agreed that good affiliate links would be counted by their engines and that it was not necessary to mark these with a nofollow or other method of blocking link value.
A few years ago I set up my affiliate program to use 301 redirects to prevent hijacking, and get any link benefits I could. But right after I changed by business model to a membership site my affiliate program was featured/outed in this interview, and it no longer passes PageRank.
Watch the above video and see how at 2 minutes and 15 seconds in my site was put up for review to any Google engineer that happened to watch it.
The same set of links, to the same site, using the same format, under similar circumstances...
counts for most major corporations (and is allegedly an approved and legitimate strategy)
counted for this site for years
stopped counting around the time they were outed by a popular SEO blogger
8. Temporal Algorithms + Domains Expire, & May Lose PageRank
Search engines may place weight not only on the number of links pointing at a page, but also on the rate at which links are accumulated. Even if you know the raw number of links and the site age it still does not tell you how many links were built last month or in the last year.
Not only are links born, but some of them rot. The web graph as a whole is over a decade old. Linkrot was a big issue in 1998, and it is still a big issue today. In 1998 6% of links were broken, and the DotBot crawl shows 7% of links being broken.
To appreciate how bad linkrot is...
if you publish a large site with many outbound links, run Xenu Link Sleuth through your site and see how many broken links you find
Some domains that expire may keep their PageRank, but many expiring domains lose their PageRank. With how hard it is to build links today and 1 in 7 links broke there are SEO tools designed around trying to capture this link equity
The domains that die off may later be re-registered and re-purposed. And keep in mind that the 1 in 7 broken links number is actually much higher than that when you consider how many people buy expired domain names and build them out.
By creating an index of the web in 2008 a person would have no idea if...
the links occurred recently
if the links are old
if the site expired and potentially lost much of its link weight
And Matt Cutts generally hates re-purposing expired domain names. Why? The very first spam site he found was a high PageRank expired domain linked from the W3C. That site was converted to a porn site, and ever since then (before Matt was the head of the webspam group - before Google even had a webspam group) Matt has not liked expired domains.
Matt offers background on that story 30 seconds into this video:
9. Advancing Algorithms That Move Away From PageRank & Anchor Text
domain history (ie: spam infractions/penalties, etc.)
site authority
signals of locality (hosting location, TLD, link sources, etc.)
searcher intent (Google's Amit Singhal stated "the same query can mean entirely different things in different countries. For example, [Côte d'Or] is a geographic region in France - but it is a large chocolate manufacturer in neighboring French-speaking Belgium")
other forms of search personalization (past searches, user subscriptions, frequently visited sites, etc.)
editorial partnerships with news companies & other universal search categories (like Google Shopping Search and the maps local onebox)
usage data (especially with sites they host, like YouTube)
All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won’t support the ranking. That’s what we are constantly looking at in algorithms. I can tell you one thing, that over the last few years as we have been building out our search engine and incorporating lots of data, the absolute percentage contribution of links and anchor text to the natural ranking of algorithms or to the importance in our ranking algorithms has gone down somewhat.
Final Thoughts
It is not that Linkscape is a bad tool, it is just aiming to do something incredibly complex, and as long as Yahoo! Site Explorer gives us a decent free sample (and other tools let us layer data on top of Yahoo!) we can get a good idea of the approximate level of competition for free. But with Yahoo! at $12 a share, if Yahoo! gets bought out and Site Explorer goes away then Linkscape (or Majestic SEO, depending on who does a better job of innovation) might be one of the best SEO investments one can make.
Compete.com quietly launched a referral analytics product as part of their advanced package ($499/month). Even as a free user you can see the top 3 results for any site, which can be used to see how reliant a site is on search. Why is % of search traffic an important statistic?
If search traffic (as a % of total traffic) is low (relative to other competing sites) then it could indicate that there are organic optimization opportunities that are currently being missed and/or that site has a large organic traffic stream that can be marketed to in order to help it improve any search related weakness.
If search traffic (as a % of total traffic) is high (relative to other competing sites) then it could indicate that the site is near its full search potential, that the site is not very engaging, and/or does not have many loyal users
Here are search stats for SEO Book. Note that Google controls a minority of the traffic to this site, which means they have limited direct influence on the revenue of this site. Some sites are closer to 90% Google, which makes it easy for Google to effectively remove them from the web!
This sort of data is important for considering the viability of a business model, the stability of a site, and what multiple a site should sell for. It can also be used when considering the CPM of an ad unit - search traffic is much more targeted and goal oriented than a person browsing a forum is.
Until everyone and their dog started looking at PageRank (and how to manipulate it) it was a rather sound way of finding the most valuable backlinks. But with the pollution of endless bought links, nepotistic links, and PageRank only being updated quarterly it is tough to glean much market data from only looking at PageRank. Tools like SEO for Firefox (especially when used on a Yahoo! backlink search) allow you to gather more data about the quality of link sources. But they all try to measure proxies for value rather than how people actually surf the web.
Microsoft BrowseRank research would use browsing data to supplement PageRank on determining relevancy. In Internet Explorer 8 (currently in beta) a person's browsing details are sent to Microsoft by default. With ~ 80% of the browser market, Microsoft does not need to use a random walk for the core of their relevancy algorithm - they know what people are actually doing, and can use usage data as a big part of their relevancy algorithms.
Using a tool like Compete.com Referral Analytics makes it far easier to poach top affiliates, discover the best ad buying locations, and replicate a competitor's best backlinks. Be forewarned that the tool only works at the domain level, so it is much better at analyzing Yahoo.com than shopping.yahoo.com.
Along with referral analytics Compete offers destination analytics, which let you know what websites people visit AFTER visiting a particular site...which should help you glean information about how sites are monetizing, what offers are working well, what sites are well referenced by another site, and what sites people go to if they can't get what they want on the current site.
At $500 a month, this tool is probably only going to be used by those who are already fairly successful rather than as an entry level tool.
Google has been changing the code used to display their search results a number of times over the past couple days. We recently updated SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker. Both should work as of now, and if any more SERP changes happen we will try to update the extensions as soon as possible.
If you need to update these tools you can do so within the Firefox browser by clicking on Tools in the top Firefox menu, then from the Tools menu click on Add-ons. This will pop up the Add-ons / extensions window. At the bottom of this window there is a Find Updates button you can click. That will bring in the new updates and then when you re-start the browser the extensions should be fully functional again.
James from Semvironment created a plug in to automatically email webmasters you link to from within Wordpress blog posts. When he launched it, the opening post sent me an email
Hi! We linked to your website in our post: Link Builder for Wordpress - Download it Now!. Please stop by and check it out, subscribe to our blog and if you find something useful on our site or blog - we would welcome a link back anytime ... no obligation - we're happy to link to high quality websites and blogs like yours! To your continued success, [Your Name Here]
That link was broken (pointing to a revisioned archive version of the post before the URL changed), but even beyond that I sorta do not like the idea. Why? Automated communications is the enemy of relationship building. And the worst people to offend are the people you find interesting / important / influential enough to want to talk about them. You can get the person's attention just as easily by clicking the link in the post a dozen times and by commenting on their blog. And most of them would even be up for lending their time to you if you stoke their egos.
As more people start using a wider array of automated link building tools the effectiveness of automation will drop. And you can't train an automated tool to be personal. A tool like this might work in some verticals for a year or two, but if people find it effective look out for the tragedy of the commons to be heading toward your inbox some time soon!
Google announcedAdPlanner, a tool to help ad agencies find where desired demographic audiences are active online. The WSJ highlighted how the new Google tool can help make the ad marketplace more efficient:
The Web-audience data could be combined with the ad-serving system, so that advertisers would be able to find out whether they would reach the right audience before they committed to placing an ad.
In addition to AdPlanner, Google will launch another tool that compares consumer response to ads against a control group of users who did not see the ad:
Separately, Google this week is expected to roll out a new tool aimed at showing how Web surfers respond to online ads. It will compare groups of people who are exposed to an ad with others who haven't seen it, taking into account such factors as search activity and site visitation.
Our CMS only shows 300 comments per page. I am sure there is a way to enhance that, but for ease of publishing and following the conversations I decided to close the last SEO for Firefox thread and start a new one. If you have any questions about SEO for Firefox this is the place to ask them. :)
Summize is a conversational search engine which allows you to search Twitter in realtime. Useful for finding customer feedback even when people do not provide it directly to you. For example, I just found out that for some people the Rank Checker Firefox extension stopped working after the last update. So I just reverted the extension and am awaiting another update from the developer. Summize offers RSS feeds so you can track conversations mentioning your brands and/or important topics.
Summize offers an API which can be used to generate free content for your sidebar if you publish Mahalo-like content, though that is a bit spammy. ;)
The Rank Checker developer told me he just completed our first major update on the extension. From his email...
added international character support
fixed query time saving error in options window
added status icon (right click on the icon to see the whole menu)
fixed linux issues
changed doubleclick behavior (if you want to go to SE results on windows, hold CTRL key and click on the url; on mac hold META key and click on the url), because double click causes some errors on mac os.
Want to check your rankings on Google.com, international Google search results, Yahoo, and Microsoft? Try Rank Checker, our free Firefox extension which tracks your rankings, and allows you to automatically check ranking changes over time.
If you have any questions please watch this video.
The tool has issues with special international characters, but we are trying to get that fixed ASAP. Have any other feedback? Please leave it in the comments below.
If you like it/find it useful, please show some love via a blog mention and on del.icio.us if you can. :)
[Update: to verify your rankings on a search engine you can scroll over the rank number, hold down control, and then click on the ranking.]
Some tools exist because they are valuable and remove market friction. Others exist because they are perceived as being valuable, even if they are actually value destroying, or only valuable in rare circumstances.
Valuable Tools of the Trade
Outside of paying for a domain name, hosting, site design, and buying a few links you could create (an ad supported) business online virtually free.
Blogs are easy to post to, easy to subscribe to, and easy to comment and interact with. Keyword tools and analytics services are easy to view and infer ideas and trends from. Searchable email saves time. Google Alerts and feed readers save time and keep you connected with your industry. Many of these tools are free, in spite of offering great value.
Negative Value Software
But there is another class of software that exists long after it is useful or profitable to use, or long before you would need to consider such a solution. Are you still paying for monthly submissions to the search engines? Not all of the solutions are outright fraud though (like monthly search engine submission services are). Even some of the good intentioned tools can still hurt you.
Automated Email
A friend of mine is nervous about launching their first linkbait, and wanted to use this enhanced email software to help automate finding the right people to contact. But until you get some experience in the marketplace you might be paying for value destroying software that hurts your brand.
One software program my friend bought crashed his computer.
Another was bought through Plimus. It was purchased, and simply never came...pretty bad after about a half dozen emails and a few phone calls. How hard is it to send an unlock code?
One of my friends got his account banned by an ISP the first day, when he accidentally misused one such software program. One minute he was doing research, and then he clicked to the next step to refine it, and accidentally ended up sending out about 150 emails in under a minute. Ooooops.
And none of those situations even take into account brand value and risks of a reputation management issue arising.
Automated Bid Management Software
A customer of mine recently asked about what bid management software program made sense to use, as he was new to PPC and wanted to do it right from the start. But if you are new to the game I think you first need to do it by hand so you can understand how it works. If you use bid management software that is optimizing for the wrong things you may end up blowing through a lot of money. It is much harder to learn the ad network + the management tool at the same time rather than learning them one at a time, and in many cases human intuition works better than machines do.
There are a lot of ways to get caught up in the complexities of money saving tools and ideas to where you never do anything. You can't teach a software program, machine, or employee how to do marketing until after you have done it yourself.
Other Backwards Solutions
Have you seen people pay to be able to resell some sleazy MLM company's junk on a 100% duplicate content subdomain off of the corporate site?
Have you seen people pay for hosting and CMS services that are far worse than they can get for free from other providers or the open source community?
Have you seen people using expensive keyword density analysis software this year?
What causes people to buy into such stuff - laziness? lack of research? greed?
What (does/doesn't) Work Well for You?
What tools made your marketing easier? Which ones set you back?
What works well in 2008? What is a waste of time? Twitter? FriendFeed?
We updated SEO for Firefox again. The Yahoo! childnodes error is fixed, and we added BOTW directory listings to the stats we pull in to SEO for Firefox.
