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.

URL Trends found from SEO Scoop.

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".

The use of Google from "normal" browsers is not effected -- it is only specialized programs such as OptiLink that are targeted by Google's change with the result that OptiLink can be blocked
from Google for two or more hours.

While this is not a terrible problem as no lasting impact has been found, I am not comfortable with Google being able to discover the use of OptiLink no mattter how "gentle" the counter-measures
might be.

So, OptiLink's Goolge interface has been REMOVED pending a solution to this problem. This has been done for your safety, and for the safety of all other OptiLink users.

Rest assured that this problem will be solved and Google access restored as soon as possible, but in the meantime, you should use the Yahoo and MSN interfaces for your Google ranking analysis.

I am a bit curious if Google is going too far with all of their recent anti-SEO moves. I can't even count how many times I have read that search relevancy is similar at Yahoo! and Google. Webmasters have undoubtedly helped to build Google's brand.

With the extensive filtering that Google does on its linking information, the loss of the Google interface in many cases is not that important.

In general, you can do your linking analysis using the Yahoo or MSN link databases and safely assume that Google has these links as well, but are simply not showing them. The exception to this rule is of course the "banned domain" which appears to be a uniquely Google concept.

Google does provide useless linkage data. Some of the other engines, especially Yahoo!, provide useful linkage data.

The connectivity measurement (or PageRank) that Google shows in it's toolbar is outdated. July of last year I talked to a Yahoo! Search employee and asked why they were not making a reliable Yahoo! connectivty measurement available?

A large part of how Google gained their brand was by creating concepts that were somewhat easy to explain, like PageRank. Why not force them to keep that data updated or take that market position from them by providing across the board better tools that are easier to explain? This also could help Yahoo! gain a much larger installed toolbar base, which may allow them to

• gain market share

• collect more market data
• improve relevancy algorithms

MSN has also been significantly more supportive of the SEO industry than Google, even allowing people to subscribe to search results via RSS.

I understand running automated systems add to system load time and has associated costs, but could that cost be a cheap form of marketing your high margin search service over competing services?

On many fronts I do like Google as a company, but I think their idealism is at least as much of a hindrance as it is a strength.

Leslie also had the following to say in his update:

My Thoughts on the Future

It is certainly well known that Google does not look with favor upon SEO tools in general, and most especially tools that make use of its interfaces, so some sort of reaction is not totally unexpected.

OptiLink has been in very active use and continuous development since May 22, 2002, and has been on Google's "short list" since the moment they called me (true story) just 10 days after it was announced.

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.

Mentioning that blogspam script a while ago got me a few hate comments, but I knew that was expected (although I think some of the haters may have been a bit hypocritical, but that is for another day).

It seems as though the script is no longer offered for sale. Most likely some bloggers saw it and complained to 2Checkout or his host. I can't fault them and I was fairly certain that would be an eventaul side effect of me mentioning it. But he probably sold a few more when I did mention it.

I have not much used any software that:

• blog spams -or-

• creates automated content -or-
• cloaks

I don't necissarily think that one needs to use many automated tools to do well. I do well enough with this site without using any of those tools, but it does not mean someone is a bad person if they use a tool which may not comply with the search engine's TOS. Search engines do not always comply with publisher's TOS, either.

With all that being said, I do realize that if search engines no longer appreciated my site, if they chose to remove it from their index, that could likely eventually have a long lasting effect on my livelihood, or at least until I created other revenue streams.

There are large groups of people who move from business to business and person to person claiming how unethical they are and how right they are when a site eventually get penalized by Google. Now sometimes these people are right, and other times they rely on Google to tell them what is good and bad, right and wrong.

There is a ton of fraud on the web. It is a rather tiring experience trying to create a helful business model that is both honest and profitable while not spreading yourself too thin. I probably could have took on a half dozen clients today, but that would have made little sense. And my blog software was down a large part of the day :(

I think the web as a whole would do far better if on average we each looked for ways to do better ourselves than to point at the flaws with others. It is human nature to say that others are cheating if they are doing better than you or I. Controvercy also builds linkage data and attention, which is a must for blogs.

Now granted the fact that I have this blog makes me a bit of a pundit of sorts, but the point of this post is that generally the biggest gains are in improving our own sites, offerings, and marketing methods rather than wasting efforts on thinking about how unfair or unethical some idea may be.

When you were doing exceptionally bad and go to doing rather well in a short period of time it is easy to take it for granted. I do realize that some people expect certain things from me and from time to time my ideas or links or words will disappoint a few people.

My buddy Jason Duke recently created Widget Baiting, which is a free tool that can be used to mix content.

The tool can generate near matches of a seed article, allowing you to:

• set article length

• recreate at random or using Markov chains
• set the change percentage
• quickly change various words
• quickly regenerate up to 100 mutations of any article
• regenerate future generations from those articles

Two things that would really improve this tool would be to let people change conceptual word groups and to allow people to move the location of a word or wordset within a sentence.

This tool is most likely used for spamming purposes and could probably do well when combined with things like Yahoo!'s autolinker, but is not something I would recommend using on sites that you had long term goals with.

Having said that, this tool can also be used by professional SEOs to create similar mutations of pages to understand how conceptually related pages can be before they are hit by duplicate content filters and how some various search technologies may work.

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?