Search Engine Tools Archives

There are hundreds of SEO tools out there, we have covered just a few. I recently saw a short thread with a person complaining his site has been removed from the Google index. In the Google Webmaster Help thread, a top contributor suggested they use a tool to see if they are linking to bad sites and getting links from bad sites.

The tool was built by Michael VanDeMar and can be accessed at bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm.

I am not sure how accurate it is, but it is just one more of many link tools to help you analyze the health of your site's linking strategy (or lack there of).

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Google Tutor listed five tools that help you compare the Google Caffeine index to the current Google index. I figured I would list six here:

• facesaerch.com/caffeine/
• Google Caffeine Bookmarklet
• Plug Caffeine into FireFox Search Bar
• Caffeine Ranking Checker
• cartercole.com/googlevsgoogle.html
• comparecaffeine.com/

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

A WebmasterWorld thread has discussion about future of Yahoo's SearchMonkey and BOSS tools, specifically after the Microsoft & Yahoo deal, where Yahoo is pretty much giving up on search technology.

If this is a concern for you, i.e. will SearchMonkey, BOSS, Site Explorer and so on, be around in a year or two from now, then you should read on. In fact, Vanessa Fox covered these questions in detail at Search Engine Land.

To make a long story short, we honestly do not know. Yahoo doesn't know, Microsoft doesn't know, I don't know and you don't know. I can still see SearchMonkey, BOSS, Site Explorer all working with Microsoft's Bing, but will Yahoo continue to invest in those tools? I don't know. It is clear to me that Yahoo wants to cut most, if not all, of their spending on search. So if that is true, which I think is, then Microsoft would have to pick up the technologies behind those tools.

Will they? I don't know. I can honestly seeing all three of these tools being forgotten in two years from now. Maybe some form of "Bing" tool will come out to replace them, but will they replicate all the features? I doubt it.

The truth is, I don't know. If I had to guess, in two years, we won't have a SearchMonkey, BOSS, or Site Explorer. I am not sure if we will have something equivalent from Microsoft Bing.

Should we start worrying about it now? I am not sure if that would do any of us any good. Clearly, Microsoft is reading this and know that these tools and features are something that webmasters and SEOs treasure.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

It has been about five years since I last interviewed Patrick Gavin, and back then I interviewed Patrick on his new company, Text Link Ads (TLA). Who knew TLA would have such a huge impact on the lives of so many SEOs and shape this industry, for better or worse. I should add that TLA has been a long time advertiser here and RustyBrick, my company, does work for TLA on the development side.

Patrick has stepped down from TLA's parent company, MediaWhiz a few months ago. Patrick has been informing various bloggers about his new SEO venture with Andy Hagans named DIYSEO.com, Do It Yourself SEO. Since Patrick is one of the most successful, honest and caring people in the industry, I thought I would cover a Sphinn thread on this new project. I asked Patrick several questions over instant messenger on DIYSEO.com. Here is that interview:

Barry Schwartz: Hi Patrick, thanks for agreeing to answer some questions about your new SEO venture, named DIYSEO.com. Can you first tell us a little bit about the new business?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry. Sure, DIYSEO is a venture I am launching with Andy Hagans. The product is a SEO software platform aimed at small business website owners.

Barry Schwartz: Can you tell me about some of the software's features? What features will make this the killer SEO app?
Patrick Gavin: To start with our software is not a suite of tools, instead it is a task based system designed to give website owners a step by step playbook on how to improve their natural search engine rankings. It is unique in that it gives advice tailored to specific verticals. When a site owner begins the process, they complete a questionnaire. We then take that data to give them an SEO campaign and task list that is truly geared towards their vertical.

Barry Schwartz: I saw that ShoeMoney wrote about your new tools. But doesn't ShoeMoney also have his own SEO tools he is selling? How does yours compare to his?
Patrick Gavin: ShoeMoney has a great suite of tools. The difference to us is we are not designed for professional internet marketers who are looking for advanced tools. We instead are designed for business owners who want a step by step plan for SEO success. We think there is a need in the market for both expert tools and what we are doing: an SEO system that takes your hand and walks you through a winning SEO plan without having to be an expert.

Barry Schwartz: Would you consider any tools currently out there similar to yours? If so, which ones?
Patrick Gavin: I wouldn't consider any current SEO tools as similar to ours. We are taking a new approach to SEO and I think you would have to look outside of the SEO industry to find similar approaches. Among those would be Mint.com and Basecamphq.com.

Barry Schwartz: You have been in the SEO industry for a really long time. You are most famous for Text Link Ads, the company you founded and sold to MediaWhiz. How does this product differ from the Text Link Ads product, in terms of market-a-bilty? Do you think it will be as successful?
Patrick Gavin: The product is really quite different from TLA. Where TLA focuses on advanced "off page" SEO techniques via link buying, with DIYSEO we are offering a full service SEO platform that will instruct users with actionable on page and off page SEO actions. In terms of marketability, the market opportunity is tremendous. Adwords has some 1.5M+ advertisers buying keywords on a PPC basis. Most of these are small business owners. Some 75% of clicks go to natural search results, not PPC. All of these PPC advertisers would love the additional exposure in natural search so that is why we are so excited about this opportunity. We think we can drive value to our clients and if we can do that we will be successful.

Barry Schwartz: So our readers know, can you explain if you are still working for Text Link Ads?
Patrick Gavin: I am no longer an employee of MediaWhiz (Text Link Ads' parent company) but do some part time consulting to MediaWhiz. MediaWhiz and TLA have a number of exciting initiatives underway and I remain close to the business as a number of my best friends (and some real talented people) are there.

Barry Schwartz: To be frank, why are you asking bloggers, such as myself and ShoeMoney to write about DIYSEO when it is not even live yet?
Patrick Gavin: Well I have never been shy about promotion :-) We wanted to build some buzz to build up an initial contact list that we can then invite to our beta launch and other fun things we are doing. The SEO community is great about participating and giving feedback that we can then act on. Having been in the industry since around 2000 has given me the opportunity to build relationships with some great people and I am very thankful to be in the position to be able to get the word out on this project.

Barry Schwartz: Since I am being pretty direct, let me point you to the Sphinn thread on the topic. Some folks in our industry find the announcement on Sphinn's home page to be considered spam and should be removed from the home page. What do you think about that?
Patrick Gavin: I think it's great. Again the SEO community is a lot of fun. We will never agree on everything and I am sure we will have a few DIYSEO dissenters once the product is live but I have found that is what makes the SEO community so much fun. Fiery discussions and if you listen/read close enough there is some great feedback in those discussions.

Barry Schwartz: Finally, I asked those that follow me on Twitter @rustybrick that I am interviewing @patrickgavin right now and asked some to send questions. @shoemoney sent a question, he asked. Can you ask him about his twitter contest and if he is happy with the results http://www.diyseo.com/twittercontest.
Patrick Gavin: Twitter has been an interesting ride for me. Shoe did a post recently about Twitter being his #3 traffic sourse http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/05/for-those-who-still-dont-get-twitter/ and that really got me tuned back in to the marketing power Twitter has. Twitthis.com powered the Twitter contest and the results have been very impressive. Since the contest started my @diyseo follower count has gone from about 100 to 1,400 and still growing, so yes very happy!

Barry Schwartz: Thanks Patrick, I am looking forward to the DIYSEO product. Any words you want to end with? Like maybe the launch date or something else?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry it has been my pleasure. We are not ready to announce the launch date just yet but if you sign up at www.DIYSEO.com you will be the first to know! :-)

The other day, we polled our readers asking if you trust Google's keyword suggestion tool. We received a lot of responses, well over 200 and I wanted to share them with you.

The majority, 76% said they do not fully trust the keyword tool. While 23% said they do trust the keyword tool. Trusting Google is not something most people do these days.

Let me break down the results for you.

Question: Do You Trust Google's Keyword Tool?

:: Not Fully said 147 respondents or 62%
:: Yes said 55 respondents or 23%
:: No said 33 respondents or 14%
:: Other answer... said 4 respondents or 2%

But I bet most of you still use the tool. :-)

Forum discussion continued at HighRankings Forums.

This story was pre-written and scheduled to go live on May 29th.

Google provides a very popular Keyword Suggestion Tool that many SEMs rely on. But a HighRankings Forum thread questions how trustworthy the tool is.

Many SEMs use the tool because it is convenient and Google provides the estimated search volumes. At the same time, many SEMs know how to take Google's estimates and apply them to their campaigns. Experience and campaign history helps SEMs learn this trade.

In fact, did you know that the keyword tool allows you to adjust the type of query based on match type? After you run the tool, you can then click on a drop down menu to select the match type, broad, phrase, exact or negative match.

But the big question is, do you trust the keyword tool? Take our poll:

Forum discussion at HighRankings Forum.

On Friday, Click Forensics announced a new service they are offering that helps predict high conversions. Click Forensics is known for tracking the click fraud rate in the search industry. This new tool promises to "allow online ad networks, publishers and advertisers to identify traffic that’s more likely to convert into sales."

The platform includes the following features:

• Click Forensics Site Score – sources of traffic are tagged with individual Click Forensics Site Scores that rank visitors based on their propensity to convert. This allows ad networks to more effectively filter and route traffic for highest monetization and provide the best ROI for online advertisers.
• Adaptive Intelligence – to accommodate varying traffic profiles among different ad networks, advertisers, and publishers, the new engine provides the capability to adjust rules and thresholds to produce traffic quality scores that better reflect propensity to convert for each specific client. For example, an ad network that caters to retailers in Asia might have very different traffic patterns than a B2B ad network in North America.
• Machine Learning – the traffic scoring engine also employs new machine learning capabilities that allow it to adapt and tune itself in real-time to detect new sources of good and bad traffic as they emerge. Filtering decisions can be made instantly based on traffic quality thresholds set by clients.
• Enhanced Anomaly Detection – more granular click anomaly detection features can distinguish new complex click types – machine or human – even from the same computer. This includes increasingly popular malicious Javascript programs that execute upon a page view or site visit. In addition, volume and spike anomalies can be more easily identified to protect from stealth attacks, such as those resulting from botnet activation.

A WebmasterWorld thread has members of the search marketing community who are very skeptical about the tool. One advertiser said:

If I were an advertiser, I would be more concerned about how to test the claims made about the developers of this product, rather than the conversions of publisher traffic.

Like with any tool in this market, you need to use it with wisdom and not go by it blindly.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The SEO Smackdown blog reports that they noticed Google switching "completely" to AJAX based search results. This can put a huge damper in rank checking tools, that scrap the Google search results. Most people are not seeing the Google search results pages render in AJAX, not yet at least.

But if this does happen, we can start hearing scandals of rank checking software being blocked by Google again. It turns out, what was blocking them was a change to how Google was testing new html for their search results page, which put these rank checkers out of business for about a month, until they came back in second week of September.