I got a few dozen emails chewing me out for our keyword tool breaking. This post is just to let you know that it is fixed and to say thank you to those people who let me know about it breaking.
I took down my old Overture powered keyword tool and replaced it using Wordtracker data because:
I like Wordtracker's data more
Wordtracker's API is much more reliable than scraping data from Overture
the Overture tool seems like it has been down more often than it has been up recently
I primarily focus on the US market and did not realize how popular the international aspects of the old keyword research tool were until I started getting a rash of email complaints after taking the tool down.
So I put the old keyword tool back up, renamed it the international keyword suggestion tool, and defaulted it to using UK values (while still allowing users to grab data from other regional markets). I also zipped it up here, so anyone can install it on their site, and set it to a different default language if they like.
I recently talked to the fine folks at Wordtracker about how unreliable the Yahoo! keyword suggestion was, and Wordtracker offered to work with me to power the SEO Book keyword tool using Wordtracker's robust and reliable API.
We now have a CSV export option at the top of the results. And it is pretty sweet! It lists keyword, WordTracker count, daily estimates for the big 3 engines, and broad and phrase match versions of each keyword :)
Because Wordtracker's business model relies on selling keyword data, they have a vested interest in keeping it as clean and reliable as possible, and are unlikely to pull a Yahoo
Wordtracker does not tokenize plural words into their singular versions, so you get to see volumes for both singular and plural to know which is more popular. In fact, if you search for the plural they will still return the singular
Wordtracker does not arbitrarily alter the word order like the Overture did
Wordtracker's API is much more reliable than grabbing the data from Overture was
Wordtracker's API allows you to filter out adult keywords.
Yahoo! Search Marketing offers a developer API, but given how rough their transition away from their old keyword tool was, I would much rather use a reliable market leading tool like Wordtracker. Please give it a spin and let me know what you think.
I can plumb around Google blocking it, but there are a limited number of types of webmaster tools that interface with search engines that can be provided to the general public without either being cloned by the search engine or having the search engine serve you some type of retribution for creating them.
Editorial judgements are rarely equitable, and nobody wants to have sitelinks, but have them appear at the top of the 5th page of the search results for their own brand.
New Media is a Key to Growth (ish)
I have never created a Facebook application and have no intent in doing so, because if I am successful they would likely steal my idea and find a way to ban or silence me and/or halt and clone my project. Which is sorta what Kevin Rose did to a Digg member who created an unofficial Digg group on Facebook.
The Transition From Open to Close
Sure that Google maps API is open today, and so are many other data sources, but after they buy enough marketshare look for that to change. The big networks are only open in markets they are losing. What did they do to their SOAP search API after they had enough market leverage? They killed it.
Relying on APIs or scraping data from someone else's platform only has value if you can aggregate it from many sources, do it in a way that is hard to block, add substantial value, have alternative data sources, and you are creating something that you know the data sources you are relying on will not clone for a strategic reason.
Wanted: Writer, Editor, & Marketer...Pay: $0
All these networks pretend that they care about you, but they are vultures. Their data is their data. Their ideas are their ideas....and so are your ideas, unfortunately. If you find yourself becoming someone else's user generated content, or your business can be described as a feature on someone else's product, you are wasting your time.
Joost created an SEO link analysis extension for Firefox that shows link anchor text and PageRank on Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Central, and Microsoft's webmaster portal. I also updated SEO for Firefox to fix a Yahoo! Search error, but to get it to update you have to uninstall and reinstall it because I did not update the versioning data and my programmer is a bit backed up at the moment.
The Website Health Check tool aims to provide a simple and intuitive interface to seeing if your site has any major SEO issues. The site queries Google to grab pages you have indexed in Google, and looks for issues amongst the first 1,000 results.
If your site is exceptionally large, you can use the date based filters to view a sample of recently indexed pages in Google to see if there are any duplication issues amongst those pages.
Questions Answered by the Website Health Check Tool
Is Google indexing your site? Are they quickly indexing your new pages?
Do you have duplicate content pages getting indexed in Google?
Do you have canonical URL issues?
Are any of your pages in Google missing page titles?
Does your server send correct error messages?
Feedback Needed
This tool is in beta. Please leave feedback below.
I sent the programmer this URL and he would love to get your feedback on what you think of it. We are looking to have version two out before the end of the month.
Features We Are Looking to Add
Allow you to search for not just a site, but a site and a keyword, like [seobook.com seo]
Add indexed page counts from all major global search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask)
Allow webmasters to grab results from any of the above 4 engines, or mix and match
Make each data point we collect link to the source
What other features would you like to see?
Video About How to Use the Website Health Check Tool
Michael Jenson from Solo SEO recently emailed me about a cool new free SEO tool he created called Index Rank. After seeing my post about Google date based filters, Michael created the Index Rank tool, which allows you to see the growth of a site's profile in Google based on the number of pages indexed over different periods of time. The tool also allows you to compare multiple sites against each other.
Why is this data useful?
Since Google removed the supplemental results label, the next best thing we have to test site trust for lower end longtail pages is how quickly new pages are getting indexed.
If you see a rapid increase in indexing you know that is caused by an increase in domain trust due to better inlinks, an increase in content creation that leveraged unused authority the site was sitting on, solving a crawling issue, improving internal site architecture, or some technical issue that might be associated with creating duplicate content pages.
If everything you create is getting indexed you may consider creating content at a faster rate, perhaps using sub-brands off subdomains.
If you keep pumping out content but are not seeing your indexing stats go up, that is a cue to build links.
The people from SEO Digger recently put together some research on search spam. Some of the terminology they use (like using the word illicit) is inaccurate, but the trends they discovered align well with what one would expect.
In high money niches, spam sites tended to dominate longer search queries while having less exposure in search results for shorter queries. View the below graph with adult, pills, dating, cars, gifts, and casinos. It shows the normalized density of spam sites ranking in Google by 1, 2, and 3 word queries.
Why is Casino an Anomaly?
I believe the reasons casinos appear so tight nit are
US advertising laws and gaming laws prohibit some of the common spam related revenue streams
leading online gaming sites have heavily embraced both offline advertising and SEO
people who gamble tend to be quite passionate about gambling
That passion means gamers are more active to participate in community sites in that niche, which further consolidates traffic streams due to network effects and creates a lot of free on topic content for some of the major community driven sites.
Effective Search Spamming Business Models
Given this research, if you were to create a business model revolving around spamming, it makes sense to focus on the long tail of search. Get enough PageRank to get your pages indexed, but do not worry about accumulating enough PageRank to try to rank for core keywords in the spammy niches. Plus, staying away from the core keywords makes your sites less likely to get booted from a manual review and/or a competitor snitching on you.
Spam & Ranking Low Trust New Sites
The exact same trend that is seen between real sites vs spam sites is paralleled when considering new websites vs older websites.
Older websites that are heavily linked at and heavily trusted dominate the core category related keywords.
Longer search queries have less matches in the search database, and are thus more reliant on the on the page aspects of SEO.
Older sites can not possibly adequately cover all the related longtail search phrases, so newer sites with less authority rank for many of the more accessible long tail keywords.
If you create a new site you can set your goals on ranking for core category keywords, but realize that longtail traffic will come first. If Google lets entire categories get dominated by spam pages then there has to be an associated opportunity to rank real pages.
I just updated SEO for Firefox to include Compete.com website rank and Compete.com monthly uniques. If you leave Compete.com in on demand mode it tends to work quite well. I am also going to ping the guys at Compete.com to ensure the automatic mode gets to be pretty reliable too. Compete.com data is far better than Alexa because it has less of a webmaster bias.
While I was off on vacation apparently there was a childnodes error on Yahoo! SERPs with SEO for Firefox. An SEO Book reader nicknamed nastyw fixed the error and a programmer friend of mind recently updated the code. We also added phrase and exact match to the broad match values for the Google traffic estimator link at the top of the SERPs.
Justin Laing recently emailed me to let me know about his SEO sitefinder tool, which uses the ODP and the Internet Archive to find DMOZ listed websites that have not been updated in a while.
Domain Tools also allows you to find expiring domains that will be up at auction soon. You can view their top picks or use the right rail filters on that page to search for DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory listed domains.
Free tools such as DropScout allow you to find expiring high PageRank domains.
You can also look at TDNam for expiring domains, and either use software to filter through those OR sort the results by bids and prices. Some of the domains with many bidders are pure play domainers, but others are old trustworthy sites in need of a good loving owner.
Mind mapping software is useful for mapping out complex subject matters in a visual presentation. Free Mind is a free tool to help you create mind maps that can be formatted as HTML, AJAX, or PDF.
Yahoo / Overture had the default status as THE keyword tool for about a decade. They lost that last year when Google started opening up their data a bit more. Now Microsoft is getting into the game offering more useful tools and more data. How does Yahoo respond? They stop supporting their keyword tool. No results, no 301 redirect, no rebrand, no description of why it is broke, no anything. Since my keyword tool is powered by their keyword tool I am getting 10 to 20 emails a day. How many people are not emailing? How much more traffic is Yahoo getting than I am? Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of shareholder value are wasted each day with that move.
The best spot to market yourself is on your own site. As long as Yahoo continues to undermine their own assets without regard or thought their marketplace will remain inefficient, and each day they will continue to lose marketshare. They paid $350 million for Zimbra, but what are the odds of them not screwing that up? They have too many half done projects that do not gel together.
Quintura recently made a search page for Seo Book. Their search service is likely going to be more useful for large publishers with millions of pages than it is on a personal blog, but give it a try and see what you think.
Their cloudlike visual search service is a great tool for finding related keyword modifiers used in competing sites, but I don't think we will see such technology front and center at the mainstream search engines anytime soon due to future advertising regulation which will make it harder to integrate ads and make search results more profitable than the current Google format is. Though I would love to see their technology integrated against social bookmarking sites and personal search history data.
With a click of a mouse you can add either of these to you iGoogle homepage. In addition, you can install them into any webpage by inserting a small JavaScript code. Visit the SEO Book Google Gadgets page to check them out. Please comment with any feedback you have on improving these.
I also am inserting them in this post so you can see what they look like in a web page
SEO Book Keyword Research & Competitive Analysis Google Gadget
I recently came across a number of new and useful SEO tools. Some of them were emailed to me and others were from browsing around the web. Below is a roundup post citing some of them.
Over at Seo4fun, Halfdeck created some free tools to estimate your internal PageRank flow based on your internal linkage data and how you link out to other sites. He offers a free PHP script and a Java version. He also went into great detail to explain how to use his free Javascript version, offering better documentation than many paid tools.
Many of the large web players offer or will soon offer analytics products for free. If you use them they may eventually charge you for the service, or they may keep them free but look for other ways to charge you, and use your own statistics against your best interests, by doing one or more of the following
using your site to help categorize keywords that competitors should bid on (and do SEO for)
compare your direct traffic to search traffic and flag your site for review to potentially reduce your search traffic if it is outside the normal range for your given industry
compare your traffic from their engine to traffic streams from other known clean sources (such as competing engines) and flag your site for review if it falls outside of a certain range
compare your keyword cost and conversion rate relative to other words and reprice accordingly
I put my favorite keyword research tools and competitive research tools in a Google Gadget. Thanks to Jay at Widget Waker for making the original version with a sweet design, which I hacked up a bit to add a few more tools at the last minute.
I just grabbed Quantcast's free rankings of the top 1,000,000 sites. Currently Seobook.com comes in at 112,095, which is 5 spots below PornHater.com, which is apparently a PageRank 3 porn blog stuck in an industry with an endless supply of traffic.
I am looking to hire someone to create a few Google Gadgets for the the iGoogle homepage. If you are good at that sort of stuff please contact me. My email address is seobook@gmail.com.
I recently got a beta account to the upcoming Compete.com Search Analytics tool. I am not sure of their pricing yet, but Jay Meattle, from Compete.com, told me "the price points will be extremely attractive to small business owners."
You can get leading category based keywords, top competitors for a given keyword (exact or broad match), compare competing sites head to head on keywords, and get the breakdown of traffic sent to any website.
Google's traffic estimator tool by default is set to broad match. If you want to see an estimate of the value of a specific phrase remember to wrap it in [brackets] instead of just submitting the broad matched version of the keyword term. I just reprogrammed my keyword research tool's traffic estimator link to include the broad, phrase, and exact match of each term. Since my tool is driven from Yahoo's it strips the s in some plural phrases, so the link to the traffic estimator tool gives all 3 match types, and links to all 3 match types with an s appended to the end of of the keyword phrase.
