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Introducing New Features for Open Site Explorer

Posted in March 4th, 2010
by in SEO

Posted by Danny Dover

 Today I am proud to announce the launch of the second version of Open Site Explorer. Since SEOmoz has officially moved out of consulting, we are now able to put our full resources into building fantastic SEO software. We want to thank all of you who provided feedback on the first version of the tool for your guidance and we look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

Open Site Explorer

Now enough with the chit chat, on to the new features!

New Features:

Top Pages on a Domain

With the new version of Open Site Explorer you can get a sorted listed of the top 10,000 pages on a domain. This is essential for viewing your own site and for doing competitive analysis.

Top Pages on a domain

With this new feature, we can see that Microsoft is unwisely 302 redirecting their homepage! Doh!

Top Pages on a domain competitive

You can also see which content is drawing the most links on your competitors websites. In this example we see that that these are the most linked to comics on XKCD.

Target URL

The new version of Open Site Explorer shows you which URL a given link is targeting when you sort by sub or root domains so you can see exactly where the given link is helping you. (This is also available for all links when the data is exported as a CSV)

Target URL

With this new feature you can see which link is most important to Harvard.edu’s domain and which page it is linking to.

Comprehensive CSV Export

After lots of input, we are now offering more robust CSV exports.

CSV

The new CSV exports offer:

  • The Target URL of the given link
  • Numbers of links to the given source page
  • Indication of whether or not the linked is followed
  • Indication of whether the link is internal or external

Usability Enhancements

Remember how you used to have to reload the page every time you applied a filter in Yahoo! Site Explorer?

Filter Results

With the addition of the Filter Results button, these needless page reloads are a thing of the past.

Common Tasks are Easier to Perform

New buttons make performing common tasks easier and faster to do.

New Buttons

The new Explore and Compare buttons make it easier to get more information about any links you find interesting.

Improved Filtering

With the new version of this tool you can do even more filtering to drill down into what you think is important.

Filtering

In this example, we filtered the data to show only followed (dofollow) and 301 redirecting external links to the specific page.

Open Site Explorer vs. Linkscape vs. Yahoo! Site Explorer

Throughout this process, we also heard a lot of questions about the differences between Yahoo! Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer and Linkscape. The chart below lays out the similarities and differences.

Open Site Explorer vs Linkscape vs Yahoo Site Explorer

Help us Improve!

Are there other features you want to see? Are we moving in the right direction? We want know! Please feel free to share your suggestions and opinions via SEOmoz on Twitter, SEOmoz on Facebook or in the comments below :-)

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Ballmer, Sitelinks & Other Favorites from SMX West Day 1

Posted in March 4th, 2010
by in SEO

Posted by jennita

SMX West Keynote Danny Sullivan and Microsoft CEO Steve BallmerSMX West 2010 kicked off with quite a bang (or was that a yell?). Since Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer was the keynote, people arrived early to ensure good seats. The music playing before it started was amazing, it helped to create an excitement in the room that I really had never felt before a keynote before. I had attempted to save a seat for someone up front, but there was just too much demand and had to give it up. That’s the sort of thing that happens at a great concert, not a conference keynote.

There were quite a few live blogs of the event, but I had a few favorites from the interview that I wanted to call out.

  1. He made it very clear that Microsoft is focused on the big picture and not just immediate goals. He spoke about continuing to move forward with a positive momentum and a differentiated point of view.
  2. When the question came up of "Can you be #1 in the U.S.?" he essentially said "YES!" [and yes he said it with that exclamation] However he made it clear that it was a tricky question. If you say yes, you sound arrogant but if you say no you sound unsure of yourself. You don’t do things to come in second!
  3. Danny asked "Is Yahoo! going to survive as a search player? You want to beat them aren’t you just going to kill them?" Ballmer could really only answer one way "No." He stated that they wanted Yahoo! to do a good job, that there was lots of flexibility written into their contract and there was advantage to having the power of 2 as opposed to the power of 1.
  4. When asked whether he was going to get on Twitter he said "I’m more of a webpage than a bunch of short tweets." But then acknowledged that he did have a stealth Twitter account however only the people in his neighborhood followed him.
  5. His favorite thing on Bing are the Bing maps. [completely agree here... the maps are amazing!]
  6. What he thinks is the biggest opportunity in search: to "Help people get done what they’re trying to get done."
  7. Oh! And he gave us all his personal email account. You’ll have to watch the video to get that though. :)