Google frequently tests different user interfaces and layouts with subsets of users. It is possible that this is just a test or it is possible that this is the being to a new AJAX based search result from Google. To the searcher, it makes very little difference, but to the SEO, it may matter.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

From Google:

We're continually testing new interfaces and features to enhance the user experience. We are currently experimenting with a javascript enhanced result page because we believe that it may ultimately provide a faster experience for our users. At this time only a small percentage of users will see this experiment. It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search, please see http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html.

I am not a heavy user of SEO tools or toolbars, but Aaron Wall's latest tool, he named The SEO Toolbar has received a ton of feedback and buzz from the SEM industry. The day it was released, which was some time last week, about a dozen or so SEO blogs wrote about it. Most people praised this toolbar as the only tool SEOs need.

This toolbar is jam packed with features including link data, directory information, competitive data, rank checking, keyword research, RSS reader, comparison tool and much much more. To see all the features, go to The SEO Toolbar.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

In a Google Groups thread, AdWordsPro Sarah has asked us what our favorite bid management tools are. There are a two different tools represented thus far, and it's interesting to see what you've got to add.

One user acknowledges that he likes Google's tools (which fortunately are free).

Another is using SearchRev.

I'm going to mention that I saw a demo for Acquisio's tool back at SMX East, I think, and it looked mighty fine. (I don't use any tool right now since I don't really do PPC regularly, but if I had to pick something, this would be it.)

What tools do you use?

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Ever want to know what questions searchers are typing when they are looking for answers? Let's face it -- people do ask the search engines questions; I actually do so every so often, since the actual question is often found in the search results and I know it's exactly what I'm looking for.

SEOs can take advantage of this kind of traffic (and if they haven't yet, they should) with a new tool from WordTracker. The Keyword Questions tool takes a phrase -- perhaps the keyword you're optimizing for -- and gives you questions based around that phrase. For example, take a look at the screenshot below:

As you can tell, it will prove to be useful, and users think so as well.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Russ Jones over at The Google Cache talks about a new tool he released for public consumption. It's called glync and gives you historical data of links you have accrued over time using Google Webmaster Tools. There is a free version (for up to 30 days of tracking) and a pro version with more time, valued at $5/month.

Here's a video:

What do you think?

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Update: You can block your pages from SEOMoz. SEOMoz documented the procedure, but it is as simple as a meta tag: <META NAME="SEOMOZ" CONTENT="NOINDEX" />

At SMX East, SEOmoz launched Linkscape, a powerful tool that will give you competitive analysis of linkage data. The tool has been lauded as extremely powerful though there have been some criticisms. In the Smackdown blog, Michael VanDemar attacks the credibility of the tool and claims that there is no way to block the user agent, at least not now. Therefore, we're still waiting to hear from SEOmoz on how to block the Linkscape tool from crawling their pages.

In Barry's coverage of the launch of the tool, he noted speaking with Rand about this issue. Rand told Barry that they will announce a single useragent that people can use to block the SEOmoz bots from crawling their site The question is, when will this capability come?

There's a lengthy discussion on Sphinn about the issue.

I often try to stay away from covering tools but in this case, a Sphinn thread with over 70 votes and 35 comments, I cannot pass this up.

SEOmoz launched a new tool called Linkscape, the tool utilizes a growing index of 30 billion pages indexed by the SEOmoz team to plot detailed linkage data for SEOs. In the past, SEOs relied on search engine data from APIs or via a scraper. SEOmoz decided to crawl the web themselves to get this data. Thus reducing the reliance on search engines to obtain critical linkage data.

While most SEOs are really happy to have this tool, some are eager to block SEOmoz from crawling their site. One said:

Cool tool, but I want to know the user agent so I can block it - no sense giving my competitors my data if the tool ends up working well.

I am not sure what the useragent is, but most are of the belief that they do obey the standard robots.txt protocol. The tool does seem to be down now, as their whole site, probably for a lot of usage. But I am told the useragent discussion is over at SEOmoz's feedback thread.

In any event, I commend SEOmoz for undergoing this process. I know it is expensive and complex but it is also a valued new tool that should help SEOs get their job done.

Forum discussion at Sphinn and SEOmoz.

Update: I spoke with Rand and he said they will announce a single useragent that people can use to block the SEOmoz bots from crawling their site. What do you want to name that useragent?

It has been confirmed via a WebmasterWorld thread that many search ranking checking tools have been working over the past day or so.

Just about a month ago we reported about the issues people were having with WebPosition Gold and other rank checking tools. We first thought Google was going after these rank checking tools but then we learned that the issues were due to Google testing out new HTML structures and layouts in the search results pages.

The WebmasterWorld thread reports that not only is WebPosition Gold now working, but other rank checking tools also. So maybe the Google experiment is over or maybe it is on a vacation? Or perhaps, the tools built in a fix for the scraping issues.

I still know Google hates these tools but will they go as far to block them?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Yahoo Site Explorer has done a major update to their linkage data reports. Most webmasters are reporting huge drops in the number of links reported today versus the days before.

The linkage drops are reported as high as losing over 5,000 links. Others saw a drop of about 1,000 links and so on.

It is possible it is a temporary reporting glitch, but some are actually speculating that Yahoo is no longer showing links that are not counted, either nofollowed or simply not counted, in the linkage reports anymore. Right now, it is too soon to know for sure. But if anything changes or if more reports come in, I will do a follow up post.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Update: Just wanted to add that we reported similar issues in March, where my link count then was 271,196 inlinks, but in October I had 216,880 inlinks, and now I have 247,183.

I am tracking the large WebmasterWorld thread on the topic of WebPosition Gold no longer working on Google's search pages. It seems like WebPosition Gold is releasing an update today, that will address the issue that is preventing the scraping of the Google results, which stops the tool from building Google ranking reports.

WebPosition Gold employee, Scott, said in message number 3726633, yesterday:

I have an update going out today which should improve things for WP users...

That clearly implies that they have reworked the program to properly pick up the Google search result pages and document rankings again.

Member, pageoneresults, feels this fix won't last too long. He feels Google will counter WebPosition Gold's update with a slight change themselves, which may cripple the software from documenting your Google rankings.

Clearly, Google is not happy with people using these tools. But it doesn't seem to be the top concern for Google at this moment.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A couple weeks ago, Google slightly changed how they show the Google search results, which resulted in several search ranking software packages to not function properly anymore. I reported this under the title of WebPosition Ranking Software Being Blocked by Google? early on and Scott Goodyear from WebPosition commented here and also at WebmasterWorld with his two cents.

Scott took offense to me using the word "blocking" in the title. The truth is, I posed it as a question and Google was not technically blocking them, just yet. But will it happen? It seems like it.

Matt Cutts of Google has commented (once again) at WebmasterWorld on his stance on ranking checking tools, saying:

I wouldn't be surprised if our bot detection continued to get better over time for many types of software that scrape Google. We'd prefer to use that server capacity for real users, not someone who wants to check how they rank for tons of queries going down hundreds of pages.

Does this mean that Google is now going to try really hard to prevent scraper based rank checking software? Seems like it.

Google's JohnMu also commented at our site, explaining some of the history:

I think the information given in the Webmaster Guidelines and the TOS is fairly straight-forward:

"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."

and

"5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google."

Matt Cutts also commented in a thread Scott started in the Webmaster Help groups.

I am not going to get into the argument, if this should be allowed or not. I would hate it if people wrote scrapers to constantly scrap my pages, oh wait, they do. It is a waste of my bandwidth and can impact the speed of our page loads. At the same time, there are easier ways to get this data that might be more in accordance with the TOS.

There is also a big debate on why SEOs need to bother with ranking reports.

I'll leave the discussion in the air.

Forum discussion at Google Groups, Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

About a month ago, Google's external keyword tool began to show search volume numbers. Last night, there were reports via WebmasterWorld that the tool stopped showing these estimated search volume numbers, all together.

The reports were sending back error messages that read, "Insufficient Data." This happened for any and all keywords searches between the times of about 5pm (EST) and 10pm (EST) last night, August 5th.

I personally tested the tool this morning and most popular keyword phrases are showing search volume data. I suspect it might have something to do with the launch of Google Insights for Search, which Tamar will have a post on later and which I wrote about at Search Engine Land just about 8 hours ago.

All seems to be good now with the Google Keyword Tool.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

The historically popular search engine ranking software, WebPosition, has reportedly been blocked by Google from checking rankings automatically.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that WebPosition is no longer able to process one's search rankings as of August 5, 2008. Old time WebmasterWorld member, Barbara 'WebMama' Coll, who has been a member of WebmasterWorld since 2002, said:

Has anyone else noticed that after years of threatening it appears that Google has now blocked WP Gold from reporting rankings through their tool? We called the WP support line and they said they are waiting for Google to 'do' something and have NO ETA has to when it will be fixed.

There is no estimated time when the software will begin working again. This software has been around forever and I believe Google has threatened to block it many times. In fact, Google has named WebPosition Gold in their SEO guidelines saying, "Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."

So maybe Google did something about it finally? Or maybe not. Time will tell.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has added a new feature to the external keyword tool, they have added approximate search volume numbers. For example, I conducted a search for SEO and the results returned showed columns for "Approx Search Volume: June" and "Approx Avg Search Volume." Here is a screen capture:

By definition, the "Previous Month's Search Volume" column "shows the previous month's search volume on Google for each keyword, specific to your targeted country and language. The shaded bar represents a general low-to-high quantitative guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword." The "Avg. Search Volume" column "shows the average monthly search volume on Google for each keyword over a recent 12-month period, specific to your targeted country and language. The shaded bar represents a general low-to-high quantitative guide to help you determine how competitive ad placement is for a particular keyword."

There is a Google help page on these numbers that adds:

• Search volume fluctuation: Web traffic is influenced by seasonality, current events, and a number of other factors. The level of search volume on your keywords, therefore, is constantly fluctuating.
• Location and language targeting: If you access the Keyword Tool from within an ad group, the search traffic statistics will factor in your campaign's country and language targeting (if you target a region or city, only the country will be reflected). If you use the standalone or external Keyword Tools, your country and language selections will influence these statistics. Learn about the different variations of the Keyword Tool.
• Match type: The Keyword Tool's statistics vary depending on your selection from the Match Type drop-down menu. If you select Broad or Phrase, the tool will factor in certain variations of your keywords that could potentially trigger your ads. Learn about keyword match types.

These figures come to no one's surprise because Google did release Google Trends with numbers and Google Ad Planner, which hides nothing.

I guess this is pretty good timing, being that Yahoo just killed the Overture keyword suggestion tool.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Update: Jeremy actually posted about this several hours ago.

Update 2: This is now official, the Inside AdWords blog has posted the official announcement.

It seems like the day has come, the day that Yahoo has killed the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool. Now, if you visit inventory.overture.com, you are redirected to http://sem.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/searchenginemarketing/. In fact, it is a permanent redirect, not just a temporary redirect, as you can see by using the URI Valet tool.

