The coolest SEO tools

[hdwills]

Note to the admins/moderators : Hi, if you feel that this is not thr right thread for this post. Feel free to move it :)

I have developed three different free SEO tools.

1. Keyword Competition Research Tool
2. Competitior Link Analysis Tool
3. Backlinks grapper with graph display.

Here is what the tools do

1. Keyword Competition Research Tool

a. Finds out the top 1000 competitors for any given key phrase.
b. Finds out the link popularity and page rank of all the competitors
c. Upon further analysis [optional], provides you with a detailed report of all d. the competitiors.
e. Full analysis [optional] finds out the backlinks of the competitor
f. Finds out the link popularity of the backlinking site
g. Finds out the anchor text/link text used.
h. Finds out the number of links on the backlinking page linking to the competitor.
i. Finds out the pagerank of the backlinking page.

2. Competitor Links Analysis Tool

a. Gathers all the backlinks to your competitor
b. Finds out the anchor text/link text being used
c. Finds out the link popularity of the back linking site
d. Finds out the page rank of the linking page
e. Finds out the number of links on the page from which your competitor is linked.

3. Backlinks grabber with graph display

a. Finds out the backlinks for upto 200 sites for any given key phrase
b. Eliminates the duplicates from the compiled list.
c. Finds out the page rank of the backlinks
d. Displays visually appealing graphs of the sites found. Graphs contain the number of links found, their page rank, percentage of page ranks etc.
e. Sends the all the backlinks to you in html or .csv format, thru email.

You can use them at www.paidproject.com/news.php

[orion]

Hi, hdwills

The link provided seems to be broken, at least from my end.

Orion

[seostruggler]

Hi all - I'm new here - just thought I'd say hello - :)

Hdwills - I just popped over there and looked at the tools you've written - one question I have though is where do you get your backlink data from?

I'm under the impression that all links are no longer returned by the google "link:" command. Are the tools performing another query of somekind to get this information?

Thanks
SEOstruggler.

[hdwills]

Hi guys,

Orion - The server was down for maintenence, its online now. By the way, the tools and the instructions are listed on the page. You might have to scroll down the page. :)

SeoStruggler - The google link commands returns internal links, so i am filtering it using this query "+www.somesite.com" -site:www.somesite.com. Will return good number of links without internal site links. :cool:

[orion]

OK, hdwills. The link seems to work fine now.

All feedback seekers and reviewers are welcome to read the sticky thread For Reviewers and Submitters (http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2484) before seeking or providing feedback.

Orion

[hugo guzman]

hdwills,
I absolutely love the idea behind your competition analysis tools. However, I feel that basing the tool on Google backlink data only will be a major problem. I am fairly sure that Google's backlink data for specific urls is purposely incomplete (so that seo folks like us can't get too much insight into how they determine rankings).

If I were you I would consider taking Yahoo or MSN backlink data as well (minus interior domain links) and combining all three or filtering the three results, etc...

I personally feel that Yahoo's backlink command (link:) is a better reflection of what google counts as a backlink than google's own command!

Just my two cents.

[hdwills]

Hi Hugo,

I am working on a yahoo based tools, By the way can anybody make my task easier by providing me with a code snippet that scrapes or parses Yahoo SERPs, preferably in PHP. :)

[hugo guzman]

I've encountered another major problem with your method for obtaining backlink info (for the competitor tool). The method that you are applying searches for "occurances" of the domain, even if the occurance is not actually a hyperlink but simply a written reference.

Here's an example:

Your tool show this page as a backlink for the following URL:
URL: http://www.seoproject.com/forum
Backlink: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000161.shtml

This page does not contain a backlink for my forum. It simply contains a written mention near the bottom of the page. It was a note to the site owner, but contains no hyperlink to my site.

Because of your method of search (linkdomain: I suspect), your results are not accurate in terms of actual backlinks.

[JohnW]

Hugo brings up a good point. Take it a step further - search for all occurrances of the domain, on several engines - say, Yahoo, Google and Teoma, and remove dups. Then spider the pages to see which actually contain links, and you end up with a better list to base everything else on.

[seobook]

Your tool show this page as a backlink for the following URL:
URL: http://www.seoproject.com/forum
Backlink: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000161.shtml

This page does not contain a backlink for my forum. It simply contains a written mention near the bottom of the page. It was a note to the site owner, but contains no hyperlink to my site.
the word Hugo on that page is a clickable link to your site.

[hugo guzman]

What's up Aaron.

I didn't notice that link on my name. However, the issue is not resolved necessarily because the url that I queried on that tool was www.seoproject.com/forum, but the hyperlink on my name was to my index page (www.seoproject.com).

I'm fairly sure that the query command picked up just the sub url within the (non-linked) written text of the page.

I'll see if I can find a more definitive example.

[hdwills]

Hi hugo,

I checked it out. The script doesn't take normal text into account, only text between anchors.

JohnW- Your suggestions are fabulous, I am working on it right now.

By theway, the scripts will be offline till I find a good webhost, simply because, my present webhost suspended my website due to the mega server load caused by the script on its very first day.

[hdwills]

Hi

The scripts are back online now. :)

[hugo guzman]

how did you verify that?

