We’re making Search more intuitive by taking user context and applying it to the search experience. Today we are introducing an enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist, providing suggestions geographically closer to you as you type your query.
Sitting here in our Yahoo! headquarters at Sunnyvale, if I type “santa” from Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, I get “santa clara county” as the first suggestion.
If I type the same query from my friend’s place in Santa Barbara, I get “santa barbara” as the first suggestion.
Here’s another example that commuters in the New York and Pittsburgh metropolitan areas will appreciate: As I type “port au” from the New York area, I get “port authority bus terminal” and suggestions prioritized for New York’s Port Authority.
But if I’m in the Pittsburgh area, I’ll see more locally relevant suggestions like “pittsburgh port authority” and “port authority of allegheny county.”
Yahoo! Search Assist helps you find what you need with fewer keystrokes by taking into account the location from which you’re searching.
Give this new feature a try and let us know what you think about geo-sensitive search suggestions in the comments section below.
Vivian Lin Dufour
Product Manager, Yahoo! Search
Posted by randfish
It's been a wild few weeks at the mozplex. Today wrapped up the amazing mozinar with our half-day tools training just in time to launch the new version of SEOmoz. Should we slow down this crazy pace? Nah.
If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, don't worry; it's perfectly normal. We're the same old moz, but with a new look, faster loading pages and a surprising amount of new functionality. Let's walk through it together, shall we?
Big Improvements to PRO MembershipIt's a good day to be PRO; we've just released:
• A brand new PRO Dashboard, that's designed to be the center of everything you can do with your membership, including access to your web app campaigns, tools and tool reports, webinars, Q+A, discount store, etc. If it's part of PRO, you'll find it in the Dashboard.
• The web app has made some big improvements and we're now announcing a full public beta - campaigns should be faster, more accurate and dramatically less buggy. There's also some cool new functionality I'll cover below.
• The dramatically upgraded SEO Tools page, which will likely show off plenty of tools you may not have seen/heard about until now.
• Slide decks from our PRO Tools Training are now downloadable. We had a highly interactive, terrificly valuable day sharing tips, tricks and applications for the data and resources and wanted to give you a small taste of that experience by making those slides available.
If you've been curious about what's in PRO membership, there's a new PRO Tour section that gives you a more complete look at the features and functionality. Also - the last chance to get PRO at $79/month and be locked into the rate before it rises to $99 is now - after Friday, the price change goes into effect.
Zoinks! A New SEOmoz WebsiteRub your eyes a bit and have a look around. We've done a considerable amount of work to make pages load faster, let the design highlight the content in a cleaner fashion and added a few fun bits, too. Big changes include:
• A new home to Learn SEO. I've recorded an "Intro to SEO" video and we've made all of our learning-focused content available through that page (nearly all of it is entirely FREE!)
• A renewed focus on YOUmoz and the Blog (both of which are featured more prominently on the homepage). We've re-designed all of these to help make them more useful and usable, as well as focusing on the content itself with a less-intrusive design. As always, we've kept a strong focus on comments and participation and we're planning to do even more with it in the future.
• More accessibility to our SEO tools, including a free sneak peek at our LDA Labs tool (more about that in my next post)
There's lots more coming soon (a new about section, upgrades to the marketplace, more free information in the Learn SEO section, etc.) so keep an eye out.
The Web App is Now in Public BetaOur private beta launch to PRO members had more than 2,000 folks create thousands of campaigns. While the feedback has been phenomenal (your very kind tweets really helped keep our engineers pushing through sleepless nights and crates of pizza), we know there were a lot of bugs and missing functionality in the early release. Starting today, the app is far more stable, speedy and powerful. Crawls should come back consistently, rankings should more consistent and accurate and issues/recommendations are rocking.
We've also added a brand new feature - one of our most requested - exportable PDF reports for rankings (with crawl diagnostics and on-page reports coming very soon). As Adam Feldstein, our head of Product, discussed today in his roadmap presentation at the tools training, next on the list is additional crawl issues, Google Analytics integration and exciting new functionality for competitive comparisons in the link analysis tab.