We knew this was coming, we have story after story reporting outages and downtime for this tool. Here is a run down of some of the stories we wrote covering the tool:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007
• More Server Problems With Overture's Keyword Tool on December 6, 2007

So does this end the saga with the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool or as it moved elsewhere?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Aaron Wall has written a pretty awesome rank checker tool Firefox plugin that checks various keywords against results on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. Here's a sample screenshot of what you're expected to see:

While it looks like it's pretty accurate from my perspective, on Sphinn, one of the users note that it isn't completely accurate. Aaron has responded to inform us that the tool "clusters 100 results per page to minimize scraping on Google. That clustering can cause a shift in ranking compared to only seeing 10 results per SERP."

But I gotta say -- this is probably one of the tools that should have been made earlier and just hasn't been. Now, you really don't need an API key to run ranking tools. You can do it out of the convenience of your web browser. Thanks, Aaron. This rocks.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

We have Google's Blog Search and Technorati for blog search, but has anyone found a reputable forum search engine? Enter Twing.

Twing allows you to search and discover forum discussion. We do that here but this is something different. Find content from long ago and use the tag cloud to get additional inspiration.

Here's a screenshot of the system in action.

Sort you results by relevance and date and then even search forums with the associated keywords.

Looks pretty cool. If you're a forum junkie, this search engine looks very cool.

A DigitalPoint Forums has reports from dozens of webmasters that their link counts in the tool are way down.

Some users are reporting as much as of an 80-percent reduction in the number of links Yahoo Site Explorer is finding for their sites.

Lost about 75% on all sites today.

Ya! This was a huge drop though..not the usual slight fluctuation. i lost like 12k links.

I don't track my links on a frequent basis for this site, but I was able to dig up a past link count that I posted here back in October 2007 where I found I had 216,880 inlinks reported. Today, Yahoo Site Explorer reports I have 271,196 inlinks. So I don't see any reductions and I also checked some tools that might have been tracking this for me on an automated basis and I see no reduction.

(1) Either this site was not impacted or
(2) This was a temporary bug that is now fixed.

Are your Yahoo inlinks report down drastically?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

The Google Webmaster Tools "external links" report is buggy over the weekend. The tool is not showing any backlinks anymore for, I believe, any site.

For example, here are the non-existent backlinks for the Search Engine Roundtable:

There are dozens of reports from webmasters worrying if Google banned them or not. Threads at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups both have concerned webmasters discussion the issue.

The issue started Sunday morning or early afternoon and is still an issue at the time I write this. Hopefully it will be fixed shortly.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and Google Groups.

Now Fixed: At about 3pm (EST), it has now been fixed. JohnMu, a Google Webmaster Trends Analysts posted below and I confirmed it is now fixed.

A very common practice when discussion Google search results changes is to list the data center you are on when viewing Google results. But how do you do that? How do you know which IP address Google is using to serve up your results?

One of the best methods is to download the ShowIP Firefox extension into your Firefox browser. After you restart Firefox, at the bottom bar, you will be able to see every IP address of every web site you navigate to or query. So when it comes to searching at Google, where the IP address may change frequently, this tool gives you the IP right away.

For example, here is a search I did for mp3 players at Google:

The arrow I added points to the ip address that ShowIP adds to the status bar of Firefox. You can easily see that at the time of my query, I hit the 64.233.169.103 Google data center. Not only that, you can also quickly dig up more information on the IP address you hit by clicking on the IP address:

This is a useful tool for many reasons. What if you can't download the ShowIP extension? Well, there are other ways to try to get the ip address but they don't work as well. You can try pinging Google.com before searching, but the search may trigger a different IP address. Some suggest you can look at the cache URL's IP address, but that may not be 100% either.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

A new tool called Link Diagnosis has been released that allows you to examine your competition. The tool uses the Yahoo! API and according to Patrick Altoft who posted it to Sphinn, it's one of the "best link analysis tools I've seen."

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. There are a few bugs (this is brand new), but that's to be expected.

I have been running some tests on it and I really like the information it provides. I have experienced a few errors, which is to be expected, and I assume they will get straightened out. All in all I like what I see from it so far.

The findings can then be downloaded to CSV. Very cool.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator abbottsys started on a venture to make a tool to help AdWords advertisers automate the process of writing their AdWords ads. You can track the idea to the inception of the tool at the Search Engine Watch Forums thread.

As you might think, most people were skeptical, including the tool creator, abbottsys. But that didn't stop the idea.

The tool is now done and is named AdWords Analyzer. Instead of writing a whole ad, it offers keyword ideas for your text and gives you just the headline for your ad. Does it work well? Far from it.

Let's plug in my Custom Web Applications page from RustyBrick and see what it gives us:

It suggests: "Rustybrick Custom"

I would have been happier if the tool just picked my title tag, "Custom Web Applications" and then maybe add "Done Right" to the end. :)

Trust me, I know how hard it can be to automate the process. Google and Yahoo, I believe, both have tools to aid the advertiser in coming up with titles as well. The only way to do this, is to test by hand. Humans read titles, humans click on titles, humans should write the titles. Of course, using dynamic keyword insertion is the exception to all of this.

Forum discussion Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google seems to have updated the look of the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Here is a before shot:

And here are after shots:

Notice the new tab for "Website Content":

I believe the UK keyword tool has this design for a bit longer - not sure exactly how much longer.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I have been spotting threads over the course of the week that Yahoo's Overture Keyword Selection Tool is not loading for people. I tested it myself, and yes, it is not loading for me either.

This is nothing new with the tool. Yahoo has not been eager to support this tool since they have other tools in place within their Yahoo Search Marketing console that does similar tasks. In addition, the tool is a huge scraper graveyard, which requires huge server resources - something Yahoo probably doesn't want to invest in with this tool.

Here is a historical look at some of the problems we covered with this tool over the past year:

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? on January 29, 2007
• Overture Keyword Selection Tool Back Online on February 2, 2007
• New Free Yahoo! Keyword Tool Coming; Overture Keyword Tool Suffering; & Other Tools on January 31, 2007
• Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 2, 2007
• Yahoo To Stop Updating Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool on May 8, 2007
• Is Yahoo Working on New Keyword Tool with Search Volume Data? on May 10, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Seems Dead on September 17, 2007
• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has Returned on September 24, 2007

So now it is back offline, for the time being. Do we have alternatives? Of course!

A Cre8asite Forums thread lists a bunch of alternative solutions, including:

• http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
• https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
• http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2
• http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx
• http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
• http://www.seosleuth.com/site/www.seochat.com
• http://www.seodigger.com
• http://www.spyfu.com/
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

It appears that the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool has gone offline from yesterday evening to this morning.

Several reports from DigitalPoint Forums have confirmed the issue with the keyword tool.

If you have not used the tool, you should give it a try. It has come a long way since Google first released the tool.

The short 8 hours of the tool being offline really seemed to worry many advertisers and Webmasters.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports that Google is now updating their AdWords Traffic Estimator data monthly.

GuyFromChicago, a respected forum member, said;

Last week I received an e-mail from Google and one of the topics was the announcement that the traffic estimator stats are now updated monthly. The announcement read:

"Selecting new keywords to meet your campaign goals can be challenging, including the process of getting traffic and cost estimates on potential keywords. We are pleased to announce that traffic estimates are now being updated monthly. As a result, the data will be more accurate than it has been in the past. The specific date that the data will be updated will change from month to month."

I don't think making it more accurate would be all that difficult. When you start with "not at all accurate" it should be pretty easy to move to "a little better than before"

I wonder if advertisers will take notice.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Traditional bookmarking seems obsolete. Adding a bookmark to your browser, to many, is a practice that has been since seemingly replaced by newer methods -- social bookmarking sites, if you will.

However, not everyone is aware of these social bookmarking sites, nor are they ready to abandon their traditional methods of bookmarking. A Cre8asite Forums thread touches upon this subject. In the thread, administrator EGOL suggests that traditional means of bookmarking stay intact, and social bookmarking methods through sites like AddThis.com not necessarily be implemented -- or at least done as a secondary option.

This is exactly what other members agree is the right thing to do:

Absolutely. For most visitors bookmark this site means triggering a bookmark in their browser. I would add social bookmarking micro-icons for the rest. It also comes out as more honest.

The other angle is whether to have social bookmarking sites only, browser bookmarking only, both, or simply some text saying "hey, press Control-D to bookmark this!". IMHO, you need at the very least the Ctrl-D text and some of the social bookmarking sites.

For those not ready to jump into the social bookmarking realm, you should make sure that if you include a bookmarking option, your website accommodates these types of users.

Discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.

This article was written this past Monday and scheduled for publication on Wednesday, May 23rd.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has hearsay on Yahoo working on a new keyword tool that will show search volume data.

This has been sorely missed since Yahoo stopped updating the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool with search volume data.

I was talking to a rep at Yahoo! and voicing my concern about the removal of the Keyword Selector Tool removal and reinstatement. She told me that they are currently working on a new version of the tool that will retain the keyword search volume and introduce some more robust functionality as well.

But at the same time, a "platinum rep" told someone else that "thinking" about it, but have nothing started yet.

I personally have not heard more outside of what I posted here the other day. So I doubt they are currently working on a new keyword tool at this moment.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A WebmasterWorld thread reports that Yahoo! has removed the UK version of the Overture Keyword Suggestion tool.

The tool used to load over at http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ but now it appears to just time out for me and those trying to access it.

It may be just a server issue or it may be a sign that Yahoo will also be replacing this UK version with a new one. Which they promised us after taking the Overture US tool offline.

We know they will begin expanding the Panama solution to the UK soon.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: A reader commented explaining that Yahoo changed the URL of the tool to http://inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ the other day.

Continue reading "Yahoo! Removes UK Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool"

A WebmasterWorld thread reports a member seeing a new tab within the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The new tab is for "Negative Keywords" and reportedly "will come up with potential negative keywords for your campaign."

I hope to obtain a screen capture from the member who reported it and post it here, I will update this post if I get it.

The first feedback is:

What I really had hoped it would allow me to do is to use negative keywords right in the Keyword Variations tab, i.e., tell it I was targeting, say, [card games] and then add [-pokemon].

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Update: Here is the screen capture from "Winooski", a longtime WebmasterWorld user, thank you:

Full size screen capture here.

Are you a huge fan of Google's link tool? Would you like to see more details on the page, such as:

• PageRank score
• The anchor text of a link
• Which links are nofollowed
• Are the links still live
• Which links are images

If so, you can add a Greasmonkey script to your browser and the Google Webmaster Central Link tool page will automatically add this data to your reports.

Joost created this code, it is not supported by Google, but it seems cool to me. It adds many but not all, of the features I requested to be added to the Google tool.

You can get more information about the script here, I have yet to try it out myself.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Google released a Link Analysis Tool this Tuesday and the forums have had a couple days to digest the tool. I went through many of the forums and gathered all the feedback I can find in terms of suggestions to improve the tool. Here is what the forums had to say.