All in all it was quite enjoyable to watch, although I was a bit unprepared (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) for the yelling. Ok, I don’t think in his mind he was yelling, he was just talking VERY LOUDLY. But sitting right up front, I think we all sat back in our chairs a bit when he got excited and started to get louder. :) You can see the full video of the keynote below.

I’d love to hear your impression of the interview. Do you feel that anything was said that gave away any secrets? What are your thoughts?

<br/><a href="http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/steve-ballmer-smx-west-keynote-conversation-with-danny-sullivan/1280gxwnj?fg=sharenoembed" _fcksavedurl="http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/steve-ballmer-smx-west-keynote-conversation-with-danny-sullivan/1280gxwnj?fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Steve Ballmer SMX West Keynote Conversation with Danny Sullivan">Video: Steve Ballmer SMX West Keynote Conversation with Danny Sullivan</a>

Google’s Personalized Search Revolution

Now that personalization has become an opt-out rather than an opt-in, I was really interested in what this session had to offer. The only speaker, Brian Horling who works in Personalized Search at Google, first gave a very informative presentation, then fielded quite a few questions from the audience. I really enjoyed having just one speaker who was focused on the topic at hand. The top takeaways that I got were some of the differences between a logged out user who gets personalized search versus a logged in user. Let me break it down a bit.

First of all, both types of users are thought of as two different identities to Google. Let’s say you’re logged in, and then log out, they don’t view you as the same logged in person. At that point they do look at the cookies set on your computer which tell gives them information on what you’ve searched for previously, which results you’ve clicked on, etc. For signed in accounts, your web history is saved indefinitely, but your non-logged in identity is only saved for 180 days.

Every user using search has the potential of seeing personalized search in some way whether it’s geo-location, web history, social search, etc. Personalization occurs about 1 in 5 queries for a user and the changes tend to be restricted to only a few results.

How can you control the personalization of your searches?

  • Use search details
  • Disable it by appending &pws=0 on searchs (you can find the bookmarklet to do that here)
  • Edit or disable your web history

If you haven’t looked at the "view customizations" link I highlight above before, you should definitely check it out. Pretty interesting what’s going on there.

One thing that came up in this session was how do you explain to a client that the results they’re seeing aren’t the same as what everyone else sees. Although in some cases that would probably be a good thing since they’re seeing better rankings since they search and click on their sites more often than the average user. :)

How do you feel about personalized search? After this presentation I found that I was much more open to the idea than I was previously. I think because I felt like I finally understood a bit better where the data was coming from and how to turn it off. But what about you?

And so on…

The other session I really loved was "Supercharging Your Descriptions With Sitelinks" but as I was putting this post together I realized that should really a be a post in and of itself. It was great to hear from a Google rep about how certain sitelinks show up and ways you can enhance your site to ensure proper sitelinks. I have tons of screenshots and examples, so I’ll put them into a full post. Plus I’d really like to get Jerry Dischler (the Google guy) to answer a few of my questions. :) So watch for that one!

The best swag of the conference goes to Yahoo! for not only giving away these awesome coffee mugs, but for setting up a full-on coffee shop with baristas to make us our much needed lattes!

I really wanted to show the videos from the SMX Ignite as that was one of my favorite parts of the day. But unfortunately the videos aren’t live yet. Here’s a link to where they should be. :) Maile Ohye’s "DateRank: PageRank for singles" was my personal favorite, although all the speakers were exceptional.