As always, we welcome feedback - your messages have been instrumental in helping us improve, and while we're feeling good about this wider launch, the web app is likely staying in beta for another few months as we add features and continue to tweak, bug fix and get better.
Still Ironing Out Some KinksThere's a few known issues with the new site that should be cleaned up in the next 12-24 hours. These include a bit of CSS oddness on the Beginner's Guide and the Keyword Difficulty tool (though both still function), the thumbs highlighting being a bit softer than intended (for thumbs up/down you've already left), some headline/text font sizes and spacing, etc. Sadly, we've also temporarily broken the long beloved functionality of highlighting "new" comments in a post - that should be back soon.
I also noted that we had some issues with Domain Authority in our last push of the Linkscape update. Amazingly, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team, we're expecting to have new scores up in the next few days (rather than taking a full 2 weeks). We still need to run some tests, but we're hoping to fix many of the odd outlier issues.
We Love Your FeedbackIf you see anything you love, hate or think might be an error, we'd love to hear from you. Every page on the site now has a "Feedback" button on the far left-hand side and we read those obsessively! Of course, you can also leave us comments on this post.
Thanks so much for joining in the adventure that is SEOmoz. In the weeks and months to come, well.... let's just say you ain't seen nothing yet :-)
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
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.
I’m going to speed through the 2nd half of the 1st day at the SEOmoz Pro Training Race Track. Recall that 9 speakers raced through topics covering clicks to conversions.The following are highlights of the end of the race for Day 1.
Presentation Off
Insights distilled also included the business side of pitching SEO. Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin dueled it out for their "Presentation Off" to determine who could give the best advice for “How to Pitch SEO.” This marked the first time they “faced off” in battle on US Soil. Will held the winning title to date. Bottom line, both of them presented valuable insights about pitching and when not to pitch (or bother).
Takeaways from Will Critchlow, The Champion:
Download Distilled’s SEO Traffic Model spreadsheet. http://dis.tl/dk6N59 <nice!>
Takeaways from Rand Fishkin, The Challenger:
Rand focused on the emotional side and winning minds of the in-house SEO
Rand showed graphs and slides on how to show value based off ROI - showing the value of their traffic:
<If you're taking notes, you can see how this would fit into a spreasheet...>
Then explain search growth over time - meaning, search is growing, period! If they are not adding 20% budget to SEO, then they are falling back.
“Every day, there are more than a billion searches for information on Google. These people have specific intents. If you’re not adding 20% to your SEO budget this year, you’re falling behind the average."
Show prospective clients which competitors are winning for their keywords:
And the winner of the Presentation Off is ... Rand Fishkin, who edged over the finish line just in front of Will.
OK, let’s catch the replay highlights of the rest of the search marketing race.
Joanna Lord drove the fastest car, “The End of Analysis Paralysis.”
She explained it’s time to get serious with metrics and conversions:
1. What is your website trying to do?
2. If one metric could identify that you are succeeding or failing, what would it be? How would you know you are gaining or losing ground?
3. What is the biggest threat to your success?
You should only have 3 or 4 metrics, no more than 5. (Focus)
Joanna then sped around Google Analytics advanced filter fun, including:
Joanna was stopped in her tracks when she polled the Mozzers to find out how many were using Multiple Custom Variables - 2 hands raised.
MCV is the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of interactions on our site. It goes beyond the single user-defined variable _setVar() and replaced it with _setCustomVar().
Multiple Custom Variables give us the ability for us to tag visitors for any number of sessions to enable “first touch” attribution rather than Google Analytics default “last touch.”