• Add an API to access the data
• Filter option by Recent Data Found
• Filter by Last Date Found
• Sort by Link Numbers
• Filter by PageRank Score
• Integrate with Google Analytics
• Open it for competitive analysis (not sure if this will happen)

Some additional ideas from me:

• Graph those links, bar graph to show links growing over time
• Filters for those graphs, to plot only PR # to # on that chart
• Filter the report that shows you new links (to see how many new links have a PR of # versus a PR of #)
• Anchor Text reports (show most popular anchor text used for your links)
• filter those by PR also, and other standard filters
• Outlink To Inlink Ratio Report Per Page
• Show Links by IP address and C-Block

Of course, just providing enough of this data and enabling us to export the data (as they do or add an API), then we can graph it ourselves.

This is an excellent tool, thanks again Google.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Search Engine Watch Forums, Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums and WebmasterWorld.

A Search Engine Watch Forums thread has links to several free and useful keyword suggestion tools that are still available to us. Remember last week, we discussed Yahoo!'s plans for a new keyword tool, Wordtracker opening a new free version of their tool and Overture keyword tool having issues. Here are some keyword research tools still available to you today, some from the thread and some I added.

• Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Google Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool
• Keyword Discovery Free Tool
• Google Trends
• DigitalPoint Keyword Suggestion Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

At least for now, the Overture Keyword Selection Tool is now back online, I think as of yesterday some time.

Monday we reported some sporadic reports of the tool going offline for a bit. Then on Wednesday we reported Yahoo!'s statement saying that the tool is basically dying and that Yahoo! is building a new one.

I suspect they fixed some of the issues now.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

Monday we reported that Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool Offline? YahooSarah replied to that at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums explaining that the Overture tool is having issues but they are not taking it down.

I wanted to confirm that YSM's public keyword research tool (formerly known as the Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool- KST) continues to exist today and will continue to exist until we replace it with an improved product. Unfortunately, the responsiveness of this free tool is diminished due to the volume of hits it receives each day, therefore browsers may time out and error pages may appear but it doesn’t mean that this tool has been removed.

We do have plans to offer a new public keyword research tool, which would be hosted through Yahoo! and available to our API partners. We plan on making this new tool available later this year.

If you are an advertiser, I'd suggest using the keyword research tool within our platform (the old or new one).

In her message, it is clear that Yahoo! will be focusing their efforts on a new keyword tool, as opposed to getting the Overture tool working consistently.

The new Yahoo! tool will have an API, that will enable developers to integrate right into their campaigns, so I look forward to it. But it appears that Yahoo! will not continue to fully support the old, Overture tool.

Aaron Wall reports that Wordtracker is now offering a new free version of their keyword tool at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/. Defintely worth bookmarking, in my opinion.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Not only can you check your Google web search rankings in any country, you can now check your rankings for image search, news search, video search and group search on any Google data center.

A new tool at http://oy-oy.eu/google/trydc/dc.aspx has a method for you to plug in a query URL at Google.com and hit submit, after specifying a Google data center.

Softplus, at Cre8asite Forums, who designed the tool said;

You can specify any C-Class datacenter (or all of them) and run a Google-query of your choice on it. It sends it through my server (so you'll have Swiss geotargeting) directly to that datacenter and returns the results just slightly adjusted (so that the links work and the images are displayed, optionally with the javascript removed). It won't give you any "secret information", but if you stumble upon a query that brings unexpected results, you can work out which datacenter it is and let other people use that datacenter directly (this is especially the case with image-search, though I have seen differences in video, news, froogle and even groups as well).

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

A Cre8asite Forum thread has a discussion on a new tool by oy-oy.eu that allows you to specify the location and data center you want to search in and it will show you a side by side comparison of your Google results between the two locations/data centers you selected.

The tool is located at http://oy-oy.eu/google/world/.

You type in a search query, then specify one set including a location and a data center. The available locations include; (local), Belgium, Canada, China, Denmarkm India, Iran, Italy, Korea, Latvia, Mexico, N/A, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, or Uruguay. There are a number of data centers to choose from as well.

Have questions or feature requests? Join the discussion at Cre8asite Forum.

Yahoo launched a new tool in the Korean domain named Webzari. What it does is use the Site Explorer data to map your inlinks on a map, in the form of planets. A link map, in a sense, with AJAX and more flavor.

You can check it out in action by clicking here.

Pretty cool and here is a screen capture.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Do you hate search spam? Do you report search spam often? Would you like to make reporting search spam easier? Well, if you answer yes to all or some of those questions, this tool may be of use to you. It combines all three spam reporting pages from Google, Yahoo and MSN all on one page. This way you can easily report the spam you find to all three search engines quickly. To be clear, this is a page with three frames loading the spam report page from each search engine. It is not a single form that then sends the data to each search engine. Forum discussion on this tool at DigitalPoint Forums.

Do you have a love/hate relationship with Google's PageRank? Do you find Yahoo's Web Rank to be a joke? Do you want to know, from an independent source how strong a page is in terms of Web popularity? Do you like Rand? If you answer yes to all or some of those questions, the new tool Rand released at SEOMoz named Page Strength Tool may fulfill your needs. Yesterday, I posted an interactive review of it at SEW blog, I will repost my video cast of it below. Forum discussion at DigitalPoint forum.

Continue reading "Quick Spam Reporting Tool & SEOMoz's Page Strength Tool"

Duplicate content issues are one of those plaguing issues that SEOs have to deal with often. Often, Webmasters are unaware they have a duplicate content issue until it is too late. Yes, by too late I mean, your pages are dwindling down in the index and your rankings suffer. So what can you do?

Well, there is a new tool out named Site Wide Duplicate Content Analyzer;

This tool crawls your entire site and then analyzes all your pages for duplicate content. It shows similarity percentage among all pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in major search engines and consequently they can penalize your site for duplicate content.

I didn't try it out myself, but give it a whirl. Any comments or feedback, discuss at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Cre8asite Forums has an excellent new thread named Keyword Research and Related Tools, What do you use? The thread contains many ideas for tools and common sense ideas. Here are some tools:

• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
• http://www.wordtracker.com/
• http://www.keywordsanalyzer.com/

Ammon Johns goes about it a different way. He takes out the old clipboard and pen and talks to people, actual people.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Text Link Ads launched a Text Link Ads Calculator that tells you the value of a link on a particular Web site. The price is derived based on Alexa ranking, link popularity, site theme, numbers of links available to be sold, sitewide versus single page link and most importantly, the location of the link on the page. The thing is, when you test it out on this site, you get the following prank!

There are several other examples of funny responses, including wolf-howl.com, seomoz.org, msn.com, davidnaylor.co.uk, shoemoney.com, text-link-ads.com, webguerrilla.com, and jeremy.zawodny.com. Also if a site is like a Google.com or Yahoo.com, you get the "Priceless!" response. As an FYI - SEW Blog is worth over 6k per month for a single link. More details at the link building blog.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

SEOjunkie posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums on a tool he built named the Google Ban Checker. The tool uses "typical checks like site: commands and it automatically checks the sites you link to to see if any of them are banned," according to SEOMoz.org.

It is also important to note that if you use Google Sitemaps, Google may also notify you of a penalty.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

I wanted to point you guys to a new service named the Click Fraud Index. In an SEW blog entry Danny Sullivan reports on some recent figures that put click fraud at 13.7 percent, industry-wide. The major problem is that we do not know how "click fraud" is defined in this index and which advertising networks they use to come up with the data exactly. Danny summarizes;

I didn't mean to say the the Click Fraud Index was offering up an industry wide statistics. I meant only to highlight that the data is specific to your particular network only.

Which received more criticism;

hese figures have to be vetted - how are they calculating the percentage, i.e. what does that represent?

For example, if 30% of the universe of all PPC clicks are fraudulent, and the publishers "catch" and don't bill for half of that 30%, then we would see 15% of advertiser traffic that is being billed for as fraudulent. Is that the figure they're talking about?

Or, is the percentage of fraudulent clicks 15% of the entire universe of clicks? And if so, then what percentage of those clicks are being billed for, and what aren't?

Also, how are they defining "click fraud"

So much methodology to vet.

There is a Search Engine Watch thread named Thoughts On New Click Fraud Index & Network? In that thread most are skeptical about the service. SEW moderator, Marcia says;

Brand new, multiple sites, no privacy policy in place. Nice setup for a data mining operation, eh?

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

There is a recent thread at DigitalPoint forums named Is Matt Cutts a part of the DP Coop? What is happening, is that some DigitalPoint Co-Op Advertisers are using some of their "link weight" to create text ads for Matt Cutts for the term, "search engine optimization." The links reportedly helped Matt Cutts blog earn first page rankings at Yahoo! and MSN Search.

I wonder if this is a good thing or bad thing for the network?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

There is a DigitalPoint Forum thread named that discusses a neat PageRank tool at http://www.webmastereyes.com/. The PageRank tool is different from others, in that it will enable you to plug in a URL and it will then place graphical PR bars on all the links you have on that page. For example, I plugged in my corporate site's sitemap and it told me the PR values of all my pages on my site (since all my pages are listed in my sitemap. On the right hand side, is an image of how they plotted my PR values over my left hand side navigation.

Back to the PageRank debate. I do not believe it is worth much in terms of ranking. Google does claim that PR affects your crawl frequency. And when everything else is equal, you have to assume PageRank makes the difference. But when is everything else equal in our world?

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

AdSense Publishers who are serious about making big bucks with Google AdSense tend to be aggressive with the managing sites they do not want to show up in their ads. There was even a small unscientific study, where a WebmasterWorld member tested removing his AdSense filters and noticed a downward affect on his revenues. I was skimming Cre8asite Forums and found a thread named Adsense Black List, interesting.... The thread is probably at several other forums, but I found it here first.

It links to a tool at http://www.adsenseblacklist.com/ that helps you generate an AdSense filter for your industry. The tool will "filter low paying google ads which link to MFA (Made for Adsense) sites AND we will provide you with tools that will help you to substantly increase your AdSense revenue, all for free." You can even submit your own list to help the rest of the AdSense publishers.

Ah, but is there any concern for blocking your competitors unfairly on all other sites? Time will tell.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

Update to this service under AdSense Black List Revisted.

This week Google introduced Google Finance, which has been getting a lot of attention. They also added a feature named global trends to AdWords keyword tool. I have not seen anyone discuss the fact that Google Finance has added the ability to search and filter news volume over time, just like keyword data over time with global trends.

I was doing some playing with a client of mine, Jennifer Convertibles, Inc. (Public, AMEX:JEN) at Google Finance. I then clicked over to the more news items and found news items put into folders by month. So then I tried the same thing for a company that is more in the news, Yahoo and notice the graph on the top left of the page. It says, "News Volume (90 days)," plus links to articles by month. You can click on the graph columns to sort news by that time period.

