Archive for the ‘Search Tools and Resources’ Category

Everyone, at some point, wishes they had a magic mirror like the one in Snow White. One place where you could get the scoop on yourself. In one moment, the Evil Queen could find out for certain whether she really was the “fairest one of all.”

And, really, it wasn’t how she looked that she was trying to figure out anyway. Any mirror can tell you that. She wanted to know what people thought of her- beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all.

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SEOMoz’s recent release of Search Engine Ranking Factors Version 2 has generated a lot of buzz within the SEO industry. More accurately it has received tremendous praise and is being hailed as the “final answer” to search optimization for Google. After carefully reviewing this hopeful work which is said to;

“…represent the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”

which:

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Last week I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. While that is a good article in and of itself, I’m using that as a jump off point to start a short series on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. Just in case you haven’t caught on yet, this is the first post in that series.

As a quick aside, and along these lines, over at search engine guide I made an argument for website validation as an important part of the optimization process. I don’t believe 100% validation makes a difference for rankings, but I outlined there why it is worth taking the time to do. At the very least it helps you identify search engine unfriendly problems.

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I feel compelled to begin with a little disclaimer: in no way was today’s blogging activity here at PPM orchestrated to be a pick on Rand day. We openly praise and discuss much of Rand’s work here at the office and we are very much fans of SEOMoz.

With that said…

Today I was reading an interesting post over at SEOMoz in which Rand put forth the idea that perhaps submitting a Google sitemap could be detrimental as it may cause pages to be indexed which are unworthy of inclusion in the index (Google SpamMaps?) . The main point that I got from the post was that non-inclusion served as a pass/fail metric to indicate the strength of a given page.

I have a couple of problems with Rand’s position. Firstly I can state with a good deal of certainty that inclusion in a Google sitemap does not equal inclusion in Google’s index. I have experienced this first-hand and I’m quite certain that Google is still evaluating index worthiness of individual pages, even those crawled via sitemap.

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Everyday I see at least 1 new “SEO Tool” on the web. Generally they are copycats of existing tools as this is an area that SEO’s have beaten to death. Over the years I have encountered thousands of so-called SEO tools most of which are simply of no unique value. Occasionally I do however come across something truly valuable which either simplifies my life or enhances my productivity. If such a tool also proves itself to be useful into the future it is immortalized by gaining entrance into Jason’s SEO Toolbox..

Today I will be sharing 2 of my favorite search tools. These are either search engines which furnish search results in a new and innovative way or search services which enhance or refine the search results of traditional search engines.

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Google’s databases are estimated to contain over 20 billion objects. This includes everything from web pages to text files, pdf’s, spreadsheets, etc. Everything that has been found by Googlebot, while traversing the Internet Link Graph.

As you can imagine there are all sorts of treasures hidden within this massive data pile. The trick is formulating effective queries that will deliver the goods. I call this Google-Mining and below you will find some of my best tools for striking gold.

A Word of Caution: As well-intentioned as Googlebot is, sometimes it indexes information that was not intended for public perusal. Please respect other’s privacy and digital property! Don’t save or even view any data that is obviously intended to be private. This includes media objects, personal files, business data, etc.

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An article over at New Scientist covers NASA’s solution to the overwhelming amount of atmosphere and climate data that they have been receiving due to an advanced monitoring system which they have deployed. The article describes NASA as being swamped by Terabytes of data streaming in daily from the Earth Observing System.
The solution is a simple piece of software that makes the data viewable and navigable through the user-friendly Google Earth interface.

According to NASA, the integrated solution named iEarth, will be available for use by anyone in April.

I thought it might be interesting if I share some of my most treasured and frequently used web-based SEO tools. If you find something useful to you; return the favor and post one of your favorite webmaster/SEO related tools.

Text Analysis Tools:

• Web Vocabulary Profiler: An awesome text disambiguation suite.
• Textalyser: An old favorite for quick and easy text stats.

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Just a quick post… Our CodeMonitor tool was mentioned in a PubCon session. If you’re looking for CodeMonitor you’ll find it on the right under “Web Tools”; but here’s a quick link: http://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/

Are you worried about internet privacy? I’m not so much (yet) but I know many are. Well, here’s a clever way to to keep “The Man” (in this case your favorite search engine) from tracking your searches.

[quote]In the past, the only way to prevent this association was to routinely clear the cookies from your browser. Lost in the Crowd takes a different approach: automatically and over time placing a number of random queries through the search engines you use from your actual tracking cookie. What searches did you care about versus those that were just made up? There’s no way for the search engine, or anyone else, to tell.[/quote]

Now, get lost!