Resource: How to do First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
Joanna then screeched around the corner to present her Advanced Analytics Checklist:
Whew... surely it was time to full-up again after that session, but no... more typing at high speeds:
Marshall Simmonds - Site Architecture & Best Practices for Big Site SEO
Marshall Simmonds is a seasoned Enterprise-level SEO and works with the NY Times, previously with About.com. Working on large sites requires triage and prioritization. (Race car drivers overlook a chip in the paint when the carburator blows out.) Any level of SEO can view the following triage tips for their own site to determine where to best spend their time:
High Priority Tactics:
Low Priority Tactics:
Focus on best practices for the long term. Marshall often recommends you don't budget for an SEO project. Putting a dollar amount to it turns it into a a project with an end point. SEO doesn't have an end point.
Marshall proceeded to explain that the NY Times is a duplicate content factory and has some SEO challenges. As a news property, they dramatically see the importance of the following principle:
Optimize all assets!
Ask: Are there any assets that you are not optimizing? If not, then competition is beating.
Key takeaways for all of us in the SEO race:
Bottom line, add as many analytics packages that you can afford, optimize, track and prioritize.
Tom Critchlow
Keyword Research & Targeting Tom Critchlow of Distilled explained that you need to group all keywords:
Keyword harvesting tools:
The following is a shot of how to use Mozinda to review tags on Delicious.com. (You can look at Delicious tags without using Mozinda.)
Discount code that applies to full pro plan: seomoz20 (Valid till Sep 15th 2010.)
Build an SEO friendly CMS:
Below is a wireframe template for an ideal CMS that pulls data in:
Discussion raced through use of APIs for scraping content from the Web and incorporating on your pages to include additional keywords. The boxes on the right represent ideas for pulling in the following:
The Mozzers had lots of questions from the audience about this CMS concept, and Tom’s answer was:
It’s not that hard! <sigh> Tom then gave away a proof of concept Google doc that scrapes Google suggest and Google search.
Thank you, Tom!
Lindsay Wassell - Constructing Effective SEO Audits
Lindsay Wassell got deep under the hood like no one else has done at a conference to show her approach and outline of SEO Audits, starting with her daily schedule. I especially liked that she set a schedule to focus on one client in one day and allow time for lunch to ponder your findings and approach.
Tip: Allow ponder time & 6 weeks or more to deliver an audit. Give it enough time.
The following SEO Audit Outline lays out a suggested framework:
She incorporates a Scorecard for rating issues with a 1-5 rating scale:
Some Scores are site-wide and some scores are finding-specific.
She placed importance on showing visuals and also providing an actionable Executive Summary. SEOs realize that a 40-page audit is likely to set on someone’s desk for weeks or months. Give them takeaways they can begin working on now.
Tim Ash – 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Optimization
The final race of the day focused on after the click – conversions. Discussion included importance of considering what you do with all that SEO & PPC traffic after they arrive at the site.
Tim Ash did a poll at the end of the race day to see how many Mozzers were doing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Almost 1/2 of the room raised their hand.
Tim starts with insults – You are ignorant and blind. He then asked:
How many of you have talked to the end user in the last quarter? Well, only a few admitted to talking to website users ...
Tim showed us how to avoid the following 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design:
We all left the SEOmoz Raceway convinced that our baby is ugly and tips to optimize and beautify our website babies.
The US Open is heating up on Yahoo! Search. This week we are launching the US Open Shortcut to help you find the information you want when you search for the championships.
Whether you’re a dedicated fan or just want to check out Maria Sharapova’s outfit, simply search for ‘US Open’ or your favorite player. You will find real-time scores and schedule of the day, news, photos and tweets. Did you know many tennis players love to tweet?
This is an exciting time for tennis fans: for the number one seed Rafael Nadal, who has never won the US open title, this can be finally his year. Or could the winner be Roger Federer, who won last week in Cincinati, his first title in seven months?
No matter who you’re rooting for, we hope you’ll use our Shortcut to follow coverage of the US Open.