This, I would imagine, can be used for search term research, much like the global trends tool can be used for financial research - if you get what I mean. Anyway, I thought this was a nice little feature of Google Finance and I wanted to bring it to light.

I added this detail to our thread on the topic at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

If you are still a PageRank follower, then you will love this tool named live pagerank. Live PageRank lists out a domain's PageRank value over, currently, 78 different Google data centers.

For example, the PageRank of seroundtable.com is a PR 7 but also a PR6 at some of the older data centers.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.

Very rarely will I publicly oust a particular piece software or spyware I think is rather bad. Most SEO tools are usually written to help people with their SEO projects and can provide some assistance in helping people acheive good rankings. I have never been bullish on the benefits of using SEO software but I do think it has some value for certain people.

For the last couple years I have had people email asking me whether or not I would review there SEO software and provide some feedback. I usually will provide some comments and test out the program. I install the software and test it out and then proceed to uninstall it after I am done. Someone contacted about a review for WeblinkSEO. I installed the program, tested it out, wasn't impressed, and that was the end of it. I forgot to uninstall it. After a period of a couple months, I found the program and have been through hell trying to uninstall the sucker. Basically it will not. It was coded by someone who didn't know what they were doing.

After closer inspection I found the little program has overwritten my environmental variables in Windows XP, including the system variables and values. This is critical stuff, software should not mess with it! Where there should have been "%SystemRoot%" and so on there was paths to the weblinkseo software in there. After deleting those, and fixing the paths. I tried to remove the program with Add and Remove Programs. No luck, it only asked me whether I wanted to delete it from the list. After that I found the folder in which it was installed, it took a couple attempts to uninstall the software and finally hard delete the left over junk the program left behind, I think I got it. Well so I thought, until I found the program was in my temp folder too. Delete. Success, no traces left.

So my warning, is to be very careful about the SEO programs you install. Its common to be suspious of any free software, but being that its SEO software you may not be aware of what it is actually installing and how difficult it can be to get off. SEO software will rarely if ever be the reason you obtained those high rankings in Google. There is no magic bullet and software that claims to be is just lying to you.

Update (11-20-06): The developer recently updated me on the status of WeblinkSEO and has stated the "software will no longer write to your system's environmental variables and the uninstaller will remove all traces of the software". They have made a good effort to fix any past problems with the software and I believe it should be okay to install the program and use it. They have also mentioned the software received a "major overhaul and [they have] added some new tools".

Basically, you install a firefox extension and then mouse over links, the little contextual pop up shows you inlinks via Google, Yahoo and MSN, plus the ranking of the site based on that anchor text.

Very smart tool, creative... Available for download at http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.

SEOmoz reports on a Dodge the Sandbox for $79... Is this for real? which links to an SEO Chat thread named RankAttack/SEO Sandbox Tool Advisory. It discusses a tool named RankAttack which claims to have a product that gets you out of the Google Sandbox (see page at http://www.savemoneyfast.com/sandbox.htm).

This is the product offering:

This software was designed using Google's new relevancy models and patents. The technology used in this software is brand new and no other software package offers it. First understand that the most important attribute your site can have, in the eyes of every search engine, is relativity. SandBox received its name from one of Google's new secret weapons, the SandBox filter. The new Google filter sends all new websites into the garbage can for an unknown period of time -- and it also places websites that have been abused or have low quality into the garbage can. This means, no matter what, your website cannot get listed with Google on any keyword that gets decent traffic. Hundreds of search engines are adapting this concept and it is becoming quite a problem. RankAttack's SandBox software can get your website off this list and much more.

The thread links to a blog entry which explains how this software works.

The means by which the software appears to increase "...popularity..." is by submitting a massive amount of queries to each search engine in its database by taking the url and keywords provided. The algorithim used is apparently a trivial combinitoric permutation of submitting search queries in a cascading manner to each engine by spoofing the HTTP REFERRER from another engine in a fashion similar to spanning trees. This manner is of questionable ethics and even more questionable in results given the simplicity of the algorithim.

Not good, not good at all.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

Today, I had a need to take several permutations of keyword phrases and bulk them together for a PPC campaign. So I had one of my developers build a tool I named Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator Tool.

What does it do?
Given a set of primary keywords:

example: vanilla,chocolate chip,strawberry

example: ice cream,cakes,candy,ices

example: colored sprinkles,chocolate sprinkles,syrup,whipped cream

You can generate a full set of permutations for those 3 sets of keyword phrases. Final list would look something like:

vanilla ice cream colored sprinkles,vanilla ice cream chocolate sprinkles,vanilla ice cream syrup,vanilla ice cream whipped cream,vanilla cakes colored sprinkles,vanilla cakes chocolate sprinkles,vanilla cakes syrup,vanilla cakes whipped cream,vanilla candy colored sprinkles,vanilla candy chocolate sprinkles,vanilla candy syrup,vanilla candy whipped cream,vanilla ices colored sprinkles,vanilla ices chocolate sprinkles,vanilla ices syrup,vanilla ices whipped cream,chocolate chip ice cream colored sprinkles,chocolate chip ice cream chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip ice cream syrup,chocolate chip ice cream whipped cream,chocolate chip cakes colored sprinkles,chocolate chip cakes chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip cakes syrup,chocolate chip cakes whipped cream,chocolate chip candy colored sprinkles,chocolate chip candy chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip candy syrup,chocolate chip candy whipped cream,chocolate chip ices colored sprinkles,chocolate chip ices chocolate sprinkles,chocolate chip ices syrup,chocolate chip ices whipped cream,strawberry ice cream colored sprinkles,strawberry ice cream chocolate sprinkles,strawberry ice cream syrup,strawberry ice cream whipped cream,strawberry cakes colored sprinkles,strawberry cakes chocolate sprinkles,strawberry cakes syrup,strawberry cakes whipped cream,strawberry candy colored sprinkles,strawberry candy chocolate sprinkles,strawberry candy syrup,strawberry candy whipped cream,strawberry ices colored sprinkles,strawberry ices chocolate sprinkles,strawberry ices syrup,strawberry ices whipped cream

We also gave you the ability to choose the syntax you prefer. Google AdWords; Broad Match, Exact Match or Phrase Match AND SEO Types; Title Tags, META Keyword Tags, H1 Tags.

Try out the Dynamic Keyword Phrase Generator Tool when you like. Coming soon, a way to send all those keywords to your AdWords campaign via the Google API. Feedback requested here.

Back link analysis tools are some of the most interesting to look at. I have built one, that I am not sure if it works anymore, on August 11, 2004. Since then, Google messed up the link command to show a "sampling" of all links to a particular page. So the scraper tools came back.

Anyway, Aaron Wall, from SEO Book, released a new tool last week he named Back Link Analyzer Link Popularity Software (Beta). I gave it a quick try and its pretty cool, its a lot like the OptiLink Software but free. Aaron is asking for feedback for ways to improve the product.

I am sure when Yahoo! Site Explorer comes out, it will lead to ways to improve Aaron's tool.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

A tool for the crazed PageRank fan. Thought this tool was quite neat and deserved a quick mention for sheer creativity. This was mentioned on Digitalpoint yesterday. You can do some nifty things with flash, but as far SEO Tools go you don't seem to run into a large amount of them. This little tool is not too much different then a tool that tells you your PageRank, however it allows you to organize your sites (with PR information) in a visual network and then correspondingly connect them with arrows. You can move them around like cards, connect them or not, and even delete them by throwing them in a trash can.

I honestly think this tool should be renamed as the makers might not have thought of its other uses. Having a tool tell your pagerank is pretty boring these days. However, from the standpoint of ease of use in working with external linking networks this tool could be useful with the addition of some more information in creating diagrams for use in SEO. Backlink information could also be useful with this. Overall though a fun tool to play with.

Check it out at PageRank Decoder

SEOmoz, randfish, created an SEO Quiz, in reaction to the SEW thread asking you to Vote for the Most Knowledgeable SEW Forum Member. If you look at the Leaderboard, you will see some well known forum member's names. I personally find the "texas holdem - spammer ;)" link to be funny.

Forum discussion on this started mid-way in the thread linked to above. I think it is a fairly good quiz, I have some suggestions for revising some of the questions and answers. Danny Sullivan has his ideas as well, including "I want more. I want a news quiz each month."

DigitalPoint's popular and free Coop Advertising Network has under gone a major change.

(1) Everyone's "weight" number has been substantially reduced. It does not mean that you are losing the number of ad impressions, but rather that the actual "weight" number displayed is lower. Impressions will change, but not at the scale of the "weight" number.

Everyone's weight is a LOT lower (weight is relative to everyone else, so it won't affect what counts... ad impressions). The total weight of the system was reduced by more than 6x, so the sky is not falling or any other doomsday scenarios.

(2) There used to be a weight cap, where large sites were unable to benefit from normal sites. For example, "with the cap removed, you are saying that above 4,500 pages (or whatever it was) there will be more weight given...just at a lower marginal rate."

Weight caps have been removed, so there is no upper limit on the amount of weight a single account can have from a single site. I've been tinkering with the formula for a few weeks, and I think it's pretty good right now. It's a logarithmic (not linear) scale, so enormous sites (there are some with 1M+ pages of content in the network) aren't going to take an absurd percentage of total impressions.

Just in case you were freaking out about your lowered weight, you do not need to anymore. Forum discussion at DigitalPoint under the title Weight Formula Changed.

A new site was released the other day named GoogSpy which boosts of being a "Adwords Competitor Research" tool. I did a search on rustybrick and then clicked on the rustybrick.com result on the left under companies. This tool informed me that I rank #3 for "dynamic web sites", #9 for "pagerank" and #10 for "web development services" and "web definitions". I am sure I rank well for other competitive terms, or maybe not. But it is clear that I do bid on AdWords for rustybrick, see my AdWords Ad on the right. So it seems that currently the GoogSpy still needs some more development and testing.

However, the press release does boast of being able to easily figure out what ones competitors are bidding on at AdWords. "It also displays the search terms that they naturally rank in the top ten and it even computes the company's top 25 competitors."

Forum discussion at SEO Chat.

Over the past few months we have been listing to your feedback and developing our system to what our members have asked for. We invite you to log into Seotie and look at our most recent additions to the service in helping you in all your webmaster and seo tasks. Seotie monitors and notifies upon inclusion into directories monitoring for you so you can keep track of your sites without wasting your time checking daily.

Seotie Features:
Support for the most popular Internet directories - DMOZ, Yahoo!, Google, Tygo
Batch Submit and Update - Submit and setup all of your sites at once, make mass changes
Automated Category Discovery - Find out if your domain is addded to a new category, without lifting a finger
Detailed Activity Reports - Complete and customizable reports that are ready for print

The new Seotie directory monitoring algorithm provides faster and more accurate results with full additional directory support, so as a SEO or webmaster, you can trust that you will be kept up to date on your diverse directory exposure strategies. Presently, Seotie remains a free service with advanced features and customer support for premium members. If you haven't taken a look recently in what Seotie has to offer or you need to update the websites your are monitoring, you can simply log in to http://www.seotie.com

A Seotie premium membership is currently only twenty dollars for one year of service (that's about five cents a day). Premium memberships are what makes it possible to continue developing the system and adding additional features. For this small fee you can take advantage of all of Seotie's features that will your life easier and more productive.