Google recently added the ability for you to report link buyers, which is probably nothing more than a mind control game and a complete waste of time. I recently saw what looked like obvious link buying by Discovery.com. Do you think Google would do anything about it if I reported them? Nope.
Google also recently starting a phased launch of their position placement reports, which is far more beneficial to webmasters, as it shows what sites your AdSense ads are syndicated to. Most sites monetized via AdSense only make a fraction of their full potential, so sharing this data presents more arbitrage opportunities. How you can use this data to profit:
Spyjax allows you to view the browsing history of website visitors. You upload a list of competing URLs and see which ones the browser visited before visiting your site, which can be used to let you know what competing sites people typically visit before seeing your site. By tracking this, you can replicate the features and/or marketing strategy of other well visited sites and move yourself earlier into the buy cycle.
I just updated SEO for Firefox again. Now it numbers the search results, and it allows you to sort the results by any of the selected variables. I didn't want the sorting to be obtrusive, so you have to right click on the search results, scroll over SEO for Firefox, then scroll over sort on the submenu and click the variable you want to sort by.
The tool is fast, and does a good job of showing you how well you have been mixing your inbound anchor text, but you need to be using Firefox with Greasemoney installed to see the information. Greasemonkey extensions are easy to make, especially if you read Dive inot Greasemonkey.
Yahoo! Pipes is a visual RSS slicing, dicing, and meshing tool. Basically you can take any feeds you like, add them together, and apply a bit of filtering. It is fairly intuitive and a lot a of fun for a wannabe programmer like me.
Google's Link: command has been broken forever, but now Google is letting you see a far more representative sample of external links to your site and your internal link structure if you verify that you are the owner of your site by signing up at Google Webmaster Central. They also allow you to export your linkage data in an excel file.
Please be careful when reading feedback about SEO Elite. I shockingly discovered that many of the below comments praising SEO Elite are fake. Read more about it here.
If my experience with someone posting fake testimonials to this page says anything else for the marketing used to push SEO Elite, I am not sure how much I would trust any of it.
Quintura updated their website to allow you to use their keyword research tool right from there home page, without needing to download any software. It is exceptional for discovering keyword relationships and digging deeply through a category.
So the web is becoming far more social in nature. Many clients insist on owning a 6 page brochure site (or maybe 100 of them) and expect the SEO to rank them for crumbs. There are a few potential outcomes of working with clients like that:
Most sites are easy to relate to popular or important link rich ideas if you are creative. For example, to some people this site relates (or at points in time related) to web browsers, open source software, religion, politics, science, education, human rights, free speech, marketing, market manipulation, entrepreneurship, blogging, search, and many other link rich topics.
Part of why I stray off topic is because I think everything is related. But it also doesn't help that I entered the market so late, and SEO is generally hated when compared with the general linkability and passion with which people talk about innovating search technologies.
Microsoft recently announced the ability to research what pages a domain links at. For example, see what pages this site links at using LinkFromDomain:SEOBook.com.
Improving Customer Experience linked to me (so they are obviously cool), but, more importantly, they mentioned a cool related keyword research tool named Quintura Search. Quintura is a free LSI type keyword research tool which shows you related keywords pulled from top ranked websites in any of the major search engines and major content sites like Wikipedia and Amazon.com.
My programmer recently updated SEO for Firefox again. It now uses the Yahoo! API, the MSN Search API, and the Technorati API for added reliability.
If you have any feedback or comments about the most recent version please leave them hear. While I will be traveling for a bit I will make sure my programmer checks out your feedback.
AOL has a bias toward consumer (ie: non b2b) type queries, and they may have a higher % of brand related searches that both act to place a bit more emphasis on the top search result than general searchers from other search engines, but some people have dug through the 20 million search queries AOL gave away and come up some stats.
Yahoo! recently announced they are moving some of their link queries over to Site Explorer. The problem with that is that now there is no way to get .edu and .gov backlink data from Yahoo!
I had my programmer update SEO for Firefox to pull linkage data from MSN Search. In addition, he added some of the features that are in SEOpen and SearchStatus, such that you can highlight nofollows on a page and right click on a page and pull in some of the relevant link and other SEO related information.
After Yahoo! (hopefully) restores the ability to sort linkage data by TLD we will re-enable Yahoo! as a data source. There might be a few bugs in the newest version of SEO for Firefox as well...like if you query MSN Search automatically too quickly they may end up blocking your IP address.
A few people have created free cool web based tools which allow you to search through the 20 million keywords AOL recently shared with the marketing community.
If you rank for a business name in a good niche ~ it can pay dividends, especially as the business markets its brand, I am not talking large corps here but I have maybe 5 websites that I tested that rank either 1 or generally 2 for the business names and they pay large, when these businesses advertise and push their brand ~ kerching!
I'm expecting some creative answers here. I'll phrase it more generally: Forget XML files or even what Sitemaps looks like currently. What info would you want as a webmaster?
If you could design your dream webmaster or site owner console on Google, what would it look like?
Rand announced the launch of his page strength tool, which aims to be more accurate than Google's PageRank. The one downside to the tool is that there is a delay most all the data sources (for example I think my SEO for Firefox page is ranking at #10 in Google for SEO right now, but the page strength tool shows it as being at 3.5), but it is probably quite a bit more accurate than PageRank alone is.
Also interesting that on one front Google is requesting to look for ways to share as much data as they can with you while on other fronts they make external tools and ideas necessary and valuable because they are unwilling to share data they once shared. Thus markets which were once fairly open are getting more and more abstract. It happened with PageRank and SEO and now it is happening with AdWords too.
There is a new version of Backlink Analyzer. I added PageRank to it (hopefully that doesn't piss off Matt too bad), made the search term feature more reliable for deep backlink analysis (ie: it shouldn't crash if you are doing an analysis of the keywords in thousands of backlinks), and it also shows what URL extension the links are coming from, as well as the page the links are pointing at if you do a linkdomain search.
If you find any problems with it please leave a comment on this post.
If it is not working when you try it here are some things to take note of
off the start if it does not work you may have to click the preferences button (the one with two check marks on it) to de-check the "use proxy server" option if you do not want to use a proxy
Norton (or equivalent) may block it
make sure you set the result limit count to a reasonable number (like 100 or 1000)
you have to select at least 1 engine to pull link data from
if you want to enable PageRank, site age, etc. you have to check those features
you cant get the keyword summary until the tool is done pulling in all the links
This thread will probably be up most of the rest of the weekend as I am reading a killer book and my internet access has been shifty recently. I have replaced the wall jack and all cords. A new router will be in next week. If my internet access is still unreliable that will speed up my decision of when and where to move.
So my friend might take another week or two to get it done, but I am having him make an extension for adding data to Google's SERPs on the fly. A mock up might look something like this. Notice the links under each organic search result showing things like PageRank, site age, site size, and linkage data. Of course if this extension was made you would be able to actively pull in the data automatically or click a button to have the data selection pulled in on an as needed per URL basis.
Is SEO for Firefox an extension worth making? What marketing data would you like to see in Google's SERPs? What data points should be page specific? Which should be site specific? Which should be both? When gathering site data should it gather subdomain specific data? Or domain specific data?
Bob Mutch at SEO Company created an inbound link quality extension for Firefox. You can download the extension from his home page, or access the tool online (again on his home page, but the web based tool has been slow).
A friend of mine recently quit his job to work as a full time content developer for me, where we share the revenues generated. He started off with about a 20 page website about a month ago and right now it has about 40 pages indexed in Google. Yesterday the site brought in about $40 in AdSense earnings (which is not a lot, but the site is young). Within 2 months I expect the site to be able to make at least $200 a day.
Corinaw at DP forums mentioned a new rank checker that shows rankings on many Google data centers, cache date, PageRank, number of indexed pages, and link data from Yahoo! and MSN. Here is an example result page.
Not overtly exciting, but a useful tool with an exceptionally clean interface.
Sufyan created a free tool which checks page similarity. You can set it to check sitewide on small sites, or enter in a couple URLs manually to cross check them for how similar the pages are to one another.
This tool doesn't test if a site has canonicalization issues, but it is plenty cool for free.
If I could sell 10 on this site it would amount to about $5,000 a month in passive supplemental income. I would be more likely to try to sell just 1 exclusive for something like that price though :)
Google made their AdWords traffic estimator available external to your AdWords account. They still use the evil little graphical representation for total search volume, but they give rough approximations in actual numbers for the amount of AdWords clicks they think you will receive.
If you do not enter a bid price or budget the bid price they recommend is supposed to show your ads ranking #1 85% of the time. More background here. They also note that when you access this tool external to your account that it will not factor in your past account performance, so the numbers may not be as accurate as if you use the tool in your account.
Recommending doing things like using the Google Toolbar assumes that you are not mass spamming on that computer or a computer that shares the same router / IP address.
RustyBrick pointed out a new free SEO tool by Sufyan that searches through a page or site to look for links to sites that are banned in Google. It is designed for smaller to mid sized sites. The tool returns a list of pages you link at and their PageRank. The tool lists the age and URLs of pages that do not appear in Google.
Most large quality sites probably have at least a few links to banned sites, so you don't want to let Google become the editor of your site, but if most of your links go to banned sites that could hurt your site's reputation or ability to rank in Google.
Currently Google is also a bit flaky on the URL search. With some of them they they give the signs of sites being banned while listing many pages if you do a site: search.
Google extends their lead in the keyword research market by adding a new tool called Google Trends. It operates similar to the Google keyword research tool, but offers trends that goes back for years, and even overlaps news related to keyword search spikes, like Google Finance does. Many of the links they provide are to cheesy press releases, so that might present another marketing opportunity.
The tool also shows top cities, regions, and languages that queries occurred in. They also allow you to set timeframes and the market location.
It also allows you to compare phrases.
The only downsides to Google Trends are that it only works for broad terms and does not give exact numbers.
Tag Viewer is a Ruby on Rails AJAX application that makes it easy to cross reference tagged resources at popular tagging sites.
The idea sorta came to life after I started to find the footer tag links on my keyword research tool rather handy. Your thoughts on Tag Viewer would be appreciated.
I don't intend to commercialize Tag Viewer in any way. I had it made because I think it will be useful for helping me do web research. While I claim to be an SEO, I am much more of an info porn junkie than an SEO ;)
Google recently opened up their AdWords keyword research tool by allowing it to be accessible from outside AdWords accounts. They also added seasonal search volume data for global and local searches, and allowed it to be accessible by match type (ie: broad, phrase, exact).
That will likely just about kill off most of the paid keyword research tool market.
I told MSN that I thought one of the ways they could possibly catch up a bit with Google on the SEM front is to make the default keyword research tool. Google's now is feature rich, shows seasonal data, data by match type, and the data is easy to export. As Google, Yahoo! and MSN jocky for position you can bet that their keyword research tools are only going to get better - although I don't think Yahoo!'s crusty old tool has changed in about a decade hehehe.
Some of my friends recently told me that the version of Backlink Analyzer on the site did not do the cross referencing of the anchor text profile. I linked the download page to a version that does.
If you downloaded Backlink Analyzer and you were not able to cross reference the anchor text profile give this version a try. After all the pages are spidered click the search terms button to bring up a full list of words in the anchor text, linking page title, and page copy of the page you are analyzing. You also can enter a phrase or groups of phrases and click the add keyword button to see how often those phrases occur in the anchor text.
I am hoping to have a new version out by the end of the month that will be cross platform, extensible plug-in friendly, and open source...will see how it goes.
Want to run your own meta search engine? I made the source code to Myriad Search open source...so if you want it come and grab it.
Google, Yahoo! and MSN are queried via their API programs. Since Ask does not have an API those results are grabbed from Teoma.
Myriad Search makes it quick and easy to see all the top search results at the major engines and then export the results via a CSV spreadsheet. It also allows you to grab Alexa data, if you desire it.
Reminder: New Free Tools:
About two weeks ago I added a bunch of SEO tools to my free SEO tool list. I just made all of the new public tools open source, so if you like any of them you can do whatever you want with them.
Cool Keyword Research Tool: Needs Feedback:
I would love feedback on the SEO Book keyword research tool. Give it a try and see if you think it is useful or what features you would like added to it.
