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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.
• fixed export to CSV
• fixed result scraping when domain has sitelinks
• added dragable columns
• fixed domain.net vs domain.net.au issue

What else do we still need to fix/do?

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. :)

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.

The new SEO Book keyword tool operates like the old one, but with the following improvements

• 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.

Recommendation: If you don't mind investing a couple bucks into in-depth keyword research, make sure you try the paid version of Wordtracker with all the added features and benefits they offer.

Nice Idea, Google!

About a month ago I launched an SEO tool named the Website Health Check tool. The launch was quite successful, so Google decided to block my tool, then added its features to Google Webmaster Central. You shouldn't artificially manipulate the link graph or screw with other people's sites, unless you are Google.

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.

I have been giving Compete.com a lot of coverage, but that is because they offer a great service. Today they are offering credits for half price.

Via Dan Thies, I noticed you can download and register Camtasia 3 for free. Camtasia is the screen capture software I use when I make SEO videos.

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

Try the Website Health Check tool today.

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.

Spam Dominates Longtail Adult & Pill Search Queries

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.

Ads becoming content is not only true from a thin affiliate site perspective, but also on larger more traditional ad buys. Selling content hosting is going mainstream. About.com has been selling custom branded sponsored content for about a year.

A while back I created a Google Gadget for keyword research and competitive analysis. I also just created a Google Gadget for link analysis.

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

SEO Book Link Research 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.

If you use the iGoogle homepage you can add the tool to your homepage by selecting add by URL and then submitting this URL:
http://tools.seobook.com/google-gadgets/keywords.xml

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.

Eli goes through the thought process of how to create automated search spam generator software. His recent launch of SQUIRT (a much expanded version of his free quick indexing tool) seems to have went quite well. Great marketing on the launch.

He also posted about recycling content, which is a bit aggressive for high brand sites, but probably quite common on thinner spammier sites.

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.

A friend pointed me to SEO Digger, which is another site which shows what keywords a particular page ranks for.

Other similar sites that do this are SpyFu (AdWords & Organic), KeyCompete (AdWords), and URL Trends (Organic).

SerpArchive.org looks a bit alpha(ish), but looks like it might be a useful rank checker and competitive analysis tool.

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.

Joost de Valk emailed me about a Firefox Greasemonkey extension webmasters can use with Google's Webmaster Tools to see the PageRank and anchor text of inbound links.

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.

SEO for Firefox has been updated again. It now shows the number of pages from a site that are stuck in the supplemental results.

Here is an old primer on supplemental results, and here is how to find what pages from a site are in the supplemental results.

With many companies offering free keyword research tools I recently created a keyword list cleaner that can be used to help you format keyword data into a usable format. Use the SEO Book keyword list cleaner, grab the source code if you like it, or read here for background on the tool.

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.

Ken McGaffin just shot me an email alerting me to a free version of Wordtracker, which goes 100 terms deep, and shows daily search volume estimates based on the marketshare of Dogpile and Metacrawler.

Nice timing there Wordtracker!

SEO for Firefox was recently updated. The new features are scraping Google cache dates, and allowing you to CSV export the data.

Warning About SEO Elite Feedback

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.

I recently updated a number of my SEO tools, and a few other people recently launched some interesting new search engine marketing tools.

Rand recently posted a comparison of traffic volumes and competitive research data for various SEO Blogs.

Here is a brief overview of a few of the other free competitive anaysis tools on the market.

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.

I added a link to Quintura results on my keyword research tool.

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.

DaveN is making a metasearch SEO tool by the name of Zippy.

Please leave feedback and requests @ TW.

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.

SEO Blackhat dug through the numbers and has a free tool for estimating clicks based on search volume estimates and rank position.

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.

Branded traffic is worth big bank.

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!

Exact match keyword domains work well in Google when combined with a few high quality links, and most branded keywords actually are not that hard to rank for.

Matt Cutts is looking for feedback on improving Google Sitemaps.

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.

Probably the coolest Firefox SEO extension ever created. :)

It now works on international versions of Google and Yahoo!, While it currently only works on the global Google.com and Yahoo.com sites and it pulls a ton of marketing data right into the search results to help you analyze how competitive a marketplace is. Learn more about SEO for Firefox.

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.

Please give it a try (or else).

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).

After I pointed out Microsoft's AdCenter Labs yesterday WMW started a thread about some of the new tools. The selection of tools is diverse, interesting and useful enough to be well worth a review.

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.

Microsoft AdCenter Labs offers a tool for Detecting Online Commercial Intention. It estimates the probability of a web page or search query being information, commercial-informational, or commercial-transactional in nature.

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.

Text Link Ads recently announced a new tool to price the value of text links.

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.

The tool allows you to pass variables in the URL string, so perhaps this is good for scraping some data on the value of certain keyword markets? I also added a link to the tool on my keyword research tool.

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.

I updated the page with Google Toolbar buttons for Internet Explorer, including a new botton for Google Trends.

I also listed the extensions I use on Firefox and posted a few handy Firefox bookmark toolbar links that you can drop to your Firefox bookmarks toolbar.

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.

I added a link to Google trends on my keyword research tool.

Clicktracks offers up a free version of their analytics software by the name of Clicktracks Appetizer.

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.

These are SEO Tools that I use and recommend to others. Most of these SEO tools are free.

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.

Want to see the difference between the current and future Google indexes? Try Tony Hill's free BigDaddy Watch tool.

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