Yuko Kamae
Yahoo! Search
It’s summertime and the livin’ is easy, but at Yahoo! Search we’ve been busy fielding queries about everything from Kermit the Frog to Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Early in the month US users showed interest in Ramadan, the month of fasting which began on the evening of the 10th. Searchers looked for the meaning of Ramadan, activities for children, and even “Ramadan text messages.” Searchers on Yahoo! also looked for biography, commercials for Ben Quayle, son of former VP Dan, as he takes the GOP congressional primary in Arizona.
Celebrities (and their children) continued to fascinate searchers throughout August, and we saw spikes in queries about Montana Fishburne’s adventures in adult entertainment, Tiger and Elin Woods’ pricey divorce, and the on-again-off-again relationship of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson. Also on users’ radar were Lindsay Lohan’s release from rehab and singer Fantasia’s tumultuous personal life.
Human drama around the globe captured the attention of the many Yahoo! users who wanted more information about the catastrophic floods in Pakistan and the plight of the trapped Chilean miners. Searches for “map of Chile” jumped 60 percent in the last week of August, and searches for “trapped miner update” continue to spike through the past two weeks.
Drama of another kind was also popular as shown by the surge in searches for the McNugget rage video and for information about JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, whose show-stopping exit from flight 1052 may lead to a whole new career in reality television.
Yahoo! Mobile Searchers were busy this month, too, tapping in queries about topics ranging from floppy haired teen favorite Justin Bieber and the NFL preseason to more serious subjects including California’s Proposition 8 and the 14th Amendment of the US constitution.
As August ended, we saw searches about the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as well as in the upcoming hurricane season. Searches on Kermit the Frog spiked with the announcement that the original puppet will be displayed at the Smithsonian – proving that it is easy being green! And users who couldn’t wait for fall were already inquiring about back to school searches like lunch box recipes and costume ideas for Halloween. It’s not too early to plan for Halloween, even for the tiniest trick-or-treaters: searches for “baby Halloween costumes” spiked over 720% in August.
Can’t wait for our monthly recap? You can check out the weekly Yahoo! Trends segment on ABC News. This week, Yahoo!s Pamela Woon dishes on popular search topics like Puppy Tweet and the Emmys.
Check back often at the Yahoo! Search Blog’s Search Trends section to find out what’s buzzing on the web.
Mireille Majoor
Yahoo! Search Blog
Posted by Dana Lookadoo
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.
Day 1 of SEOmoz Pro Training was like being at a race track. The course careened from clicks to conversions and from search results to landing pages. The audience watched 9 speakers drive their search marketing race cars at speeds faster than fingers can type. Given the finger-breaking speeds, it was fortunate all SEO fans were well fueled - beginning with a healthy breakfast buffet, mid-morning energy bars, lunch (more all-you-can-eat) and a scrumptious mid-afternoon pit stop with fresh cookies and treats. After everyone was fed each time, it was off to the races.
Todd Freisen was in the sports booth service as emcee, host of ceremonies, referee, judge and time keeper. The event was like a well-oiled machine. Maybe that's why they call Todd, "Oilman."
When I said "yes" to attending the Mozinar on a Press Pass, I didn't realize I was going to be covering a sporting event. GoodNewsCowboy asked me how I was going to recap and condense this "wild ride." I realized there was a lot of horsepower on-stage and that we were at the SEOmoz Training Raceway.
Mozinar fans experienced exhilaration and gleaned insights as we watched performance race car drivers present their seminar presentations. The following race highlights are condensed from 32 pages of notes. I strongly suggest you buy the Pro Seminar DVD when it's produced so you can see under the hood for yourself.
From Clicks to Conversions with Local, Social, Analytics and SEO in Between
1st up: Rand Fishkin had pole position and drove a car with a most unusual name, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad SERP."
The results we are seeing in blended search results are even more unusual, starting with changes of the past 2 weeks. For those who attend SEO races regularly and are watching Google, this may be old news. For others, brace yourself. A branded search can have more than 2 results. Rand explained:
Changes to Image SEO was next, and guess what? Google has a new image search interface.