As mentioned in my previous post,

"Your tool showed this page as a backlink for the following URL:
URL: http://www.seoproject.com/forum
Backlink: http://www.seobook.com/archives/000161.shtml

This page does not contain a backlink for my forum. It simply contains a written mention near the bottom of the page...but contains no hyperlink to my site

There is a hyperlink on my name there, but that hyperlink on my name was to my index page (www.seoproject.com) not my forum."

Why would your tool show that seobook page as a backlink to my forum, when none exists?

[JohnW]

Don't want to get too deep into this, but one thing to consider is that citations of a URL without a hyperlink are still worth counting, but should be counted seperately form actual hyperlinks ;-)

[hdwills]

Hi

Hugo - Because the way I parse a web page, I only extract text that is between anchors. If that page shows up as an anchor for your forum page although you meant it for the home page, it means google treats it that way or google does this to confuse us.

John-W - You are right, i have seen atleast one instance where just a citation and not a live link was accounted for as a backlink to one very popular site. [http://www.seobook.com]

http://www.host4net.com/web_host/guy.com-seo.html -- this page comes up as a backlink for www.seobook.com. The most surprising thing, is the former page doesn't have a clickable link to the later. There can be two explanations.

1. Google treats mere citations as backlinks
2. These host4net guy has removed all the live links. If he has done this with his reciprocal link partners, then he sure is cheating.

[dannysullivan]

Can you past the exactly Google URL that will show this backlink? In other words, jump me to a place within the Google results page themselves that show this, similar to http://www.google.com/search?q=link:http://www.seobook.com&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&start=40&sa=N

I've gone 16 pages in and don't find host4net coming up. I also think I know why. If I understand right, you aren't actually doing a link: backlink search, because that generates internal links at a site as well as external.

Instead, it sounds like you are doing something like this, say if you wanted backlinks for seobook.com:

www.seobook.com -site:www.seobook.com

or http://www.google.com/search?q=www.seobook.com+-site:www.seobook.com&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&start=20&sa=Nd, which jumps you right to a page where host4net DOES show up.

The only problem is, that type of search isn't a backlink search. That type of search simply says, "show me all pages with the ordinary text www.seobook.com that aren't on the www.seobook.com site itself.

In short, I don't see Google counting ordinary text as a backlink according to what's shown here.

[orion]

There is more to the story.

Links are defined based on an addressable URI or URL regular expression

Examples:

<a href="http://www.domainname.com/..."
<a href="http://www.domainname.com/afolder/..."

There are many derivatives of these.

The point is you need a protocol followed by an URL or URI. Consequently, mere declaring the above as text does not qualifies as a link.

According to the W3C standards

"A link is a connection from one Web resource to another. Although a simple concept, the link has been one of the primary forces driving the success of the Web.

A link has two ends -- called anchors -- and a direction. The link starts at the "source" anchor and points to the "destination" anchor, which may be any Web resource (e.g., an image, a video clip, a sound bite, a program, an HTML document, an element within an HTML document, etc.)."
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.1

Mere text describing a URI or URL has no ending and direction on the Web. They are not nodes of a subgraph of the Web. Therefore, I'm inclined to say that the above statistics and findings are incorrect.

Orion

[hugo guzman]

hdwills,
Have you read my to posts carefully? You made the following comment:"If that page shows up as an anchor for your forum page although you meant it for the home page, it means google treats it that way or google does this to confuse us."

I wasn't trying to do anything on purpose here.

I simply used your tool to search for backlink info for the following URL:
*.seoproject.com/forum

Your tool came up with the following backlink for that unique URL:
*.seobook.com/archives/000161.shtml

Based on this result, I am 99.99% sure that there is a fundamental flaw with the query method that you are using for this tool (*.domain.com -site:[url]*domain.com).

I am agreement with both Orion and dannysullivan. Your query method returns results that are not "true" backlinks, because that query returns any occurance of the url in question (even if it is simply a written expression that is not hyperlinked). That seobook page that I cited includes a written expression of my url (*seoproject.com/forum) with no hyperlink, but your query is treating it as a backlink.

Furthermore, I've done some followup research on the subject at hand:
I performed a query for my homepage (*.seoproject.com) on your tool. Guess What? The seobook page that we have been discussing does not show up as a backlink for my homepage url!

I would recommend that a simply test be run at this point. Set up a "virgin" set of two unique suburls (from two different domains) and set aside a third (target) domain. Have each these suburl pages indexed in google, then have one of the suburl pages point a hyperlink to the third domain and have the other suburl page simply include a written expression of the third domain.

I really like the idea behind your tool, but I am thoroughly convinced that for the purposes of such a tool only the link: command info can be used. I know that google's link: command is incomplete, but it can be supplamented with Yahoo or MSN link: command results.

Any other form of query like your *domain.com -site:*domain.com or any sort of linkdomain: command will fall short because those types of commands are not querying "absolute" backlink data.

[hdwills]

Hi hugo, danny, seobook, orion

Thanks for your great feedback, I have done the neccessary changes (back links) and couple of bug fixes for the tool. Sorry for goofing up :confused:

Plus, I have created the Yahoo based version of the tools. Please check them and provide your extremely valuable feedback. :)

[hugo guzman]

I give you nothing but props for undertaking such an ambitious task.

Let me know when the tools are fully update (yahoo, etc...)

[hdwills]

Hi hugo,

Both tha yahoo and google version of the tool is online and working :)

www.paidproject.com/news.php -- Links to them are in the main menu on the top left handside of the page.