Dana Lookadoo and I interviewed a number of people in sort of a Jay Leno "man on the street" sort of way. We hope to have the interviews up tomorrow.

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30 SEO Bookmarklets to Save You Time

Posted in February 9th, 2010
by in SEO

Posted by randfish

We all work hard at the SEO process – analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today’s post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn’t completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don’t personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you’d like. I’ve divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

Site Indexation Queries

Backlink Data Queries

 Specialized Search Queries

  • #15 – Google: Remove personalization
  • #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • #17 – Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • #18 – Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • #19 – Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • #20 – Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

  • #21 – Domaintools lookup on current domain
  • #22 – Compete.com traffic data on current domain
  • #23 – Quantcast traffic data on current domain
  • #24 – Alexa traffic data on current domain
  • #25 - Wayback Machine archives for curent URL
  • #26 - Google Trends for Websites on the current domain 

Social Media Data Queries

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here’s a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you’ll need to

  1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it’s calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
  2. Include the initial piece – javascript:location.href=’ at the start of the bookmarklet link
  3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I’d use http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A – note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you’ll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
  4. Next you’ll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
  5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I’d use document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”) rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
  6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you’ll need to use proper syntax – following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
  7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href=’http://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”);
  8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you’ll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process – sorry!

Now you’re ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We’d love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you’ve got great ones, I’ll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit :-)

p.s. One I’d love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website’s IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

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Q & A About Using Q & A Sites to Build Your Business & Reputation

Posted in January 20th, 2010
by in SEO

Posted by Gil Reich

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Q&A sites are a great way to get your message across and to build your brand and reputation.

How many people use Q&A sites?

  • In a recent Business.com study, 49% of companies that use social media said they ask questions on Q&A sites. Only 29% said they use Twitter to find business-related information. The 49% doesn’t even include the many who get info from Q&A sites by Googling or Binging.
  • Answers.com (where I work) is now ranked (by comScore) as the 17th most visited site in the US. The vast majority of Answers.com’s traffic is to user generated Q&A pages. Yahoo! Answers gets even more traffic. Much of your potential market is already getting their answers from these sites.

Business Answer Usefulness

Source: Social Media Best Practices: Question & Answer Forums. Business.com, December 14, 2009, http://www.business.com/info/social-media-best-practices-q-and-a

What’s in it for me?

Providing quality answers and links to relevant pages can help you in the following ways:

  • Direct your customers (and potential customers) to accurate information about your product.
  • Connect with people in your market, build your reputation, and generate leads.
  • Provide links back to your site. Some of these links are Follow links, and thus also provide SEO value.

How do I use these sites?

The general rules of social media apply here too:

  1. Help others
  2. Build relationships
  3. Push your products and services when they answer somebody’s question or request.

Q&A sites work great for this, because people are already asking the questions. When I blog I hope my posts address questions that my readers want answered, but they may not. In Q&A sites, your starting point is that somebody asked the queston that you’re answering.

Specifically:

  • Search the Q&A sites for questions about your subject, and browse the relevant categories.
  • Answer questions fairly and accurately. If appropriate, mention your product or service, and / or link to a relevant page on your site.
  • Follow up & interact where appropriate. Use these sites’ message boards to see if you can be of further help, or to congratulate another contributor for a great answer.
  • Fill in your User Profile, showing why people should like and trust you. You can also usually link to your site from your User Profile.

In the example below, notice how the user provided a quality answer (much of which follows a template he uses in other answers as well) and adds a relevant link to his site.Quality (and Self Serving) Answer

 

What are the leading sites and how do they differ?