The tool does not try to do everything within itself, but provides relevant links for digging through keyword data from lots of other tools, and makes it easy to cross reference Overture results and Google Suggest results, as well as many other keyword tools.
At the bottom it also provides links to well known web directories, news sites, shopping sites, tagging sites, encyclopedias, blog search engines, and blog trend graphs. Those links are intended to help you find information that others found useful, and maybe also help you come up with linkbait ideas.
I think occasionally if it gets queried too heavily it breaks, and sometimes intermittently Overture will not provide data, but whenever I re-query it the tool usually works fairly quickly.
Link Harvester Updated:
Some people recently notified me that the xls sheet output in Link Harvester was putting array where the individual links were supposed to be. I just got that fixed too.
Backlink Analyzer Update to Come:
The last update to Backlink Analyzer (like 2 months ago) broke some of the key features. I did not realize this until recently. I just spoke with the lead developer, and although a new version was intended to be out in December I am hoping to have it out by the end of this month.
I think I have updated Link Harvester twice since I last posted new source code. It now allows you to grab link data via Yahoo! or MSN.
On top of allowing you to search for links at a specific page or links to anywhere in a domain it also has a third function called deep links which allows you to get a sample of deep link data without grabbing links pointing at the home page. The theory is that many good sites get deep links. Looking through the deep links may give you a better view of how they were acquired or if they are all garbage scraper links, etc.
By looking through the deep links you can
check the quality of links pointing at inner pages.
know what URLs you really need to redirect if you are changing your content management system.
know what URLs are important to redirect if you buy a site and want to modify the content or gut out pieces that were causing duplicate content or other problems
Another useful feature of looking at the deep link profile is that if you look at the links pointing at sites that were not actively marketed via SEO techniques it can help you see what natural link profiles look like.
MSN tends to give some weird numbers with their backlink count sometimes and typically shows fewer backlinks than Yahoo! so by default when Link Harvester gives link counts like
Showing 421 unique domains from the first 250 results of 1129 total results
it means that between Yahoo! and MSN there were 421 unique results returned in the query. The of first 250 means that the link search depth was set to 250 per engine. The 1129 results is the number of links in the Yahoo! database (although they don't return 100% of what they know of they return most of them). If Yahoo is turned off the third number should be from MSNs database.
I added a bunch more SEO tools to the free SEO Tools page. Most of the new tools are geared toward beginners and are perhaps a bit boring, but
I like some of them, including:
Some of the tools could be quite a bit better, but I bought a bunch of them for cheap, almost just for the heck of it because they were cheap. Let me know if you find any of them useful. I already know some tweaks I want to make when time becomes available.
The next build of Backlink Analyzer is coming along slowly but surely. Am hoping to have a cross platform version of it with a few more features before the month is out.
Originally when Threadwatch was created NickW was going to track forums, but quickly found them to be a bit too repetitive & later switched to finding other news sources.
A friend of mine by the name Chris Ridings created a site called Resource Rate, which aimed to use a variety of editors to track SEO forums. It seemed to have quickly faded in popularity.
Another one of my friends, named Eaden, recently lauched SEO Bytes. It is a concept similar to Resource Rate, with a few exceptions:
No central editors: instead of having central editors the threads are ranked by freshness, number of replies, and recent activity.
Adjustible scoring: you can chose to place more weight on freshness or recent activity to get the newest threads first. You also can rate up good forums place less weighting on forums you do not like as much.
I believe SEO Bytes stores your settings in a cookie, but some SEO's travel a good bit. A few features I would like to see:
allow people to log in so their settings work on different computers
allow me to block all sub forums from a specific forum
add a few more forums to the list of forums
if he really wants to put a ton of effort into it ;) allow users to place more weight on thread ratings from friends and allow friends to submit threads for their friends to see
I am fairly certain Eaden will read this post, so please post what you like and what you would like to see at SEO Bytes.
In many industries it is likely that tools such as SEO Bytes will spring up. Sometimes they will have the best value as public research tools, and often if left private they can help some webmasters get the scoops.
A while ago I reviewed a ton of keyword research tools, but most of them are lacking in serious user data, which makes them top heavy, and forces people to only see the most common terms.
For the longest time it seemed as though Google was uncomfortable sharing some of their search data, afraid to give competitors the inside scoop, but that is no more. Google recently launched a new Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool[you have to be logged in for the link to work & it may not be available in all accounts yet], which is much more usable than their older Google AdWords Keyword Sandbox.
Keyword list sorting. Sort the results of your keyword search by popularity, performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
Easy keyword manipulation. Select a few keywords here and there, or add them all at once. Keywords already present in your Ad Group will be marked so that you don't have to worry about them. You can also download your keyword list as a .csv file.
Search for keywords in three ways. Use keywords you enter, your existing high clickthrough rate keywords, or any webpage URL for your search. You can also expand your keyword search even further to include pages linked to from the original URL. (Note: Site-related keyword searching is currently only available for English language users.)
More keyword results based on regularly updated statistics. Our advanced search engine technology allows us to provide you with the latest information on potential keywords for your campaigns.
Google also has tips on how to use the tool. I am not sure how well this tool interfaces with their API, but automating keyword selection based on Google's usage data and extracting meaning from page content makes the market a hell of a lot more efficient, especially for large advertisers willing to pay a bit extra for branding. The new tool also makes it easy for newbies to quickly build out targeted keyword lists. Google also has put Google Suggest in their toolbar, which allows them to sell better targeted ads than searches on broad generic terms would, and also helps consolidate the less common search queries (misspellings, etc.) to fewer overall phrases and more predictible patterns (since the search term suggestions are going to be based off of past popular searches). All of these will lead to Google being able to increase their profit margin per search. Combine that with the recent toolbar bundling and the numbers are looking up for Google.
This new keyword tool allows you to:
tap Google's userbase to select keywords based on past searches
create keywords from a URL, site, keywords you enter, or the most relevant terms in your account (as determined by CTR)
RankAttack technology does not submit your site to the search engines... rather it creates a persona of "popularity" around your site in the eyes of the search engines. The purpose in RankAttack technology is simple: get the search engines attention and make them want to list your website under the keywords you desire'
I can't see search term co-citation being a trusted source of data unless it is from well estabished search history accounts and/or there are also a number of news stories about the topic and/or new web pages on trusted sites about the topic.
If temporal effects of increased search volume are used to allow sites to gain link popularity at quicker rate then odds are pretty good search engines would also look at the number of news stories and unique sites posting about the topic.
I suppose you can write a number of press releases and the like, but it is going to be hard to get mainstream news coverage for most websites, and without it then I can't see any value in poisoning the keyword research tools in your keyword space (unless you are doing it to screw with competitors keyword research ability or marketing your site through spamming keyword suggestion tools - as many SEO companies have done).
Andy states that this type of search spam is poisoning the keyword databases, but WordTracker has worked hard to filter out most of it:
Unfortunately, this approach is skewing the popular keyword databases such as (our own) Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, Overture suggestion tool and the Google keyword tool.
However, we have improved our spam filter and 99% of these skewed terms have now been removed from the Wordtracker database.
snippets are organized in the same order as the tabs
you can optionally tick on returning Alexa rank, although the Alexa API is fuckslow - for lack of a better word ;)
a couple things on the backend...like using the new MSN API & not querying Ask.com directly
Myriad Search was recently featured in SearchDay. Due to that exposure, (thanks for the review Chris!) and a few other links, it seems that sometimes Myriad Search is query limited & requires manually entering a Google API key to bring back Google results.
It still may need bug checks and a couple more features. Let me know what you think of it.
I intend to eventually offer up the source code if I can, but I need to do a bit more talking with Ask Jeeves to see if it is ok before I do that (since they do not have a general use search API just yet).
I know the word myriad is not a heavily targeted high value term, but there are 28,000,000+ results in Google for myriad. It is interesting to note that after about a week the site is listed in DMOZ and Myriad Search already ranks at 15 to 19 in Google for myriad as a three page website without any link buying or press releases, etc.
And created twotools for looking up site age. I think Jim is still working on the tool naming front. Getting better though, the first tool only took an 18 word link to describe ;)
And while at Web Professor, I realize text in images is evil on the usability front, but I may sometime want to try this out. Although I already have tons of other usability issues that should be way way way better than they are on this site.
Authority Finder is another free search tool created by my friend Mike.
I wanted to create a tool which cross compared the search results from the major search engines to find the most authoritative results for a query (hence the name authority finder).
After a bit of thinking about it I realized with a few tweaks the tool could also double as a meta search engine and sorta like a share of voice tool (although an incomplete share of voice tool as it does not factor in paid listings and there are a ton of variables that go into who searches for what where).
Currently Myriad works with the Yahoo! & Google APIs. It queries MSN's search RSS feeds, but will be shifted over to their API sometime today or tomorrow at the latest.
I do not believe Ask has an API. I have sent mutliple emails to Ask to see if it was ok to include their search in the tool and they have not yet responded. Most of the stuff on their TOS talked about commercial use, and this tool is totally free. If they are unhappy with the tool querying Ask I will quickly remove Ask from it.
I have not yet released the source code since I will be changing out the MSN piece today and I still am somewhat uncertain as to whether or not Ask will care, although I am hoping they think it is ok. If not they can email me at seobook@gmail.com.
In the tools section I posted more in depth information about the features of Authority Finder.
My friend Mike just updated Hub Finder again. Version 3.0 now allows you to:
grab the top 10 search results from Google, Yahoo!, or both, and compare the backlink data.
highlight a result column using DHTML to make it easier to view potential hub pages that link at a specific resource
Additionally for those who download the source code you can adjust the settings such that you can view the co occuring backlinks from more / deeper than just the top 10 search results.
The other main features that may be worth adding are:
showing what postion a result ranked if it was pulled from an engine (G1 or Y3 for example); and
add a sum feature to show how many suspected hub links each authority page had.
One person, with a cool burrito blog no less, also suggested that I created a default ignore hub list for some common sites such as Geocities, but I think there are sometimes good pages on those sites (having once seen a freewebs page with natural PageRank 8 interior pages).
Do you guys think there should be a default list of sites to block? Or is it easy enough just to glance through?
Not sure how to set the default block list if I created one, but one mans hub is another mans scraper site :)
Scraper links may be an issue for many terms in some industries. Does allowing adjustable backlink depth setting work well enough at filtering those, or you do think there is a better way?
It is cool to see another competitive analysis tool available for those of us who can't afford to splash out the $20,000 or so for HitWise. Trellian's new tool costs $65 per month per URL.
A few things I do not like with Trellian's package are:
limited data reach (most of these types of tools do not have much data when you compare them to the likes of Google or Yahoo!, but none of the big portals have decided to sell this type of data yet, probably for fear of a privacy backlash & bad press).
they don't have a package deal. you have to keep ordering one domain at a time, which could probably lead to confusing credit card bills and the like.
When they tell you the number of domains that they have tracked traffic from they don't group the subdomains with the main domains, so that can throw the numbers off.
Before you subscribe they tell you how many keywords and websites they have listed for that domain. They state that they have stats for the top 100,000 domains.
I bought one domain, and did not see any gems from it, but I suppose if you find one or two good spots to market from it then it would be a good buy and $65 is not much risk.
I will post some stuff on the conference soon. Off to the Google Dance.
I am off to SES San Jose. The plane leaves in just over an hour and a half and I got to do a bit of shopping. I should show up around 3:30pm - 4pm today, so if you are out there I might run into you and my cell phone number is 401 207 1945.
So a while ago a friend of mine created a tool called hub finder. While the tool functioned, there were some features that I thought would make it cooler. Another one of my friends had spare time, I had a bit of spare cash, so we worked out a deal and hub finder has been revised.
The gist of hub finder is to find hub sites and hub pages to get links from (as those links may help more in many modern search algorithms). The new features of Hub Finder 2.0 include:
optional CSV output of link research results
finds hub sites that may link to similar resources from slightly different pages. each link is marked with an X and links to the page the link is on.
allows you to set the search depth... since Yahoo! places many of the best links near the top of the backlink list this can be used to help filter noise.
allows you to set the number of matching domain names... this can be used to help filter noise or find the most important hubs.
optionally allows you to compare the backlinks for the top 10 ranked sites in Yahoo! for any term. (I may eventually add a Google API Key area for grabbing the top Google results and comparing their Yahoo! backlinks.)
does mix and match, allowing you to look at sites you entered, top ranked Yahoo! sites, or any mix of the two
allows a forced inclusion feature. using this feature can require that a site links at a specific page or site and any other combination of related resources.
lists how many hub pages were found out of the total number of sites analyzed.