The image below results from clicking on one of the images for the artist "manet" and clicking on an image
Tip: Write some JavaScript that breaks the overlay to avoid having the image overlay. Not only does it produce the longest, ugliest URL, but "it’s just an invite to right click and steal this image."
Rand covered 10 Tips for Image Rankings. (Since we are in race synopsis mode, we'll speed through this.) One quick takeaway was the minimum image size:
Image Pixel Size - If you go smaller than 400x300 pixels your chances to show in image search are dramatically decreased.
So you don't have to remember any formulas, basic on-page SEO factors for image SEO include page title and surrounding text.
Video SERPs
It’s or easier to get into video SERPs than to get into the regular SERPS. There is lower competition than ordinary results (most of the time), so take the opportunity. Follow this inclusion process to enter your video race for top ranking:
Step #1: Embed Video Content on Your Pages
Step #2: Create Thumbnail Images for Videos
Step #3: Build a Video XML Sitemap & Submit
Step #4: PROFIT $$$
See Google Webmaster Tools for Video to learn more.
Rand's foot stayed pedal-to-the-metal as he showed how to produce Rich Snippets in the SERPs. Why is this important? This is where you get most of your clicks. His closing remarks were retweeted with fervor:
"If you can stay on top of this, you will have a big win. It demands full-time SEO."
2nd up: David Mihm was full-speed as he raced through "Ranking in Competitive Local Results." He explained:
Straight from Google’s mouth:
Local intent is 20% of total search volume (April 2010)
And who would imagine that local results could equal 100% of page 1? Try a search for "dentist chicago." (If it's not 100%, it's close.)
Google organic results are not, however, the dominate factor for local search. Neither are results from Yahoo! or Bing. Local search is now:
Understand that local requires a different mindset from traditional SEO, because the ecosystems vary:
Takeaway:
"It is essential to have a holistic local search marketing strategy."
"Even if all your boss cares about is that friggin' 7-pack!"
Resources to claim your listings:
"The Big Three" major data providers:
Citations - David recommended a new citation finder tool by Darren Shaw & Garrett French: Whitespark.ca Citation Finder
Find local SEO resources on GetListed.org.
3rd up to race: Dan Zarrella racing in the "Science of Twitter" car. Dan warned us he talked fast. Pro Seminar attendees listened attentively, but given the subject was Twitter ... many tweeted insights into how one can get clicks and retweets.
Dan's takeaways were in 140. Below are my fave top three:
Takeaway: Don’t talk about yourself so much.
Paraphrased: If you want more followers, stop talking about yourself!
Takeaway: Try to stay positive.
If you want to get bummed out, people can go on the News. Even if talking about the oil spill, stay hopeful.
Takeaway: If you want people to click your links, Tweet slower.
Don't "go Oprah" on your Twitter account, moderate.
Improve your "retweetability" factor by including a combination of the following Top 20 Most Retweetable Words:
Timing for retweets:
Links posted on the weekend and at the end of the week have a higher click through rate.
Tip: Want to see how well a bit.ly link is doing, CTR?
Alright ... one more Twitter insight before we close ...
He had noted that women follow a lot more people and tend to tweet more. They are more social. (We already knew women talk and socialize more, but now Dan's numbers confirm it.)
Dan covered a lot of geeky ground focused on the science and study of social media, use of FourSquare and more.. I have 5+ pages of notes from Dan's presentation alone. But I'm concerned this blog post will get too long to be readable.
Check out Dan's set of social media tools.
4th up and last race of the morning was the "Presentation Off" between Will Critchlow and Rand Fishkin.
I'll expand on that race in a follow-up post. Do you want to guess who won this year? Will went into the race with a 2-year winning streak.
Posted by Suzzicks
So here is the deal: Traditional websites frequently rank in mobile search results – especially if you are searching from a SmartPhone. What you may not realize is that the converse is also true – mobile pages can rank well in traditional search. This is quite an interesting phenomenon, and something that we need to address strategically.
Why does this happen?