Thank you!

http://www.seotie.com

WeBuildPages is at it again, they released what they call a Deep Link Ratio Calculator that basically "analyzes how the deep link ratio of a site affects its rank in search engines." "A website's deep link ratio is the comparison of the number of backlinks that go to pages under the top level of the website to the total number of backlinks for the entire website."

Here is a test I ran:

Results
Keyword Phrase: search engine marketing

You do not often find someone posting a tool that was built specifically to spam the search engine results at a forum that is widely viewed by search engine reps. Member, JasonD posted a thread at Search Engine Watch named *cough* Spammer Tool? that announces the beta testing of his new spamming tool he named Widget Baiting. Personally, I love the name. He defines Widget Bating as;

Widget Baiting is to construct content with the aim of luring search engine spiders to your widget pages, on your widget site enabling a quality of content to be indexed that if written manually would not deliver a meaningful return on investment. Widget baiting is commonly used by search engine spammers in conjunction with cloaking, although has been known to reduce the time in constructing quality content for real people to read as well.

What does the tool do? You feed it a single page of content, it will then create a hundred or so similar pages with different flavors of those keywords you are targeting. It basically uses some sort of synonym database to replace words on the page with similar words. This way you can quickly create all sorts of landing pages targeting each individual keyword phrase combination. As Jason said "Widget baiting is commonly used by search engine spammers in conjunction with cloaking." Normally, one would want to cloak these pages, so the search engines get them but the end user gets the real page.

The link building team at WeBuildPages is up to it again. During their daily link building efforts and theme song creatives, they found the time to build a Query Combination Tool.

It is extremely useful when you want to find two permutations quickly in the search engines. So for example, if you want to find matches for the main phrases:
Travel
Lodging
Real Estate
Florida
Timeshares

And combine those phrases with:
add url
directory
submit your site
resources
sponsors

This way you can easily locate sites you can submit to that are related to your site.

I love free SEO tools, most often times the ones that actually do something for you. I came across some tools today, that I thought I would mention to help you in your SEO efforts and in determining the performance of your Adsense campaigns. Both tools were made for public use, so don't worry you don't have to give up a dime for them. However I do imagine the creators wouldn't mind some feedback or "links" for their use. Liked them? Hated them? Let us know in the comments.

Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Checker

A member on SEOchat today released a tool that checks the backlinks of a site in Yahoo and reports back on the anchor text used in each of the links. Not only is this good for looking at your own backlinks, but even better when it comes to watching what you competition is up too. Stick in a site you are interested to learn about and find what their backlinks say. You might be surprised at the result. Initially this tool performed well after a few tests, but started to lag after a couple pages of data.
Check it out at: Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Checker - Dicussion at SEOchat

Revenue Checker for Adsense

This is a handy tool, do those that want to passively monitor their Adsense campaigns. I haven't downloaded it myself yet, but its seems to getting some positive feedback from members in the major forums. Screen shots look great, and this tool pass over the username and password from Google to the tool to provide the nifty charts and graphs. Concerned about security of your password, I was, so I checked into it. Apparently in the most recent update of this tool the security loophole as reported on WMW has been fixed, so its now fit for public use. About the tool from their website:

Revenue Checker is allowing Google AdSense publishers to check their AdSense revenue and detailed statistics in either specific time intervals or manually with single click option. Revenue Checker creates numeric, as well as graphic output to all statistics, including channels.

Last night I was notified by Jim from We Build Pages that they have developed a useful, and I find, interesting, tool named C Class Backlink Analyzer Tool. You basically need to plug in a domain name and wait about 3 minutes for it to run.

It breaks down the count of links you have by C class and gives you the specific domain names that link to you. Then at the end of the report, it summarizes its findings. For this specific site, here is the summary.

Results Summary
The first 1000 backlinks found come from
223 unique domain names (2 of which are invalid),
177 unique IP addresses, and
170 unique C classes.

The ratio of unique domain names to number of backlinks is 223 to 1000, or 22.30%.
The ratio of unique IP addresses to number of backlinks is 177 to 1000, or 17.70%.
The ratio of unique C classes to number of backlinks is 170 to 1000, or 17.00%.

Huge news for those who love API based keyword tracking tools, DigitalPoint has added support for Yahoo! and MSN results. I believe the MSN tracking component is through the RSS feed supported at MSN and Yahoo! is through the new API (but you might need to host something on your side because of the IP based limitation). I know Shawn has been working on this for a week or so, and now its here. I was notified this morning of it, while it was being tested and now its public.

Thread with more details over at DigitalPoint Forums.

Shawn told me some more information regarding the Yahoo! component:

I give users a PHP script they can plop on any server that supports PHP. The requests are then seen as coming from the user's server.


Nice also because International users always want to see results as a German user sees them for example... so this solves that problem too... if the user uses the script, MSN and Yahoo are enabled... but also Google queries go through their script

Again, sorry for the quick post, crazy day.

Gary Price over at the Search Engine Watch Blog writes an entry named A Week After Launch Yahoo! Search Developer Network Lists More than 20 Applications, where he lists several tools that were already developed using the new Yahoo! API.

Here is one such tool that you guys might find useful.

Yahoo Link Pop Checker. Of course, you must download it and install it on your machine, because Yahoo! limits queries by IP address as opposed to by key. So if it was hosted, it simply would not work for you.

I am actually bugging some of my Yahoo! contacts to hook me up with a large volume of queries, so I can build you guys a free nice fancy tool. Wish me luck.

The popular DigitalPoint Ad Network has reached a new level of popularity. People are actually advertising it on Google's AdWord network for certain keyword phrases. The reason they advertise it, is because they get "referral credit" for everyone they refer. So the cost per click pays based on the rankings it produces organically for the user who is paying for the ad.

I believe the keyword this individual was bidding on was good cpm banner network, the ad does not come up anymore. For a screen capture see here and for the forum thread visit DigitalPoint Forums.

I think Text Link Ads is an incredibly smart company when it comes to marketing. Not just because they are a long time sponsor of this site, but also because they are one of the most visible companies in the SEO industry. The latest marketing ploy Text Link Ads went into was announced today in a entry named Threadwatch to Build Killer Link Analysis Tool, Give it Away Free. Nick Wilson says that:

* TLA pay for the initial development
* JasonD and DaveN provide the programming and technical expertise respectively
* We ask you what features you want in a dream link analysis tool
* We build it, based on your input
* We give it away for FREE

It is going to be free! I spoke with Patrick Gavin over at Text Link Ads and he told me that "the specs will be built based on what the community wants it to be. We believe it will be the best link analysis tool on the market and the best part is it will be 100% FREE."

On a side note: I have built my own Advanced Link Analysis Tool but it only uses the Google API and I haven't tested it out in a really long time.

To celebrate the historic event of the 20,000th registered user for DigitalPoint's Keyword Tracker, he integrated a geeky product named Ambient Orb with the keyword tracking tool. I just bought an orb, its damn cool for a geek like me, but it has a programming defect, I need to ship it back to Ambient to get fixed.

So how does it work with the keyword tracker?

The manufacturers offer a developer kit/API to control any orb that has been setup for developer access. So, for pure geek factor, we've setup an option in the keyword tracker to automatically update your orb based on your ranking movements for the day. The greener the better your rankings are doing. The redder the orb, the worse they are doing. After you run a "Check All" for your keywords, the keyword tracker sends an update signal to your orb with the appropriate color.

Forum thread at DigitalPoint Forums.

I personally will be having this programmed with my internal custom project management system as an employee motivational tool.

Someone create a search tool that uses Google's engine for results but the catch is, it pairs up those who search on similar topics and lets you initiate a Web chat with them. I guess the concept behind this is that those who are searching on the same topic, might want to discuss those concepts interactively.

This tool is named Chat'N Search.

Forum discussion and poll at Search Engine Watch Forums.

PrioritySubmit announced last night the launch of a new forum for its customer base. The reasons behind the new forum include:

• better respond and address feedback and suggestions left in the forum.
  
• quickly and easily reply to any support questions that you may have in regards any of our services.
  

There are 3 main forum sections covering:
- Prioritysubmit.com
- Keyworddiscovery.com
- Overture Site Match

The forum can be found at http://www.prioritysubmit.com/forum/.

A thread on Highrankings today asked about available SEO project management applications that can help manage a wide variety SEO clients and projects. I had spent 6 months last year developing a web-based SEO project management tool that is currently being used internally by an SEO company. Unfortunately it's not currently available to the public. However there are some available tools out there that could help SEO's better manage their clients and ongoing projects.

One of the members Bernard, goes into detail about the various project management systems out there. He recommends that you need to "define the features that you require and then search for the package that addresses those needs". Now considering the following to define the type of application you need:

Critical Path / Critical Chain Scheduling - These are designed to define logic networks for planned tasks and produce time phased schedules for organizing/prioritizing the work. MS Project falls in this group.
Calendar Based Systems - These are calendar based task organizers like electronic versions of a Franklin Planner.
Collaboration Based Systems - These often resemble a mix of calendar based systems, a forum and a document management system. They are designed to allow a project team to coordinate projects where the scope of work is more fluid.

Once you define your type of software, try searching some of the available project management applications and directories with lists of those available.

http://www.web-based-software.com/ - Directory of Web-Based Project Management Software
http://home.houston.rr.com/interplan/ - Comprehensive directory of windows based project management software
http://www.basecamphq.com - Specific recommended web-based project management software

During all this buzz on desktop search over the past 3 - 6 months, there was no one who came out with a solution for the poor, unknown Apple Macintosh user. I admit, I am a Mac user - never really use a search function to find things on my computer, I keep everything pretty organized. Andy Beal reports on a report by C|Net that Blinkx is to launch a Mac desktop search appliance. Blinkx has on their Web site a little message that reads "blinkx is currently not available for Macintosh, but due to your requests, we're working on it!" But as the article says, Google also said they are working on it.

Anyway, I probably will download it to test it out and then never use it again. However, when Tiger is released, I am sure I will test out spotlight and use it maybe once every two months. Who knows, maybe I will become disorganized like the Web and need to search to find where I put a client's contract or a specification I wrote several months ago.

Dan Thies, a guest author here, and owner of SEO Research Labs, has announced a new program this morning. The program is named SEO Coaching Program, and is given personally by Dan Thies.

I spoke with Dan about this program at SES Chicago 04', he was very excited about it. To me it sounds like an awesome opportunity for many to get to speak with him one on one about SEO topics. I just received his email newsletter with the details. Here is an excerpt:

The first of these is a very exciting new coaching and training program for site designers and SEO/SEM consultants, to help you grow your business in 2005. About half of the program will focus on SEO and pay-per-click specifically, to help you deliver better results, and the other half will dig deep into how you can supercharge your SEO business in 2005.