Rapid Keywords:
a keyword tool I missed in my monster keyword tool post...will probably add it soon. similar to lots of the ones like AdWords Analyzer or Keyword Locator, but also offers a few additional ways to gather the keywords from (like scraping Google Suggest) and a few formatting tools.
I don't like the idea of getting locked into a free system which could likely start charging. plus its really a big risk to trust someone else to throw random content in your site without occassionally throwing in something a little extra.
As the price of random [and targeted] content generators decreases and search spam generator product sophistication increases you can expect search engines to place more weight on user feedback and linkage data.
Background Information on this Post:
There are getting to be a ton of keyword tools on the market, so I decided to test most any keyword tool I have heard of.
To get a full in depth understanding of all of these keyword tools you need to run them on a variety of terms. Having said that, I am going to compare how well they track search volume to a single niche long running AdWords ad group.
One of my clients is a distributor for a specific brand of products.
The company name is something like ABC Tires
A while ago I posted about my anger toward the MicroSoft Bcentral line (in particular login problems). I sent them an email and got no reply, but randomly they recently called me and asked me why I have not used their service in a while, and while the guy was on the phone I got my account information for how to login.
So MicroSoft has a keyword research tool in their small business section, although it is not easy to find from their site.
Their site is ticking me off so bad that I refuse to give them any link popularity for sucking.
if you search the entire MicroSoft site for searches like that (keyword research, etc) you get to explore their software products like MicroSoft Office.
it took me a while to find the login button on the Submit It site http://www.submit-it.com/
because they blended it with the page layout in the upper right corner. after you log in you are still at square one hunting for the tool (I must have logged in at least a half dozen times in the last hour).
they have a live chat feature, http://www.bcentral.com/help/chatpage.asp
and so I asked:
I know it is not your fault, but your site usablity sucks. How does one access the keyword research tool.
the quick start page http://submitit.bcentral.com/system/UCC/QuickStart.aspx
mentions the keyword research tool, but of course has no link because they want you to do stuff linearly and sign up to add another site first. adding another site at that point can mean just spidering the URL of a site you already submitted.
you have to crawl a domain before you can even use the keyword research tool. they try to have you do stuff liniarly from begining to end (right through submission) because it makes their solution seem more holistic and makes the submission part seem important and helps justify you spending more money on their service.
so you have to do the crawl function. if your site is large this takes a while, and the tool says you might want to come back in 15 minutes if your site is over 50 pages. the tool also arbitrarily caps out at spidering 100 pages, which are pages arbitrarily chosen by the spider and not pages you chose, and realistically not every page should have SEO in mind.
after you do the crawl function you do not need to recrawl to reuse the keyword tool, you can do the following (quoting from Ethan from their customer support):
1. Click the "URL Manager" button next to the new URL.
2. Click "Go to Page Details", and then click "View complete Readiness Check".
3. On the "Keyword Tool tab", select Use our keyword research tool, and then click "Continue".
4. Follow the instructions in the "Keyword Research Tool" wizard.
just to further clarify my opinion on the topic all of the Bcentral tools and services are useless if people can't actually access them or are so annoyed that they do not want to use them.
Most other keyword research tools take less than a minute to use. Assuming I need to do everything just to let me access that tool is some pretty close ended non hyperthreaded bogus paternal crap their MicroSoft.
New features on SEO Elite:
Brad Callen just sent out an update email promoting new features on SEO Elite. One of which looks for link exchange type pages with form boxes on them to add URLs to, and autosaves your submission data for reuse (sorta like many common toolbars and RoboForm, but without allowing you to enter details like credit card info and business address, etc).
Bulk vs Quality:
In many areas the bulk volume link techniques still appear effective, but I have a single page website that ranks at #17 in Yahoo! for Effexor which has it's only links coming from DMOZ and DMOZ clones. Some of the other top ranked Effexor sites are ranking from bulk linkspam, etc. So both techniques still work.
Mixing Data:
I don't like reusing the same data over and over again because as search advances that mechanical type approach stands a greater chance to be filtered by more and more major algorithms. For a long time I did not mix descriptions that much, but as a forward looking SEO tip I think it is worth the extra time to mix up the descriptions as well as the anchor text.
Directory Submission Manager:
Donna also pointed at a free directory submission manager program, although I am not sure I would want my submission data stored on someone elses site. The best spots to get links are usually those areas where the links have the most value AND most people do not think to look.
Zig When they Zag:
Over the past year I expanded my general directory list out to about 150 listings, but as others are pushing the idea of easy mass submissions I realize now is as good of a time as any to prune the weaker directories from my list and just refer people to other resources if they want to submit to tons of sites.
Most likely my list will soon have about 100 listings removed, as there are many sites tracking directories, and the cost of actively tracking them is far greater than any reward it may bring.
You gain access to the same data as HitWise with a few exceptions:
the database depth is smaller (100 for basic and 1,000 for standard)
you do not get access to the competitive intelligence data
Keyword Intelligence is much cheaper than Hitwise, starting at about $1,000 a year.
Keyword Intelligence allows you to grab top terms by industry, lets you enter the root search term and see what other search terms are returned, allows you to manage your keyword terms inside their product, and offers terms by geographic region.
strips the www. off of filtered domains such that both the www and non www versions get filtered out in one swoop
allows users to manually enter domains to filter. This works well if people have links from various subdomain URLs like Every-Town-in-the-Country.Spam-Site.com. Just enter Spam-Site.com and it will filter all of them.
links into the Whois Source data for DMOZ and Yahoo! listings
added # of c block IP addresses and URLs for the filtered sites section
So recently Waxy held a contest for creating a tool to visually see the history of a Wikipedia page. The winning programmer got like $200, which in terms of SEO spend is not much money for a tool that many people could use.
I am thinking our rate will usually be above $200, and I don't want to make the price something where people place the lowest bid. We will just come up with a price and then throw the idea out there and see what comes back. I can pay for the tools, or if it really takes off and others want to support some of the ideas they can help donate too.
If people would be willing to program decent SEO tools for a decent price I could probably think up at least 50 tools to be programmed.
With that in mind, I think the SEO community should have a mass cache tool, to know when stuff was cached. Here are the desired features (so far):
checks Google's cache feature (cache:www.example.com) for cache date.
the tool should have three main modes it functions in:
allows bulk upload of a list of pages and returns the cache date of each page, also informing users of what pages are not cached.
allows you to enter a URL and return the cache date from the first 1,000 URLs.
allows you to enter a URL and returns which pages are freshly cached. also allows you to set a fresh date to return URLs spidered since then when you do a bulk upload of URLs.
If it is possible return if the page is in the supplemental results.
The data should be easily exportable to CSV for further manipulation.
Is this a good tool idea? Bad idea? Have any feedback on how to make the idea better? Ideas on how to market it? Suggested award amount? Did I use too many vowels in the post? please give feedback :)
So I have noticed trackback spam is much heavier on the weekends. This weekend some kind souls have been promoting bestiality and hentai in my trackback section for me. I always wonder why there is the need to promote those types of topics, when it is just as easy to be relevant (but then again there probably are not too many hentai bestiality bloggers, and I can't see why a person would want to market anything else).
I just got an email from a guy named Jim promoting a free tool called Trackback Search. I have not yet asked how the database was created and the like, but am emailing him right now.
Most people using a tool such as Trackback Search would probably use it to create low quality automated spam, but there are probably good ways to use it, Technorati, BlogPulse, PubSub, Feedster, Blogdex, Daypop, and many of the other tools to help find useful blog type content to cite in meaningful ways.
Interesting to see free automated tools building topical relevance into their systems. Having looked at a number of searches it appears as though the topical relevancy is not perfect, but it does return many relevant sites, and most of them are from rather new posts.
The nice thing about a tool like Trackback Search is that it automates part of the research process, but still allow you to manually write posts, and manually integrate the data such that the people you are referencing do not see you as a dirty trackback spammer (like the hentai and bestiality people are).
Tools are tools, and I always adovcate looking at your long term goals and the potential outcome of using any tool prior to using it.
Even if search engines did not count the trackback linkage data trackbacks could still be a great way to help integrate yourself into a topical community, but you don't want to do it in a manner to where experts on your topic are hating you unless you are creating a crash and burn site.
I chipped in on that contest, and like the idea enough that I think we should have something like that for search and SEO, where people request open source tools be made, and we have competitions to see who can make the best ones and then pay them for it. Thoughts on that idea?
What search or SEO tools would you like to see be made?
I might start a weekly or monthly create a free tool thing next week. It could probably be a fun and useful project.
Many people get stuck in the sandbox because they can't get high quality links.
The solution is to keep churning out mediocre content and build more junk links, maybe also rent a few decent ones. Sure aging can have an effect, but a large part of the ineffective SEO problem might rest within the fundamental techniques being used.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein
Many webmasters are stingy with their links, afraid to link out to other sites. Some people view sending traffic away to other sites as losing your visitors, but linking sorta works on a karma like system.
If you don't link out to anybody and your content is not amazing then most of the best sites are not going to want to link to you. Why should they?
Certain sites are not going to want to link to your site no matter what, but you can still work your way into their community by linking at them. As you cite relevent and useful resources your site becomes more linkable. More of the sites you want to links from will send you some link love.
Linking out freely and regularly is one of the cheapest and fastest forms of marketing available. Many new webmasters drop the ball on the concept because they feel they need all the links to point their way.
In the spirit of linking, I am linking at Jim Boykin's new SEO tool, which tracks who you are linking at: Forward Links (beta). Nice touch on the beta name Jim.
Currently the tool only shows the first 100 outbound links it comes acrost.
I think Jim might further explore the neighborhood concept next week, during his WMW speech. Google Touchgraph also does a good example of showing the neighborhood concept.
Are there any good sites I should be linking to which I have not yet linked to? If so feel free to mention them below.
WordPress vs MovableType: Jeremy Z switching to WordPress. surely thats not a good thing for MovableType. Also, why is the Yahoo! Search Blog using MovableType instead of their Yahoo! 360 or whatever?
Adwords cost:
unreliable hosting £0.04
server going down £0.04
If you do a special landing page and convert those to dedicated server (£3.00 of which you'll likely get £2) you need only a 2% CTR to break even. Many sites find it quite easy to achieve 5%.
Shalom:
One of the few words I remember from my brief stay in Israel. Apparently Google wants to go there too, as they are pondering opening up a new office.
Sites Postioned Above Mine: thread about ways to penalize sites which are overtly manipulating search relevancy. A few interesting posts and points of view in there, as well as links to a white paper on the topic.
huge numbers of people are going to be using RSS to create automated content streams.
RSS will become the next blog comment in the evolution of search. Since the content is legible, and some technologies make it easy to grab many related posts on a given topic, it might be a bit hard for search engines to distinguish the difference between original blog posts and fake feeder blogs that just recompile market data from various sources. Some people may even make legitimate regular posts to combine with the automated streams to make them seem more legitimate or manually compiled.
With hundreds of channels on a given topic you know that search engines are going to be in for some fun. This is yet another reason it will be hard for search engines to move away from link based relevancy systems.
A new free tool allows you to enter a zip code, a radius, and a few keyword phrases and it automatically generates keyword phrases based on your keywords and the locations within your radius.
The output looks like:
pizza "town name"
pizza "other town name"
lasagna "town name"
A few things that would make the tool cooler are:
allow people to enter multiple words to make up more phrases based on those various words (like GoogEdit or ThePermutator do)
allow output to match various match types (like broad, phrase, & exact)
allow people to create "location + keyword" and "keyword + location"
optional format the output to allow people to enter max bids and let the search terms drive the URL.
Pretty cool tool for free. found from a thread on SEW.
added links to Google cache and Google cache text of each page
If you have not heard of Link Harvester yet, here is some background on it. Are there any other cool features you can think of? I might have a friend create another SEO tool tomorrow too if he has time. I will probably be adding features to Hub Finder soon too if I have enough money and my friends have enough time.
BTW, someone pointed out Search Lores in a comment at ThreadWatch recently. The site is so amazing I can't believe I haven't came across it yet.