Well, Google has said that they really don’t want to index two versions of the web – one mobile and one traditional. Even though they do have different mobile-specific bots, they want those their bots all to feed into one index. Hmmmm….Is it just an interesting coincidence that they just launched the multi-format site mapping in Google, where you can combine all the different types of sitemaps that we previously had to submit separately? Possibly. At least it that could indicate a shift away from multiple indexes.
Did anyone notice that this shift happened pretty soon after Caffeine, as did the re-launch of Google Images, and some significant changes in Google Places?
Hmmmm…..It seems that Google might be moving away from having multiple indexes that must be queried for different types of content - like mobile, local, images, news, etc. to a 'one index' solution that has different types of ‘indexing attributes’ instead. That would actually do lots of things that Caffeine has done, like speed up searches (only need to query one index), and allow them to algorithmically prioritize things by freshness more effectively….
Different Indexes for Smart Phones and Feature PhonesBut I have gone astray – We were talking about 'mobile'. We can’t know for sure if there are different mobile indexes. There definitely was a separate mobile index in the beginning of Google's ‘mobile’ search– you could always tell because the results were SO bad! Even in the past two years, I have seen mobile search results that were way off base – For example, the top result for a search on ‘subway sandwiches’ was a Gawker article for a long time; then Subway.com, and then m.subway.com. I just checked, and they have somewhat sorted that one out on smart phone searches, but it you still get weird results for feature phone search (shown below)! About 18 months ago Google changed the location of their mobile engine from m.Google.com to Google.com/m, and it did seem that the ‘/m’ feature phone search results were a bit better than they had been, but who knows!
As I have mentioned, there are different mobile search engine crawlers that are evaluating your website as if it was being rendered on a mobile phone. These mobile bots actually have both generic and specific user agent strings that will spoof actual phone handset models in order to understand how the website would render and function on the different phones. While they don’t do a great job, Google actually does try to only provide you with mobile search results that will actually work well on your particular handset – What that means is that there are slight variations on search results from phone to phone.
There are some simple ways to check what I am now describing as ‘mobile indexing attributes.’ I always start mobile rankings research by doing a normal search from my traditional computer. We know more about the traditional algorithm, so that sets my baseline for comparison. From there, I will do the same search from Google.com/m to see the differences. In most cases, the websites that are included in the traditional search results will be included in the SmartPhone search results – but sometimes in a slightly different order.
You don’t have to have tons of different phones to get a sense for what is going on in mobile search. There are a couple quick tips and tricks to help you do this all from the web. The first thing to know, is that you can do searches from your computer directly from Google.com/m. The results you get will be generic ‘SmartPhone’ search results. From that page, you can move on to see the results for the same query on feature phones by simply scrolling to the bottom of the page and changing the drop-down that says ‘web’ to say ‘mobile,’ and hit ‘search.’ The next set of results will be the generic FeaturePhone results. Search operators like 'site:' and 'link:' work in these versions of Google, and will return different results than they would in traditional search - a good indication to me that they are still using separate indexes.
Mobile-Friendly Signals for the Search EnginesThe best way to indicate to the search engines that your page is mobile-ready, (beyond including the ‘no-transform’ tag, which will be discussed more in another post called What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? which should be live next week), is to provide the search engines pages that will work well on mobile phones. Handheld stylesheets can be included on any page on your site. If you don’t have mobile-specific pages, you can use these stylesheets to tell mobile browsers how you would like your existing pages to look when they are displayed on a mobile phone. These are especially good if you would like to change the order that your content appear in when it is displayed on a mobile phone. They should also be used to prevent the need for left-to right scrolling when your site is displayed on a mobile phone.
If you have mobile specific pages, you should set up user-agent detection on your site to ensure that, regardless of which pages rank (mobile or traditional) that users are presented with the appropriate version of the page, based on the device that they are using to access the page. If they are on a mobile phone, they should automatically be sent to the mobile version of a page – even if it is the traditional page that actually ranked in search engines. Conversely, if they are on a traditional computer, and happen to click on a mobile version of a page, they should be automatically be sent to the version of the page that is meant for traditional-computer viewing.