More details on the coaching program are available at http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/seo-course.php - space is limited so if you think you might want to participate please take a look today. I would hate for any of you to be left out, but we do need to open up enrollment pretty quickly.

The wonderful and patient people over at Conversion Chronicles has given me permission to post their e-book named Learn Before You Spend. I have read most of the e-book and it is incredibly comprehensive. I would be interested in your feedback and I know they would love to hear some feedback on it.

So feel free to download Learn Before You Spend as a gift for you from Conversion Chronicles.

The sandbox has been hampering SEO efforts as far back as before April of 2004. Our first official coverage of what was later to be termed as the "sandbox effect" was on April 17th in an entry named New Sites = Poor Results in Google which linked to the first large thread on the topic at WebmasterWorld. Since then we mentioned sandbox here over 25 times.

A forum individual who pretty much has been dedicating most of his time towards uncovering the sandbox theory has developed a tool named Sandbox Detection Tool which does its best to "calculate factors commonly associated with being under Google's "sandbox" penalty." The inventor of the tool, randfish, removed the link to this tool temporarily while he makes some minor modification based on the feedback at an SEO Chat Thread.

For those of you that have been reading this site for a while now, you will know the name Digital Point. In fact, back in July I interviewed Shawn Hogan of Digital Point, because, whether he admits it or not, he has been instrumental in helping the SEO community grow with his onslaught of free SEO tools. Keep in mind, that Shawn doesn't build tools that are already out there, like most of us. He is an inventive individual, coming up with new ideas that solve problems.

In early July of 2004, I announced the Digital Point Ad Network with a quote from Shawn. The goal was simple, to do something with the "ton of unused advertising space out there on the Internet." Webmasters can serve up none JavaScript required ads to a wide spread of Internet surfers. At first the network was small, under 100 sites, under 500 sites, and even under 1,000 sites. But then the network starting taking off, and there were those who tried to take advantage of it to rank well for keywords in the "PPC" category (Porn, Pills and Casinos). Of course, Shawn does his best to make sure the links within the network are all from sites that are not associated with "bad neighborhoods" but the job is getting bigger.

A thread (I am not sure what to call it, a blog) at ThreadWatch has been the location of much chatter on this network. You have those who are worried about the network being mapped by Google and then anyone involved would be banned from Google. But if you look at the network carefully, you will notice some things.
(1) The network uses the Google API to determine if the pages with the ads on them are spam free. If Google has them in the index, they will be allowed in. Thus and pages that are spam, as defined by Google, will not be allowed in the network.
(2) Shawn personally reviews all the ads requested. Of course this job gets harder every day, as the network grows. He will be signing on volunteers to help review ads.
(3) People do the bait and switch tactic, and Shawn has caught a few and banned them from the network. Again, as the network grows, this will be more of a resource challenge. Part of the volunteers jobs will be to review existing ads on a continual basis. I would think Shawn will add a "report spam" page.
(4) Contextual based ads. Relevancy of the ads are important to those advertising and the publishers. At the beginning, it was a small group of individuals participating in the ad network, so relevancy was kind of there just do to the small network of people involved. As the network grows, Shawn will be adding contextual based algorithms to serve up ads that are related to the site. It was the natural next step for the ad network and it is going that way, soon.

GoogleGuy commented early during that thread saying:

But I'm saying that participation in a program that leads one to link to a site with pages (or the hidden text links I mentioned earlier) can directly impact the reputation of one's own site. If people realize that and want to take that risk, that's their choice of course.

I thought it was very smart of Shawn to use the Google index (API) to determine what ads and sites are allowed in the index. That is not enough, and I agree with GoogleGuy. If bad neighborhoods and hidden text links get into the network, then the network will die. But I am eager and excited to see what Shawn comes up with next in order to reduce the risk of being associated with such a network. He is a bright man, so this does intrigue me.

As Aaron Wall noted "Jim at WeBuildPages created a tool which shows the unique linking inboud domains." The tool checks unique linking domains, ip addresses and the age of those domain names. It can be found at http://www.555webtemplates.com/backlinks-tool.asp.

Last summer, during the San Jose SES conference, Trellian announced a keyword research tool at Priority Submit, it now goes under the name of Keyword Discover.com. Many keyword research specialists, including Dan Thies.

Recently, Trellian announced a Keyword Discovery API. I am sure you crazy coders and search enthusiasts will love this flexibility. Personally, I am thinking up ideas on how I can use this to provide fun and useful tools for the community. Forum discussion on this topic at High Rankings.

As Danny Sullivan said at his blog entry, "Search engines have generally disliked rank checking tools, so what a surprise to read on the official MSN Search Blog a tip about one." After all the heat I got from Google for using their API to make a rank checking tool, MSN search comes out and publicly tells people about these wonderful tools that screen scrap their beta msn search engine. I like their attitude. :)

In an effort to see what others think about this topic, I posted a thread at SEW forums named MSN Loves Screen Scraping Applications. Or feel free to drop a comment, if it gets through the spam filter checking.

This entry is in response to an article named Google Sandbox: Solved? by Brian Turner. Of course, by the name of the title, he is representing that he is not sure that his theory of solving the sandbox is correct or not. I am here to tell you that it is not correct.

The basic theory, to my understanding, is the by utilizing the Free Coop Ad Network by DigitalPoint, you will be able to get your site out of the sandbox. The reason behind it is that because the text ads that you set up, are found on a wide range of diverse sites, most with a respected level of PageRank. Brian compares his link selling service to the coop network in an effort to explain why his service is not working as much as he would like. He says that since his link service does not allow you to place links on higher PageRank'ed pages, your links remain in the Sandbox. Whereas, DigitalPoints free network, does allow your ads to be found on high PageRank'ed pages.

I was the first person to sign up with DigitalPoint's network, besides for DigitalPoint himself. I have a lot of experience with the network, are strongly recommend it. If you have an existing site that is a year or more aged, then the network can do wonders for you. I rank for keywords I would have dreamed to link for. I have tested brand new pages on old domain names. I have tested extremely competitive keywords as well. It is possible to achieve the rankings you want with this network, if you have a site or two that has its own weight.

I do not believe that the Sandbox has to do with links, themselves. People feel a new link is sandboxed. Also people think that a new URL is sandboxed. I think the sandbox goes on the domain name. I have tested the other variables and strongly believe its a new domain name issue.

I have sent links to new domain names with the DigitalPoint network and did not rank well for those keywords. Then I created similar pages, targeted the same keyword, but on an existing domain name (unsandboxed name) and I achieved top rankings for that keyword. The network will not get your site out of the sandbox, but it will help get your unsandboxed site in the top results.

Side note: Sorry for the quick entries today, I am out at meetings all day. I have a 30 minute break, where I wrote these past entries. Expect more later, thanks.

There is a thread just getting started over at Cre8asite named Managing a Link Development Campaign, where some suggestions in regards to tools to manage the link building process are listed. Feel free to list some here as well.

Some listed include:
- Download.com Listing
- Zeus
- ARELIS

Link building is very important if you want to rank well for competitive keywords. Back in July I mentioned a new resource that DigitalPoint came up with, in an entry I named Free Coop Advertising Network. This network has really taken off and I have done many test cases with it. Bottom line is that this network works well. Let me explain.

You set up the ads to run on your site and based on several criteria, including the number of your pages found in the Google index, you will get a fair number of ads pointing back to your site. This network works off of a weight system, the higher your weight points, the more ads you have pointing to your site with any desired link text or image banner ad you want.

DP recently added the ability to add up to five banners on one page, that means more weight for those who participate in this network. Of course he limited the number of ads to 5 and each additional ad is worth less. So if you have 3 ads, each worth 1 point, then you will have a total sum of 2.4 points for that page, it diminishes as you add banners to your pages. More on how this works at the forum post named Multiple Ads Per Page.

If you want to sign up for this network, please use my affiliate link, you see, he even programmed in referral weight. Cool, ehh? Sign Up for the Coop Advertising Network >>

Jim, from WeBuildPages, has released a tool named Top 10 Google Analysis. This tool "will fetch the top 10 sites for that phrase and show you analysis of statistics for that search phrase, as well as for the URL (if you entered one)."

Make sure to check it out!

Toogle, a funny application that uses Google's Image Search, queries Google's image search for the first result matching your keyword phrase. Then it reads the image and translates it into text, the same text you used to enter the query box. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out at Toogle Image Search.

Here is an example of a search on rustybrick logo gif.

This is a self-promotional post, but I think it will be useful to most of the readers. Back on July 12th, I announced the Free Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool we made available at my corporate site. Then I decided, wouldn't it be useful if this data could be stored and then looked at later. In addition, wouldn't cool graphs with link data be cool to be charted? I thought so. So I built a new product to my SEO Count Web site. So now there is a Google Keyword Reporting Tool, which I use almost every day AND a Google Link Analysis & Popularity Tool which is wild.

Some of the cool features include:
- detailed link analysis (anchor texts, page ranks, ip look ups, and much more)
- link comparison graphs
- filtering options (by pagerank, anchor text, domains, and more)
- i can go on forever.

Anyway, if your interested, check out the paid version at http://www.seocount.com/link-tool.php. It uses the Google API and here is a cool example graph.

This afternoon at the Advanced Search Term Research Issues SES session, Trellian was asked to step up to the podium and speak about its new keyword research tool they named Priority Submit. It looked impressive. It is the only tool of its kind for this price, free. Dan Thies had great things to say about this in the forums and to me at the conference (he by the way is coming out with a neat tool as well - more on that in a week or so). Andy Beal said the tool is great as well but he said it looks like there are some minor flaws in it (but still a great tool for what it does). So here are some screen shots and my thoughts on the tool.

I did a search on the keyword "web development" and it shows number of searches and suggested alternatives to that keyword. The cool thing is that they have been collecting 12 months of search data. So you can see the number of search over the past 12 months. Great for seasonal search words, like they demoed on "valentines". But I did a search on "web development" not a seasonal term, I think (Dan or Andy can you verify?). Why in May would there only be only be 5,000 searches but in February there would be almost 20,000 more searches on "web development". Seem to me to be a bit wild. A similar historical chart came up for "web design". Well actually, I just tried the keyword "tuxedos" and there was a similar pattern. I guess May data was lost? :)

Anyway, it has other features and seems to be a neat tool.

View Large Image

Try it out, it is free at http://www.prioritysubmit.com/.

Okay, the Earth may only be shaking quietly right now, but just wait. This is the biggest news in SEO all year. If anyone wants to argue with that, tough.

Trellian has just released the beta version of their keyword research database / tool. Their database includes over 9 billion search terms, and a full year's worth of history.

Yes, a full year's worth of history, so you can see how many people searched for "chocolate bunny rabbit" in March, or "college football picks" in September. Seasonality is finally, at long last, no longer the biggest problem in keyword research.