  • Yahoo! Answers: The biggest site in the industry, with 47 million US visits in November according to comScore (and that’s probably a very conservative estimate). It’s a broad horizontal site. Questions are open for 4 days. Users answer the question, and vote on the best answer. The best answer is selected by either the asker or by the community.
  • Answers.com / WikiAnswers: Answers.com has 41 million monthly US visitors according to comScore, making it second to Yahoo! but far larger than the other Q&A sites. It’s also a broad horizontal site. It’s key differentiators are:
    • It’s connectd to a reference site, so if you ask "What is the abstention doctrine?" your answer will come from West’s Law and the Oxford University Press.
    • It’s a wiki, so instead of multiple users providing multiple answers, users collaborate on one answer.
    • In most cases Answers don’t get closed, so you can find questions asked more than 4 days ago and still contribute to the answer.
  • LinkedIn Answers & Business.com Answers: These sites are great for more targeted communication, lead generation, and reputation building. Think of Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com as more B2C, and these sites as more B2B. This is Q&A in the context of advanced professional networking sites.
  • Stack Overflow and its siblings: Stack Overflow is a great Q&A site for programmers. If you’re a software developer and you want to establish yourself as an expert and to network with your peers, this site’s perfect. The same technology is now powering other niche sites, most notably serverfault.com (for system administrators) and Answers on Startups, which Rand Fishkin just named one of the 10 Sources I’ve Come to Love.
  • Aardvark: Aardvark is more of a closed system where you ask questions to people in your network. This is great for well connected journalists and bloggers to get answers from their network, but may not be ideal for spreading your message beyond your social circle.

How is using them like doing a guest post on SEOmoz?

Answering questions on Q&A sites is exactly like doing a guest post on SEOmoz:

  • Find the sites where the people you need are getting their information.
  • Give them quality information that will benefit them.
  • Get your own message across, with full disclosure of who you are. You can be self-serving, but not too self-serving.
  • Build relationships, and establish your expertise.

Ultimately you need a win-win here. You need to serve the needs of the community with whom you’re interacting, in a way that also builds your business and reputation.

Where can I get more information on Q&A sites?

See the following excellent articles:

Or contact me (Answers.com user: Gilr)

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The Six Best Online Note Taking Apps You Would Love To Know

Posted in January 14th, 2010
by in Design

Today, we are listing The Six Best Online Note Taking Apps You Would Love To Know. These would be very helpful for you to write, organize and share your notes. If you are designer, developer, office worker, manager, supervisor, student, home user, etc but we hope that these are worth checking for all of you. Most of them are not very well known but they are really amazing in respect to their features. Just take a look at them and share your thoughts here.

You are welcome to share more useful reminder web apps that will be helpful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.

Google Notebook

Google-Notebook

Google Notebook is a free online application offered by Google that allows users to save and organize clips of information while conducting research online. The browser-based tool permits a user to write notes, clip text and images, and save links from pages during a browser session. The information is saved to an online “notebook” with sharing and collaboration features. Notebooks can be made “public”, or visible to others, and can also be used to collaborate with a list of users (either publicly or privately).

Zoho Notebook

Zoho-Notebook

With Zoho Notebook, You can create different types of content like text, image, audio, video, etc. It will allow you to share a whole book, page or just an object on a page by granting read/write permissions. There is an option to keep track of changes not only at the book or page level but also at the object level.

Yahoo! Notepad

Yahoo-Notepad

Yahoo! Notepad is a place to write down and organize notes. You can access the notes from any computer, anytime—they’re part of your password-protected Yahoo! account.

Notefish

Notefish

Notefish makes Internet research simple. If you are making a purchase or planning a trip, this is perfect for you. You can save information from the web into a single online Notefish page, then organize and share with anyone you want.

Springnote

Springnote

Springnote is a great way for you to create notebooks for ideas, interests, multimedia, projects, and documents. It allows you to create pages, to work on them together with your friends, and to share files.

WebAsyst

WebAsyst

You can make or keep notes online with WebAsyst. It would be thoughts, instructions, memos, to do lists, recipes, or plan a party or any kind of short text notes. There is an option to share your notes with friend and colleagues and having each with specific access rights.

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