Last, include a page-to-page link in the upper left hand corner of each page that allows people to move between the mobile and traditional versions of the pages, if they can’t find what they are looking for, or need to over-ride the user-agent detection and redirection. The upper left-hand corner is the ideal location for this link, because it is always the first thing that people will be able to see, even if there is a mobile rendering problem with the site. If something is wrong with the way the page looks on someone’s phone, you don’t want to make them search all over for the button to fix it!
You should still crate the handheld stylesheet for your mobile-specific pages and traditional pages as well, just in case something goes wrong. They are a good signal to the search engines that the pages should be ranked in mobile search results.
Mobile Usability Options:
Posted by Tom_C
We all love backlinks. We all love visualisation. Boom! Let's mash those two things together. In this post I've collected a bunch of different techniques for visualising your link data. Some of these are useful for analysis, some are useful for management and some are useful for keeping Dr. Pete entertained...... :-)
Which Are My Top FoldersThe top pages function of OSE is one of the most useful features ever. Ever since I saw the first incarnation in labs I've been a heavy user of this tool but Rich Baxter has taken things one step further yet again and given us a way to see the top linked to folders on a site. Here are the most linked to sub-folders and pages on www.google.com:
Get the step by step walkthrough to creating your own version of this over on seogadget.
Creating Geo Link MapsYes, I know that this involves a competitor. But the graphs are too super cool not to share! Take a look at the geomap of Distilled's backlinks:
Anyone would think we have a presence in the US or something! To learn how to make your own version of this go check out Wiep's wonderful article. You never know, one day this feature might be native to either OSE or Majestic.... I can but dream :-)
Pretty Tag cloudsOk, we can probably file this one under "not management friendly" but you never know. If you do SEO for a dinosaur website....
These are the top anchor texts for SEOmoz visualised as a keywordasaurus. Hat tip to Dr Pete and SeanWF for this tool: http://www.tagxedo.com/app.html which let's you make the pretty pictures.
Visualising Directory LinksWhen quickly scanning a site's backlink profile there's a few different things that I look for more or less straight away. One of those is the split between quality links and umm non-quality links. It's not that the non-quality links don't work (depends how bad they are!) but the quality links are almost always the more interesting ones to analyse. These are the ones you really want to copy from your competitors. If you download an Open Site Explorer report into excel and then create a new column and paste the following formula in:
=IF(IFERROR(FIND("directory",A2),IFERROR(FIND("directory",B2),IFERROR(FIND("Directory",B2),0)))>0,"Y","N")
This formula is a little messy but basically just looks to see if either the URL or page title contains "directory". While this doesn't catch everything I've found that it get's you a long way there very easily. That will then let you create a nice little pie chart like this:
Venn DiagramsKelvin recently wrote a very interesting piece on creating venn diagrams between your links and competitor's links that looks a bit like this:
Kelvin has a nice handy video that walks you through how to create these charts (which I think are super management friendly!) over here.
Broken LinksI know this tool has been written about before and it's not technically a visualisation as such, more of a visual representation of your links but I love how quickly you can see which of your links no longer exist using Carter Cole's chrome extension "SEO site tools":
Of course, with yahoo site explorer not hanging around for much longer it's useful that this tool also works with Google Webmaster Tools:
I like this view, especially when I'm looking at a particular page as it gives me an indication of how many actual links might be pointing at the page and how many might have dropped off recently.
SEOmoz LabsWhile this tool has been around for ages some of you might not know about it and especially some of you might not know how awesome this is for sales and non-technical people! Our sales team uses these kinds of charts all the time to quickly and easily get an overview comparison of a brand new website that they might be on the phone to:
Get your own one of these over in SEOmoz labs.
Original post blogged on b2evolution.