Paul Graham:
I think I link to every article he writes. his latest: Hiring is Obsolete, which says if you are the young & motivated type you can let the market determine your value by starting a startup instead of going to work for mega corp for lower than market value wages.
Dogpile to World: Meta search is still relevant. Of course, their Missing Pieces study (2 page PDF) forgot to mention that if you search for something like SEO 17 of the top 20 DogPile listings are paid ads, and you will still end up with missing pieces ;)
Their study may have been a bit more accurate if they compared pay per click ads, since those dominate the DogPile search results.
Consider this. Until earlier this month, WebPosition was owned by WebTrends, in turn owned by NetIQ, a publicly listed company in the US. Now it's owned by Francisco Partners, another publicly listed company. The purchase was announced March 28 and concluded May 3.
Now you're an investor wondering about this sale. You decide to research some of the products. You turn to your trusted research tool, Google. You do a search for one of the products you've heard about, WebPosition. And you can't find the official site about it?
That's relevancy? That's serving the user? That's organizing the web's information? And that's defending Google because it somehow stopped all the other resellers showing up in its editorial results as well as the ads Google itself accepted?
We'd much rather waste time scanning results and clicking back and forth among less-than-useful pages than craft a really good query or use search refinement tools.
But while we're doing this, the search engines are observing our behavior, and learning from our fumbling activities.
Visitors to Yahoo's Music Unlimited will pay $6.99 a month for access to Yahoo's 1-million-song library. That's less than half what Napster and Real Networks' Rhapsody charge for similar services that permit the transfer of songs to portable music players. source
Keyword Locator is new keyword research & monitoring software which sells for $87. When I tried to download it there were download errors, but Frenchie Sano was quick to reply and help me with the download. On to the reveiw...
A while ago someone shot me an email about Constant Content and I forgot to post about it. I just remembered it again and thought to post on it.
From their site:
Constant Content is exactly what the name implies: A website where you will be able to find text to complete your website or project. This is a place to locate high-quality content at affordable prices. We will assist you in delivering the whole package, ensuring that the clients you service will be receiving a polished piece of perfection.
I have not bought or tested the content quality, but with the wide range of authors there is likely to be some real gems and some real duds in the mix.
Keyword Intelligence data is based on Hitwise’s sample of over 25 million home, work and educational Internet users worldwide and how these people use specific search terms across all search engines to find products and services online.
HitWise has partnerships with various ISPs and search services to track search and clickthrough data. Some of their products are a bit pricey for small webmasters (I believe starting at around $25,000 a year). The Keyword Intelligence offering looks like an attempt to break into the mid to lower market.
Keyword Intelligence has two different subscription plans starting at $90 and $190 a month. It allows you to subscribe to geographic markets and categories and do keyword research from there.
Thanks to Warren Duff for pointing me at Keyword Intelligence.
Tool from Last Month:
None of the major text link analysis tools for sale allow you to check co-citation, or pages which link to multiple related resources.
Last month I had a friend create Hub Finder, which is a free on topic link analysis tool which looks for co-citation. I have not got much feedback on the tool yet, but a few people have said they found it to be useful.
New SEO tool for this month:
Another common problem with most link analysis tools is that they do not make it quick, easy, and convenient for you to be able to search past the 1,000 backlink barrier set by most search engines. What is the point of being slow to give you more details than you need, only to survey a small portion of the inbound links?
A friend of mine is a decent programmer, and I had him whip up a tool I call Link Harvester, which has a ton of cool features:
WordTracker sells access to its keyword database based on the concept that meta search engines have data which is much cleaner than regular search results.
Regular search engines have screen scrapers, rank checkers, bid management tools, click bots, webmasters, and all sorts of interesting tools scouring through their networks.
WordTracker collects its data from Dogpile and MetaCrawler, a couple smaller meta search engines. The sales angle is that the keyword data is clean, but is it?
A couple problems with the WordTracker database:
As far as I know it does not store historical data (just the past two months search volume)
It has a small search database compared to the search volume seen on large engines. The small sample size means errors will be blown out of proportion.
Most people who know of and use the database are marketers, who surely could take advantage of the limited search volume by spamming it
Spamming for Profits:
A friend just recently searched and saw a particular SEO firm spamming a ton of fake search referals for their services. I guess that is fairly cheap marketing if you are looking for money from a bunch of naive webmasters.
Smokescreen Spam (Hiding Your Keywords):
Lets say you find out that the phrase gold nuggets is profitable. You run a search bot to search for golden nuggets. You do it over and over and suddenly golden nuggets looks like the money maker.
Your competition trips over each other trying to optimize for golden nuggets (where there may be little to no money), while you are headed to the bank to cash your check.
You cash your check and can afford to go buy more gold nuggets :)
Much like pay per click, some SEO markets are based on working the margins. If you can get your competitors to get in an SEO war in an area of lower profit then eventually they may get frustrated and quit or go after other markets.
Many people focus on improving their sites, but once you get near the top providing competing sites adequate amounts of disinformation may help keep you there. In SEO the only numbers you can trust are the dollars in the bank account at the end of the day (assuming they are not there from a fraudulent transaction).
Today LinkWorth is proud to launch its newest advertising product called, Billboard Link Ads. This new and exciting technology takes text link advertising to an entirely new level by allowing the advertiser to create a very effective write up about their product or service being promoted, embedding targeted linked keywords and/or phrases throughout the content and having the entire dedicated page hosted on one of our partner websites. So instead of buying a simple text link from someone, you are purchasing an entire page with up to 10 text links included throughout the content.
I am a bit surprised that nobody has tried to set up a marketplace for this until now.
As long as people have been buying and selling links for you would think that many more people would pick up on this idea. WeBuildPages has been marketing this concept, but the idea of being able to chose amongst an open marketplace makes the idea much more scalable.
I know search engines can probably pick up on more patterns than most webmasters realize, but many people selling links through LinkWorth link back to LinkWorth on their site using affiliate links, which likely makes it both easy and appealing for some search engines to give less weighting to links from those sites or decide to not want to count those ads.
LinkWorth should protect their inventory partners and advertisers better than that if they aim to create a longterm solution.
There are many affordable programmers and many marketers are sitting on stacks of cash. There should be more people pushing these types of solutions.
AdWords Spying: GoogSpy looks scrapes hundreds of thousands of searches from Google to determine who is bidding on what terms. The idea is killer, but the implementation is a bit lacking. Link found from ThreadWatch.
URL Trends is a free tool from Joel Strellner which tracks how a domain does over time. Each month it tracks Alexa ranking, Yahoo! backlinks, MSN backlinks, & Google backlinks. The tool also compares the site to Google search results and keywords in the WordTracker database to determine if the site has top Google rankings for any common terms.
By default URL Trends looks as though it does not track a ton of sites, but when a user requests a site the tool starts tracking it.
URL Trends also lets you subscribe to free update to track various sites. That may be a useful feature for those who are not tracking any competing sites in house.
In competitive industries rankings generally tend to follow linkage data.
As time passes algorithms will get far past looking at just the number of links, but for now I believe that metric is exceptionally relevant in both Yahoo! Search and MSN's new offering.
I will likely be going to a concert next weekend, but when I get back hopefully I will be able to unveil another cool link tool that a friend has been whipping up.
hehehe. Jeff Alderson with another equalizer program. Blogging Equalizer is software used for posting links to a blog to get pages on other site indexed.
The software spiders a domain you enter and then spams a blog post on one of your fake blogs to have Yahoo! quickly index all the pages on that site.
I started another blog a few days ago and subscribed to the feed via My Yahoo!, and quickly indexed it. Sure this loophole will be closed somewhat soon by Yahoo! though as marketers create products like this to exploit it.
From his sales copy
And, you should keep in mind, if you're doing the "Blog and Ping" technique manually or paying someone else thousands of dollars to do it for you, then it might take you months, or even years, to make back your investment in time and money...
As far as I can tell there is no reason or value add in buying the software.
Most blog software programs can be configured to ping automatically. I believe WordPress already is.
You can set up a blog free at numerous places.
You can subscribe to the feed quickly via My Yahoo! (which this software requires you to do anyway).
Xenu link slueth (and some other programs) can create site maps free.
Jeff Alderson, where is the value add in your blog spam software? Surely the legit blog spam software annoys people and builds link popularity, but I can't see this software doing much to save most people time.
I just got an update email from Leslie Rhode of OptiLink...
A few days ago, Google began to employ a "spyware detector" that will in some cases block OptiLink through the use of a cookie and a human visible "ransom note".
If you are worried about people giving you "crap" for your recent posts, you might want to "stiffen" your back a bit and write what EVER you feel is RIGHT.
Else, you're just a non-payed Google employee.
That is part of a recent email feedback I got from a person after I told them I was going to lay low on mentioning aggressive SEO software for a bit.
WeBuildPages tool # 9,347. Actually thats not its real name, but Jim makes a lot of good tools and shares them.
His newest tool is a search combination tool. Essentially it allows you to get the search results for various keyword combination searches.
For example, I could look for:
seo, search engine optimization, etc.
directory, submit your site, etc.
and the output page will link me to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN search queries for all the variations.
This could be useful in looking for places to buy, rent, or trade links or maybe for even tracking search results and the like. I am sure there are lots of good uses for this tool. Each result is a clickable link to search results, which means the tool does not send automated queries at the search engines.
You also can save the source code of the output page and so you can work in chunks and its easy to remember which links you have already looked through.
I have not tried out this network, but Webby has officially launched Link Vault, a new cooperative link network which uses static links.
What makes Link Vault unique is that although the links are dynamically generated, they are static and once we have allocated your links we keep these links permanent. The only time we might need to change a link (apart from if you remove it) is if the site your link is on gets removed from the network, or they reduce the number of links they want to display. In this case your link would then be placed on a similar website. New members are asked if they are unsure how many links to display they should opt for the lower number to start with.
The Term Extraction service provides a list of significant words or phrases extracted from a larger content. It is one of the technologies used in Y!Q.
Google Blogoscoped created a free auto linker tool, which makes adding on topic outbound links exceptionally easy. Am betting some people creating fake blogs probably enjoy the offering.
Part of Google's strong brand is PageRank, which now is of little use AND rarely updated. With all of these other good ideas Yahoo! Search is coming out with I am a bit surprised they are not providing and heavily promoting a regularly updated connectivity measurement service. Whatever happened to WebRank?
Black Hat: PPC Techniques. First time I have seen an article about Black Hat PPC. Good stuff Mikkel.
I do understand the reasons as they want to know what pages they send users to but why on earth does Google have to reset my hard earned high CTR if all I change is an added tracking parameter? In any case, I am not going to pay for it!
The simple solution is to set-up some kind of layer between you and them so the URL you use is actually not the one that shows the content.
Content, Content, Content:
A couple newerish (is that a word) products aim to help people grab or create loads of content. I have yet to use any of these.
Article Equalizer - pulls articles from various content sources. I think he also created traffic equalizer, rss equalizer, and many other equalizer products. Wonder if he will eventually release the ultimate equalier suite. ;)
AdSense Gold - evidently comes with thousands of articles
ArticleBot - rewrites articles using grammar rules, allows you to dynamically reorganize SERPs, can mix up content and create many readable articles from a given seed set
Jim Boykin creates another free SEO tool. The reports take about 3 minutes to make. It tells unique linking domains, unique linking IP address, and unique linking C blocks (as well as how many links from each unique linking domain).
Since links from sites on the same C blocks are more likely to be owned by the same person some search relevancy algorithms may lower the weight given by links hosted on the same C block.
Just logged into the Digital Point Keyword Tracker. In the past it only worked for Google, but I just saw that they added Yahoo! and MSN as options.
It may not be a good idea to make it too easy for search engines to cross connect too many of your sites, but if you like the whole keyword tracking concept this is probably the best free web based one on the market.
Yahoo! and MSN limit the number of API queries from a given IP address each day. You need to place a script on your server to interface with tracking Yahoo! backlinks and Yahoo! or MSN rankings.
The tool can also track the number of Google backlinks and PageRank, although generally the data given by Google is rather useless.
Website Dating: My Density shows first and second degree relationships between websites.
The interface could be a bit cooler and smoother (perhaps if they used a bit of AJAX and ensured the text was easier to read on scroll overs if they are showing a ton of data in a small area), but it looks like a cool idea. more info about My Density and even more info here.