Everyone wave your hands in the air and say, "Thanks, Trellian!" Currently, access to the tool is free, but you do have to register (free) for a PrioritySubmit account. I'm so happy I might even pay to have a URL included somewhere!

Quick one, as there isn't much to say about it, but I was bored today and threw together a PageRank Toolbar widget for Mac...

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

I wanted a tool to analyze my links and the value of those links to a specific page. So I built one. I named it the Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool. This tool basically looks at all your links for a specific page (the links are determined based on the link command in Google) and analyzes them for anchor text, pagerank and more. Why Google? Well, they are the only one that offers a free API to "ethically" obtain the data. Of course that limits you to 1,000 queries per day (or 10,000 backlinks) but we are going to make a paid version that allows you to run a single report over multiple days.

The free reports show PageRank data, internal and external link counts, anchor text weights, class C IP reporting and much more.

Check out the Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool today, please leave your comments below on the tool. Thank you.

Oh, if you have a lot of backlinks, the analysis can take a while to run.

A new tool, hasn't been done before, unique, great idea and also free. Guess who made this tool? Yup, DigitalPoint. What is it? "The ad network is a network of site owners that offer ad space to the network. In return, the ads they define are displayed across the entire network."

In fact, I am running it on this site right now. See the 3rd sponsored link on the left navigation bar? Well, that is from this network. You can do graphical ads, banner text ads or simple plain text ads.

Benefits of this program? "Because there is a ton of unused advertising space out there on the Internet, and I have not seen anyone else doing anything like this. It's easy to put 50,000 of your own ads on your own site, but there is much more value if you put your ad 50 times on 1,000 sites."

Alright, you want more information?

- Sign Up (please use this link, I get referral credit :) )
- FAQs
- Forum Discussion

Here is a neat new tool named Comparison Engine. Danny Sullivan posted this at the Search Engine Watch Forums stating, "Got a message today about a pretty neat tool to visually see how pages are ranked across a variety of search engines."

This tool is indeed very neat. Give it a try.

View Large Image

Well, finally, use Internet Explorer haters and Mac lovers can have a toolbar that displays the Google PageRank. All you need is the Firebox browser and then a few plugins. The download instructions and thread at WebmasterWorld discuss just that. Here are the instructions again:

1. Download FireFox browser from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

2. Install the GoogleBar Mozilla extension from http://googlebar.mozdev.org/

3. Install the PR indicator extension from http://toolbar.nickstallman.net/

I have installed it on my Firebox browser and its cool. It does take a few noticeable seconds to display the PageRank but its still cool. Here is a screen shot from my corporate site on Firebox with PageRank.

WebmasterBrain, the ones that brought you Proogle, is on a role. They have developed a tool to check your Page Rank on the various Google Data Centers. They name this tool Future PR lookup.

It doesn't exactly tell you your future PageRank at all times. Normally when a PageRank and backlink update take place, they are updated from data center to data center. This was coined the Google Dance, because of the different data found at the various Google data centers. During this update, Google updates the PageRank of your site on the various data centers. Those PageRank values at the data centers that were updated often reflect your future PageRank value on the main Google.com server.

DigitalPoint's popular Keyword Tracker Tool hit the 10,000 user mark this morning. As many of you know, this tool helps SEOs track their success in terms of how well one is ranking in the Google search engine. The tool utilizes the Google API to make all keyword tracking safe in accordance with the Google TOS.

I would like to wish Shawn a congratulations on this landmark event. I hear he is throwing a party at his house for all 10,000 registered users of the tool. See you all there. :)

For more information on the party, please visit the thread on this topic.

Proogle (click here to learn what Proogle is) is currently being blocked by Google. The developer of Proogle is currently making a version 2 that will use the Google API to obtain results. See more at SEO Chat forums.

Try it out, give it a request and you should see the following screen:

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Thanks for the tip at SEO Chat Forums.

DigitalPoint does it again! He built a nifty little tool that graphs the top 10 competitors for the SEO Challenge.

The results can be found here.

I have included the real time stats below, when there are more then 2 days of data, the graph will look a bit more detailed:

I knew about this a few days ago but promised to hold off on the news (not sure why). Anyway, now that it is mentioned in this months Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Report's Search Engine Resources section, I think its a safe bet to mention it here.

Proogle was released this week and is basically a replica of Google but shows the PageRank of a site (much like the DMOZ listing) under each result. The PageRank is real time and this looks to be the tool of the month. Here is a snapshot of a result:

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Also, Proogle made it clear on the homepage that they do not want to be sued by Google stating, "Google, Please don't sue! If you want me to take this down, just say." I find this funny, but downright honest.

Forum coverage will be developed over time, current forum coverage at:

• Webmaster Forum
  
• WebRankInfo (French)
  

There is a relatively new resource on the Web named Blocked PR List, which gathers information on which popular sites do not funnel PageRank to external sites.

Back in January, digitalpoint posted a entry here named Google Blocking Domains From Passing Page Rank?. This entry discusses a PR10 site's, phpbb.com, inability to pass its PR10 to the pages it links to. Too bad for those that purchased text ads on the site for the sole purpose of increasing PageRank on an external page.

Blocked PR List is a simple Web page that lists out these types of sites. The owner told me:

We fully expect that Google will penalize both the BlockedPR.com and Textlinkbrokers.com site. We get emails fairly often from people telling us how we're going to get banned for putting up such information. I think its interesting how alot of people assume that we did not think of that possibility. I would however like to assure everyone that we take every possible precaution to insure the safety of both our link clients and link partners. We have learned from mistakes of the past and mistakes of others and beleive that we have the safest linking network out there.

Currently the site is up and running. The list of sites is still short, I would guess, when the list grows so will its interest.

Hey guys, just programmed a screen scrape for the SE's basically a googlerankings.com but for more engines http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/se-pos.php looking for comments on how to use/ improve the tool
Enjoy
SEO Guy

Little tool I whipped up today to chart your Google AdSense data in a variety of different ways...

• Impressions
• Impressions (Cumulative)
• Clicks
• Clicks (Cumulative)
• Clickthrough Percentage
• Earnings
• Earnings (Cumulative)
• Earnings Per Click.

Supports both aggregate and channel data.

Sample Earnings chart:

Just wanted to update you guys that the Google PR + rank checker is now working with "/" after the domain

http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-dc.php

There was an error with my checksum algo in the Php where it was adding a "/" after the domain and causing a conflict,
All fixed now
Enjoy

New tool for analyzing a page's keywords has been released by McDar.net.

They are discussing it at SEO Chat.

I have come up with a tool that estimates your future PageRank and it can be found at Future Google PageRank Predictor page.

:)

Shawn helped out with some of the formulas, props to DigitalPoint.

Given the popularity of Googlerankings I decided to program a ranking tool that reported ranks in Yahoo, right now I guess I'll call it the Yahoo Ranking tool anyways this should tide us over until such time as we get a Yahoo API thats free, just like googles, and why not? The beta toolbar I ahve of theirs looks "just like googles"
Enjoy

SEO Guy put out a very nice tool for everyone that obsesses with PageRank (unfortunately that includes myself)...

http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tools/google-pr.php

You enter a phrase, and it shows you the PageRank (with the ability to set a minimum PageRank) for the results returned by Google (up to the top 100).

Nice find Andy of Search Engine Lowdown! Remember Booble, which I mentioned back in the Leggo My Trademark: A Search Engine Legal Update Review. Well, now there is a Yahoo counterpart named YasexHOO.

I posted a thread at SEO Chat to discuss this, since I did not find it in any forum.

Thanks to Fathom's posts at WMW on External Link Development and Internal Link Development, I was able to learn about a new tool. Not to downplay those two posts, both excellent posts and on par with all fathom's posts.

The new tool monitors your status of domains submitted to the DMOZ directory. Its free, unlike my SEO Count Google Rank Checker, and does an excellent job. I assume it just queries the dmoz application with the domain name in it. But it keeps everything in one place. Excellent tool.

Check out Seotie today! (nice ad huh?)

I received an email the other day from Jeff Kang, the person who created Queryster. This search engine tool allows you to enter in a query and then click on the search engine that you want to request results back from. It then takes you to that search engine results page. The ability to jump to an other search engine is at the top right corner of each page.

It is a nifty and fun tool.

Check it out at http://www.queryster.com/.

This is one of the coolest tools I've seen...

http://www.langreiter.com/exec/yahoo-vs-google.html?q=seo

It's a very nice graphical way to see how the top 100 results between Google and Yahoo compare.

Nothing too exciting, but some might find them useful...

• Google AdSense Sandbox - Lets you view what AdWords would be served up by Google for any webpage.
  
• Search Engine Script - Takes the complexity of adding a "search this site" function to any website (it uses the Google API on the backend).
  

I did a little poking around (hey, I'm a techie, that's what I like to do), and decided to look at why googlerankings.com is "under construction" all of a sudden (for about 3 weeks now) with their rank checking service.

Well, it appears they aren't so much "under construction", as they are simply blocked by Google. The interesting thing about that, is they claim to have been given permission to do it from Google as stated here. Personally, I always thought it was strange that Google gave them permission, while pretty much denying everyone else in the world.

Anyway, if you still want to use Google Rankings, you can do so by clicking here, but you will notice it kicks back the error it gets from Google (HTTP 403 Forbidden Access). Or at least it does until they look at their referrers and decide to not let people follow this link. :)

The lesson? If you want to check your rankings in Google, don't go around Google's terms of service. There are ways to legitimately check your rankings in Google, since Google gave developers access to the Google API. Two such services are the one we built, and SEO Count.

Quick note to let everyone know I put together a free tool real quick that basically combines the Wordtracker and Overture suggestion tools into one interface (and makes it a little easier to understand).

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

As posted by Scroogle's developer (Kackle on SEOChat)

"The entire Class C that Scroogle is on has been blocked by Google as of about 90 minutes ago. All of Google's data centers now return a 403 "Forbidden," which prevents us from screen scraping Google SERPs from our Class C.

We were up for 11 days and handled 97,343 searches comparing pre-filter and post-filter results. The information we provided is information that Google doesn't want you to have.

The latest hit list of nearly 5,000 terms and an essay on the filter fiasco are still available on the site.

Fortunately, you can still search privately for pre- and post- filter results using the exclusion term trick described in the essay. Almost all of you already know about this. It's just that it won't be easy to get the big picture of what's happening regarding the filter, without that constant data feed of search terms that was collected and sorted by Scroogle."

The developer is working on keeping it up by using multiple ip addresses, see the SEO Chat thread on this over here.

According to Alexa the popular buleon search comparer (using the plachinko test) www.scoogle.org has had the highest recent gains of 710% traffic influx. This is another clear concise indication that webmasters are a huge consituence of "search" and that Google should take note.
Surprisingly Google has not taken action on Scroogle as of yet, they are usually quick to jump on infringement issues especially when they involve critiquing of their company.