Posted by randfish
Today I'm happy to announce that we've just updated Linkscape's web index (which also powers Open Site Explorer and the metrics via the mozBar) with fresh link data. You should see some bright shiny links we've found from late July to early August in this index (e.g. our own Beginner's Guide now has lots of interesting link information). We also have some cool updates to the API, new partnerships and more, all covered below.
50% Correlation Boost to Domain Authority (with some Oddities)You may recall when we produced our correlation research this Spring, we showed that while Page Authority was substantively better than any other metric for an individual page's importance, Domain Authority was much rougher (and only slightly better than homepage toolbar PageRank, i.e. pretty bad). We've been hard at work improving our models, adding data sources and writing code to help and this index is our first to feature an improved correlation between Google's rankings and Domain Authority.
This chart from April, if re-done today, should show ~50% better correlation for Domain Authority to Google rankings (sorry I didn't have time to make an updated chart)
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You can see more in this video on How We Calculate Page & Domain Authority.
Unfortunately, along with this update are some strange outliers, likely stemming from us not doing as good a job testing as we should. We've heard feedback from our members that the new scores, in many cases, don't make sense and seem unintuititive. We agree and we scrambled all day today (Friday) to put forward a solution. That should manifest in the next 14-20 days as DA numbers update again (separate from an index update). I'll have more on that in a separate blog post when it launches.
In the meantime, our apologies to those whose numbers are adversely affected. Things should be considerably better in a few weeks, so if reporting or KPIs have you worried, please message to anyone receiving those data points that this temporary glitch should be solved soon and DA will much better relate to a domain's top Page Authority URLs.
New PartnershipsMany of you may have already seen the news that Linkscape data (via our API) is now integrated in Brightedge's enterprise platform. Their software offers an impressive collection of analysis and recommendations, and they've shared a few screenshots with us:
Like our beta web app, Brightedge's software manages a lot of critical SEO data all in one place (but for much larger sites and organizations - customers include MySpace, VMware, and Symantec).
They also do some really spiffy stuff with layering meta data onto links (like "blog, wiki, directory, etc." as descriptors of the type of links you're getting). This isn't yet in the Linkscape API (probably 6+ months away) - Brightedge is analyzing the sites and adding this data themselves!
You can learn more about the integration from Laurie Sullivan on Mediapost (the only inaccuracy I saw was SEOmoz offering "consulting services" - something we haven't done since 2009) or by contacting Brightedge directly.
We're also psyched about integrations with several other tools and data providers including:
We've previously integrated with other tools and platforms from folks like Hubspot, Conductor, Authority Labs and many more. If you're interested in the API, you can get a free key to use it (up to 1mil calls/month) here and see lots of code examples on our API wiki.
Improvements to Anchor TextIf you ran previous link reports or have used our API, you likely had the same frustration as infamous SEO rockstar, Greg Boser (of 3DogMedia) as illustrated below:
We've gone ahead and made this change, so that anchor text from Linkscape's API and the tools it powers (Open Site Explorer, et al) are now capitalization agnostic. This means words that appeared in differently capitalized ways in link anchor text will be consolidated to a single version. For example, we may have previously shown different quantities of links for the anchor text:
Following tonight's update, these will all be treated as "seo" and consolidated. This should make Greg and a lot of other SEOs, considerably happier. :-)
Index StatsThis month, as always, we've got a new index with freshly crawled pages and links. Stats are as follows:
Some other interesting numbers this month include:
Look for even more exciting things from Linkscape over the next few months, with some really big, exciting improvements to freshness and coverage by year's end.
And, as always, feel free to give us any feedback you've got!
p.s. We're taking a hard look at the feedback re: Domain Authority numbers, and have some action items ahead. Some relevant things to be aware of include:
My sincere apologies to all who are adversely affected. Feel free to ignore DA scores for now if they don't make sense for you and anticipate we'll be shooting for a fix ASAP. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
p.s. Update #2 - I've added more details in the section on Domain Authority. New scores will be out in the next 14-20 days prior to the next index update. Thanks to everyone for their vociferous and passionate feedback. We're working hard to make this better.