A9 OpenSearch:
I saw this mentioned a while ago, but I think I forgot to link to it. Essentially it allows search results to be reformatted & reappear elsewhere. Robin Good has more about why he feels it is important.
Resource Rate is the brainchild of Chris Ridings from SearchGuild. Essentially it aims to tap an Alexa type data from those of us willing to add a bookmarklet to FireFox to rate threads we view on various SEO forums.
Currently the system is heavily biased toward the newer / smaller / more hip forums ;)
If a few people join from some of the other forums it could help create a rather comprehensive resource. Editors get a share in the AdSense revenues from the site and it requires little effort beyond automatically sending back your feedback.
Buying Links to Ban a Competing Site:
Rumour has it that with the latest Google update a few people have started in on this practice...buying sitewide keyword rich links to help their competitors get blacklisted...surely SEO is going to get a bit more ugly here soon ;)
Directory Submission: 150 directories for $99. Not that long ago the price was $30 so there must be decent demand.
I tried the 50 blog for $10 package for a few sites a while ago, but something about that price makes me feel like the service quality has to be limited.
Price points also help people associate a value with the service, so even if the service is decent the person doing it should charge more to make people think they are getting something of value, which generally appears not to be the case right now.
I do a good bit of directory submissions from time to time. I usually submit to about the same number of directories as that package except I do both free and paid directories. I do not mind paying for links because it means that the directory is more likely to have a functional business model and the links will not go away as quick.
Directory registration is exceptionally effective in MSN and Yahoo! right now.
Competition Equalizer:
other than having a different name what the hell does this software do that AdWords Analyzer does not? Wouldn't it have been better to release any additional AdWords related features as an upgrade to the AdWords Analyzer program?
NickW is cooking up another scheme over at ThreadWatch.
Its a great link building idea for just about everyone involved.
He got sponsorship from Text Link Ads to build a link analysis tool that will be available free. Basically whatever features people want they will try to add it to the tool.
I actually do not know tons about SEO automation stuff... have not really tried it. Here are some of the things I have read about
automated content generation:
ArticleBot
cloaking (such as the stuff from Fantomaster)
traffic equalizer
rss equalizer
mixes like affiliate merchant feed + rss content+ ppc backfeed
automated link generation:
guestbook bots
blog comment bots
wiki bots
distributed link networks (such as the coop ad network)
think there are lots of things you can do with rss
Digital Point's Cooperative Ad Network: Digital Point's Cooperative Ad Newtork is a powerful link exchange program. I believe sites participating in the network are assigned an ad weighting based upon traffic, PageRank, and number of pages number of pages indexed in Google. On your pages you place the code and random static text links pointing at other network sites magically appear. On other participating sites links to your site will randomly appear based upon your weighting.
Google vs Geico:
Huge news for many marketers, Google won.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that there was not enough evidence of trademark violation to bar Google from displaying rival insurers when computer users search the word "GEICO."
Search Engine Filiters:
Three was a good thread on SEW forums about search engine filters. A couple people defaced the original thread with useless garbage, but ThreadWatch's coverage is a great read.
Of those consumers who converted on a trademark keyword, 91 percent did so after starting with a different term type. A full 80 percent started with a generic search term. Trademark searches, meanwhile, accounted for 20 percent of all online searches.
As for conversions, an estimated 92 percent of all computing and consumer electronics purchases occur offline. Meanwhile, 7 percent of conversions occur in the form of latent conversions. Only 1 percent of conversions occur in the same session online.
New Free SEO Tool:
Jim at WeBuildPages created a tool which shows the unique linking inboud domains. Currently I think the tool thinks a.com and a.com/ are two different sites, but I am sure Jim will have that fixed real quick-like...
The new link tool goes by the vapid name of WeBuildPages Tool #9. Hopefully Jim can get a bit more creative when he names any future tools he makes ;) ... I think #9 is a cool tool which will help at least a few webmasters save a good bit of time.
Sleezy Site Title of the Day:
"Make Your Millions with Vioxx"... that site offended many lawyers who were appearing in AdSense ads on it...they complained and, Google pulled the ads.
Spamming Google 101:
DaveN has created a new SEO blog. The early posts already have a few blog spam and page hijacking tips, and DaveN has comments open for all.
Problems with the Google Search Suggest Tool:
If this tool ever made default it would help users search with longer queries (and thus more targeted searches), but it would artifically condense traffic patterns...thus making top keywords more expensive and static on both the free and advertising side of Google. The drop in ad supply would cause prices to shot up and encourage lots of click fraud. The other obvious problem with the Google search suggestion tool is that it suggests Eric Rice is a child molester, which is obviously uncool for Eric...
Google, which already provides AOL Europe with targeted advertisements, said its expanded multi-year arrangement will let it target the U.K., France and Germany. Source: CBS MarketWatch
Google predicted that the number of advertiser accounts will jump from 280,000 this year to 378,000 in 2005, according to the documents. From 2004 to 2008, the number of accounts is expected to more than double to 652,050.
Deep Link Ratio:
When links develop naturally interior pages of a site acquire numerous links. Sites which have a ton of deep links usually have a broad range of refering websites and good traffic. This free deep link tool queries Yahoo! to look at the percentage of backlinks which are deep links.
(link from Tara via Danny)
Untitled:
Gary Stein talks about the keyword untitled (and gives my ebook a good review...thanks for that Gary).
I think something like Untitled Document or Untitled Page would be a cool name for an SEO firm.
Audio Clip:
I was on another marketing show recently. I feel weird being listed on sites with guys like Bob Bly or Jack Trout...I still have a ton of learning I need to do...luckily for me guys like those write awesome books I can read.
Keyword Permutator:
Another one hits the market... The Permutator costs $50 and has a free 10 day trial. (link found on Peter D's blog)
Persistence Pays Off ;-)
Chris Lee of Keywords Analyzer has sent me a nubmer of emails asking me to post about his software in my blog (and since I was mentioning other keyword software I finally remembered to). Keywords Analyzer is similar to AdWord Analyzer but with a few extra tweaks. Keyword Analyzer comes with a 90 day money back guarantee.
PPC competitive analysis software as a whole is going to become a huge market in the next 6 months to a year.
Social Computing Research:
From MSN: Wallop... link from Beal
Cool Idea: from Chris Ridings...he allows smaller search engine and directory reps to receive notifications when their search engine or directory are mentioned at SearchGuild.
Roll Your Own:
Tara Calishain created a searchroller tool which allows you to create bookmarks to search Yahoo! from any collection of websites or folders.
Price Per Word? John Battelle has a graph showing PPC revenue trends.
SEO Book Price
I am raising it to $79 in about 10 minutes. I still need to do a bit of grammatical editing, but hopefully I will be able to do that over the weekend or early next week.
New AdWords Tool: AdWord Tracker is a new tool which compares where some of your competitors ads are placed over time. Analyzing this data can help you find where some of the advertising sweet spots are (it is not always best to rank at #1). Additionally they collect data such as how many estimated impressions each advertiser is making and what words they are advertising for.
Example AdWord Tracker Date
For keyword phrases such as "flat screen TV" AdWord Tracker will give you:
Most of the keywords you may want to track are likely not going to be in the system off the start. You can sign up to add up to two phrases to the system though.
I am not sure how this data is collected or how accurate it is, but if it is anywhere near accurate then it is dirt cheap competitive analysis. I did not see anywhere on the site where it said specifically how / where it collected the data and if/how it could account for other bots and programs like itself which skew traffic numbers.
AdWord Tracker Price
AdWord Tracker will track a couple AdWords keywords for you for free off the start and then charges either $4.99 for 3 months, $14.99/year.
I have to try it out a bit to see how good it will be, but it could be a useful tool. Google may try to make this data harder to collect if they are collecting good data. Cheap keyword research...come and get it ;-)
I am going to ask the owner how he collects that data and whatnot.
Phrase Remover: Many times stored data has useless charaters of some sort in it. You can easily remove these using the Goog Edit phrase remover.
Word List Combiner: You can add identifiers or various word combinations in sequenced lists and use this tool to create a list of all combinations and format it for Google AdWords.
One of my favorite parts about this blog is finding cool new programs and helping programmers make their software even cooler. David is willing to add other features if you can think of any. Download Goog Edit Today
Not really sure where they collected their data from or how accurate it is, but Aleksika has a keyword directory and some other neato looking keyword stuff.
Free PageRank Tool...a Brief History
Proogle was a super cool tool when it was announced back in May. Proogle was later renamed Prog and was recently bought out by SEO Chat.
New PageRank Tool PR Search.net is a tool similar to Prog which also includes the number of backlinks in the search results page, which is one semi useful measure of competition.
One thing I would recommend doing to make the PR Search tool more useful is to allow Yahoo! Search and extract PageRank and display them within the Yahoo! Search search results.
Update on Proogle / Prog The Prog tool which was purchased by SEO Chat is having useful features added to it. The search results can be ordered by PageRank and they also look like they are in the beginning of adding backlink anchor text analysis features.
Google has been a bit sketchy with showing backlinks recently, but sorting backlinks by PageRank is one of the easier ways to find out where some of the most important links into a site come from.
A Reminder About PageRank
As a ranking element PageRank has lost a large amount of its value. Shady backlink data and more complex algorithms are starting to make link analysis software less useful.
Competitive Marketing Forces
Since PageRank is meaning less and less and Google is giving less and less useful data (showing only some random low PageRank backlinks & not updating PageRank for months on end) this would be a good opportunity for Yahoo! to release WebRank and give tons of meaningful data.
Google is primarily mathematically driven. Yahoo! has human editors and thus can afford to show more meaningful linkage / connectivity data. If Yahoo! did then marketers like me would be more inclined to reference WebRank than PageRank and Yahoo! would get a ton of free marketing. Will they do it though?
What is Google AdWord Generator?
Jeff Alderson of Xybercode recently created a new Google AdWords tool.
His tool helps you create Google AdWords ads from a prepopulated set of successful marketing phrases. Google AdWord Generator takes a list of over 5,000 sales terms in 65 categories and creates various AdWords ads on the fly.
Search Optimizer users will be able to automate search campaigns based on those response metrics. It also lets marketers develop "watch lists" of keywords or campaigns and run campaigns only during certain times of the day. It will suggest potential keywords that could meet a marketer's business objectives. Marketers also can sort campaigns based on business objectives to see which are underperforming. source: DM News
Most keyword suggestion tools do not accurately predict future performance for seasonal items since they only track the past month or two.
Trellian recently released a free keyword research tool which has tracked a collection of resources over time to give you seasonally adjusted search frequencies.
Our database is one of the biggest, with over 9 billion searches compiled from 37 sources that include major international, pay per click, meta and regional engines.
Webmaster Toolkit whipped up another quick tool. His C class IP checker lets you check if two domains are on the same IP block.
It is believed that domains which are hosted on the same C block may not get as much credit for linking to one another as sites on various independ IP C block addresses.
{update: it worked when I first tried it, but one person just reported that they had a problem with it. I let Will know so hopefully it will be good to go soon.}
Whois Source is another good place to check the IP address of your websites.
RustyBrick has created a free link analysis tool which will search your backlinks and give you various reports such as what sites are linking to you, how many links point at you from each site, how many image or text links you have, the text in the links, etc.
Some people would not recommend using a hosted tool like this on their own site since it puts your info right out in the open, but certainly it could not hurt to use this tool on your competitors websites.
This tool works in conjunction with the Google API. The combination of that fact and the need for it to spider pages means that it will analyze about 100 links per minute, which is somewhat slow compared to some of the similar downloadable software (such as Optilink).
In the future there will also be a premium service login version of this link analysis tool which will provide monthly reports or reports after PageRank updates and other customized reports. Barry is currently fielding Q & As in a SEW Forum thread.
Incidently I just got an email from Leslie Rohde which said that he just updated OptiLink and that it is now twice as fast as it was.
In case you have never noticed the little logo off to the right side of my home page I usually use FireFox for most of my browsing (as it is way cooler than Internet Explorer).
Recently MozDev came up with a PageRank hack for the status bar which looks fairly nice (especially when compared to the images used for the PRGoogleBar).
Currently I have both installed because as an SEO I just can't ever get too much PageRank. :) Unfortunately they do not work with Safari :(
I reformatted my ebook and have recopied the pay per click section of The SEO Book so people can see a representitive sample of my ebook before they purchase it.
Until I released this there really were not any good free PPC guides (at least that I knew of) since people usually make more money trying to get you to sign up for second tier search engines than they do off just giving you honest info...but you didn't hear that from me :)
The SEO Book is currently 128 pages and the pay per click report is 22 pages.
The free PPC report requires Adobe Reader to view.
I have recently reformatted my ebook to include a few more goodies such as a Directory XLS checksheet, a quick start checklist, and a quick reference guide to all the SEO tools I use.
Shawn over at Digital Point recently launched a banner (and text ad) link exchange program which aims to place links across many different sites.
He runs the ads through an ad server and uses blog or forum plugins which allow the ads to be viewed as static text links by search engines.
I think this sort of network idea is a good idea if it allows people to select their categories. Right now it is in early testing stages, but I am sure Shawn would be willing to add more categories and other cool features as it grows.
The one thing I strugle with is that I am super conservative as an SEO and I would fear that eventually a big link exchange network could garner a penalty. I am going to go to Shawn's forums and ask him about it.
Currently the program is weighted by site size, popularity, and a variety of other factors. There are no profit takers in the program other than profit via improved rankings. Learn more about the new link exchange program.
Do you think search engines will ever be able to penalize such a network if it grows to a large size?
I don't see why it would warrant a penalty to be honest, unless the search engines are going to penalize sites for advertising. {shrug}
But either way, I would say it would be impossible to detect since it's not done with JavaScript, IFRAME or anything else. If you look at the source, the ad is embedded within the HTML source.
I actually had a problem being able to automatically validate that the ads were in place, because *I* couldn't even detect it. I did figure out a way to do it by having the system insert a unique/random HTML comment tag while the validation happens. But the tag is always different, and only turned on for the split second the validation routines happen. It's also a good way to make sure people aren't spoofing the ads to make it look like they are serving them without actually doing it.
I guess my question is "Is this idea truely scalable?" and "What other features do you intend to ad to improve relevancy when the network grows?"
I think it should be scalable, I mean I don't see why it wouldn't be.
Once the network grows will probably add things like the ability for site owners to classify the type of ads they have, then allow other users to optionally set their ads to only show certain types of ads.
<Update> In a fit of irony, Daniel Brandt (Mr screen scraper himself) blocked his tool from this site.
Since the tool is broken because Daniel Brandt's childish behaviour I can only offer you a link to more information about Daniel Brandt.
</Update>
For those who want the good data without letting people know who they are. Get Google PageRank, Yahoo! Backlinks, & Alexa traffic rating while remaining a secret squirrel.
Enter a URL:
no cookies | no search-term records | access log deleted after 7 days
WorldNet - a lexical database for the english language
"WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets."
hat tip Dan @ SEW forums
Some people are building scalable predictive bid management software which is based on complex mathematical algorithms.
Former Yahoo executive Ellen Siminoff has re-emerged as CEO of Efficient Frontier, which produces a paid-search management service that was launched Friday. The service lets paid search advertisers predict the performance of their keyword purchases on paid search networks such as Google's AdWords and Yahoo's Overture Services subsidiary. source
The Efficient Frontier site states that they are the only scalable bid management solution, although I bet Kevin Lee would beg to differ.
Automated real time feedback and adjustment is what makes bid management software extremely valuable. This is one market where software price will not be the determining factor in who is ultimately crowned king... quality and breadth of the features will.
For those of you with a Mac who are angry at the PageRank gods for not giving you PageRank in your Googlebar there is now a free toolbar PageRank hack created by Nick Stallman.
I am a Windows fool so I have not tried it out. I think my next computer might be a Mac though...
This tool gives you the mathematical probablility to determine whether or not you have collected enough data to be sure the data is conclusive as to which of two ads is better.
The Link Appeal Tool has link appeal since I am linking to it. I think I used the word link to much...anyway here is the link.
This is another one of Will's cool free tools over at Webmaster Toolkit. It looks at the PageRank of a page as well as the number of outgoing links on that page to give you a guestimate of how much value that link would have to help you decide whether or not it is worth going after.
Search Engine Watch has opened their new SEO Forums. Only a few hundred posts so far.
With how intertwined that site is within the Internet.com network and how popular and powerful of a site SearchEngineWatch already is, it will be interesting to see how open they are able to keep it and how well they will be able to fight off spam.
Upon further glance they seem to have a triangle which allows you to flag moderators when a bad post occurs.
<2nd update>What effect will this new forum have on other SEO forums?
Many people know that Google allows you to search any given site using site:www.seobook.com keyword
One cool feature that many search engines lack is a "search this collection of sites" feature...
UNTIL http://lushe.net/ just changed that. Lushe allows you to easily build a list of your favourite sites, and then search only those sites using google. This toolbar bookmark tool allows you to only search sites relevant to you and your interests.
Track the Spiders: Find out when spiders spider your site free. free downloadable software from crawler-alert.com (not linked due to home page pharmacy ad) My opinions with making drugs easy to get are better tracked by glancing through Depression Blog.
Want to try AdWords? Know nothing about AdWords? Know nothing about marketing? Don't want to pay an SEO to set up your AdWords account?
Thats ok. Google still wants you to advertise. They will even set your account up for you. Potential Google clients welcome to Google JumpStart. Google JumpStart charges a one time $299 fee which is credited toward your account.
Will they usually error on the side of profit or will they be conservative with your bid price and keyword selection?
With the growing commercial nature of the web it is becoming harder to get quality one way inbound links without spending a fortune. By submitting free or cheap press releases you can build link equity without spending a ton of money.
Many people do recommend donating to PR Web to help your PR get quicker handling and a better rotation.
"For $80 your release is also included in the Yahoo! FeatureExpress program where the full release is published under the Yahoo.com domain.
For B2B client releases that are keyword optimized, you can expect 20,000 - 60,000 page views in the first two weeks. For B2C clients it's higher, as much as 190,000." - from Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing
There are also a bunch of smaller press release sites on the web. Please submit any press release sites you find useful to this posting by clicking on the your evil Happy Thoughts Link.
Update: Backlink Analyzer is free link analysis software which has probably the best feature set of any of the link analysis software products on the market.
The Original Link Analysis Software
When OptiLink ($224) came out a few years ago it was a software product like no others. A few weeks ago the second version of PageRank Prowler ($97) was released. PageRank Prowler is a product similar to OptiLink (which only lacks the link text features).
Dirt Cheap PageRank Software
Now I haven't tried the full version of it yet, but recently software by the name of PageRank Digger that only costs $39.99 via PayPal was released. I guess it's claim to fame is speed. "You will be able to scan over 2000 domain names per minute." It is not just scanning links and getting PageRank that matters though. Being able quickly evaluate and rearrange the raw data is what makes it really useful. I think this tool is targeted more toward the expired domain community vice the seo community.
Branding & Creating Better Products
It is amazing to see how quickly advanced link tools (or any technology) can become commodities. I wonder when someone will be smart enough to market a link product which is BETTER vice cheaper. I can think of a few upgrades that would make the best link software way better and am surprised that nobody has marketed them yet. I wish I had more time to learn programming... :)
Example Link Analysis Software Upgrade
I am surprised there is no specific parameter link analysis software on the market. Software which scans Yahoo! or Google for .edu links which link to your competitors. That is just one example of a useful modification I don't think has been marketed yet. I got a couple other ideas too...email me if you are a programmer who wants to make really cool link analysis software.
Do you know of any link software which better than OptiLink? What on your site makes it better, vice cheaper? The competitive nature of the web will eat up most people who use cheap as a sales angle. Branding is where it's at.
Recently Brad Fallon created a search engine radio talk show. Each Tuesday morning at 9am Pacific / noon Eastern he interviews a different SEO or search engine expert. So far he has talked to Leslie Rohde (of OptiLink) & Jarrod Hunt (of TextLinkBrokers).
I have met quite a few of the big wigs in the SEO industry and could count most of them on my hands (and maybe feet). I am somewhat curious as to how he will be able to come up with a new show every week. His guest so far have been rather cool though...
Update: Backlink Analyzer is free link analysis software which has probably the best feature set of any of the link analysis software products on the market.
Recently Shawn Pringle launched PR and link analysis software by the name of PR Prowler. The first edition was a bit bulky and slow, but recently he launched PR Prowler V2.0 which has many needed upgrades.
PR Prowler operates in its own browser window similar to OptiLink. OptiLink still has a few more features (such as showing link text), but PR Prowler allows you to search for backlinks and keywords as well.
When you use PR Prowler with the Google link:www.evilcompetitor.com function it will return their backlinks and allow you to manipulate them in multiple ways. PR Prowler allows you to organize the links by site or PageRank or by how much the link should boost your PageRank (estimated). The best part about PR Prowler is that it primarily operates in the background so that you can do other business while it is collecting data.
Any software which runs in the background, checks backlings to the full Google database search depth (1,000), and will sort the results by PageRank is easily worth well over $100 to most webmasters, but PR Prowler only costs $97. View the official PR Prowler website.
Cool new Google search result scrapper. It may soon get banned, but if it does not then it will be an awesome tool for SEO.
Proogle shows search PageRank with search results. This can quickly give you an idea of how competitive a search term phrase may be. In addition you can add a couple features to your search to make it super useful for SEO.
Instead of looking at a search phrase you can see who is linking to a site (using link:www.blawhateversite.com). In addition you can also add &num=100 at the end of the address bar to view 100 results per page.
Proogle will allow you to quickly find your competitors most valuable backlinks. It is not quite as powerful as OptiLink, but pretty damn darn cool for free!!!
Many people use meta refresh tags to tell the search engines that their pages moved. It is not the most elequent way to do so though.
What does the Meta Refresh Tag Look like?
Place
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.redirectsite.com/">
in the head of your page copy. The number is a measure of time to redirect the browser to the new location (I believe in milliseconds.)
What is the problem with using a Meta Refresh Tag?
One of the bigger problems with this is that it is a common spam technique. Some people suggest setting the meta refresh to at least 5 seconds to avoid any ranking penalty.
In addition Google will show the URL of the original page in the search results if it has a higher PageRank than the location of the destination page. Last month they discussed Google's problems with the meta-refresh tag at WMW.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A 301 redirect is a perminant change of location code. It tells a search engine spider that a page or website has moved.
The 301 redirect code goes inside a .htaccess file either at the root level or in a local level. You can also use a 301 redirect to move just a single page.
Other 301 redirect info
Yahoo! Slurp has been having trouble resolving 301 redirects for a while now, but when they work correctly they garner no penalty and all the link popularity is parsed through to the new location.
So if you are ever to market yourself as the definitive guru in any field it is a good idea to provide free supplemental data which solidifies your position. TextLinkBrokers just released a site which keeps track of what sites have PageRank blocked.
His blocked PageRank directory site is located at blockedpr.com
I am fairly certain that this bold move may make his firm a target for Google, but based on conversations I have had with him they do a good job of keeping their clients separated from their site, and they sell links smartly so as not to really raise warning flags. On his textlinkbrokers.com website he wrote an article with tips to not get your PageRank blocked if you are selling PageRank.
uptimebot.com (not linked due to excessive questionable ads) - provides uptime info and server info from different configurations as it spiders the web. also will email an inbound link report every day if you wish.
http://www.recip-links.com/ - allows you to enter a list of up to 50 reciprical link locations to see if those link partners are still linking to you.
In the past I have went out of my way to define the concept of "ethical search engine optimization" as being crap. Recently Stanford agreed with this idea. A research paper by Hector Garcia-Molina and Zoltan Gyongyi by the name of Web Spam Taxonomy stated any attempt to manipulate search results is, was, and will always be spam.
If you are doing it with links...it's spam.
If you are changing content...it's spam.
Many articles have came out recently stating that reciprocal link exchanges are a waste of time. This is true if you can afford to spend a bunch on links, but if you are a bootstrapper you will need to do all the little things. Reciprocal link exchanges can still help boost link popularity some.
Update: Backlink Analyzer is free link analysis software which has probably the best feature set of any of the link analysis software products on the market.
Recently another PageRank analysis tool came out by the name of PageRank Prowler. PageRank Prowler ($97) is somewhat of a hybrid between OptiLink ($224) and the recent free P
you can also see details like
