Posted by randfish
SEOmoz PRO has been taking some big leaps in improvement, albeit quietly. You may have noticed many small improvements and fewer bugs (though we’re still working out some kinks), but you might not have noticed one awesome change to how we support campaigns.
Subdomains, Subfolders & Root Domains Now Included!
Since the web app launched, one of our most requested items (in fact, I think it actually was #1 on the request list) has been the ability to track keyword rankings + crawl data on either a specific subdomain, an entire root domain or a specific subfolder. After many challenging hours of re-writing our crawl and tracking system, the engineering team launched this last week! What does it mean, you ask?
Thus, I could not set up a campaign in SEOmoz PRO for any of the following:
- The subdomain "webdesign.about.com" which would only crawl pages and track rankings from that subdomain
- The root domain "*.about.com" which would crawl pages and track rankings on any page on the about.com root domain
- The subfolder "geography.about.com/climate/" which would limit crawling and rank tracking to pages in that particular folder
For many of us who already use the web app extensively, the best part of this may be the ability to put separate subfolders into separate campaigns. With a 5 campaign, $99 account, you can now track 5 subfolders on the same site, meaning your crawl, keywords tracked, etc. can scale up much better. Those of us who’ve been frustrated by rank tracking not catching other subdomains on our sites (one of my personal pet peeves) should switch to root domain tracking (yes, sadly, this means having to set up a new campaign) to catch everything.
NOTE: We can’t automatically segment your Google Analytics data, so if you want to separate visit numbers into subfolders or subdomains, be sure to create a unique campaign in GA and connect the right one to the app.
Linkscape Update: Index 40
Linkscape’s index updated this past weekend with brand new link data crawled in April. Be sure to check OSE + the web app for your new scores.
- 40,283,351,470 (40.3 billion) URLs
- 395,648,189 (396 million) Subdomains
- 115,483,313 (115 million) Root Domains
- 410,406,731,584 (410 billion) Links
- Followed vs. Nofollowed
- 2.24% of all links found were nofollowed
- 57.25% of nofollowed links are internal, 42.75% are external
- Rel Canonical – 7.49% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
- The average page has 61 links on it (up from 60.88 last index – the first rise in many months)
- 51.64 internal links on average
- 9.36 external links on average
NOTE: We’re trying something new in the next Linkscape index (index 41, scheduled for early June) that may have a dramatic impact on some of our metrics. We believe this is the right thing to do and will increase the quality of the resource, but there may be some oddities as it will be the first time we publicly show an index with this structure.
Linkscape Metrics’ Latest Correlation w/ Google Rankings
Although we’ve been tracking Linkscape’s correlations with rankings on a semi-regular basis, this is now becoming a key part of how we measure each index. Below are the latest correlation numbers (these use the top 30 results in Google across ~10K keywords):
As you can see, Page Authority is still our best correlated metric and the one I’d generally bias toward when doing link opportunity analysis. Domain authority is, likewise, the best correlated domain-based metric, though it’s only slightly better than other domain-based data like DmT (of the root domain).
In this index, we also worked with SEO By The Sea’s Bill Slawski to help build a more robust, more accurate trusted seed set for MozTrust. Although the correlations with rankings aren’t much higher (only +0.01 improvement from our previous index), we’re not sure that rank prediction is the best way to actually measure mozTrust. If you’ve got feedback about the new mT or DmT scores, please do let us know – my rough observation was that it seemed at least as good, possibly better than before.
More Improvements to PRO
As long as I’ve still got your attention, I thought I’d call out a couple of other smaller improvements that went out last week as well:
- New help guides: Find yourself stuck in the web app and need a hand, click help at the top right of the page to learn how to get the most out of the feature or report. We’ve also just released this awesome PDF guide.
- Faster loading Google Analytics data. You’ll notice that the traffic data on the ranking summary and history now load right away. You can also see this with the weekly data on the traffic data tab, and soon with the monthly data too!
- .csv exports from the ranking summary reports now include the ranking URLs.
Coming Soon:
- A big update to our SEO toolbar for Firefox with a bunch of cool new capabilities for analyzing pages and SERPs (with Chrome to follow). BTW – speaking of the MozBar, it does work with the new FF 4; if you’re having any trouble, just re-install!
- Some brand new PRO pricing and plans, providing some great new options for those seeking more campaigns and keywords.
- The much-anticipated SERPs Analysis tool (no certain deadline, but probably before July).
That’s actually not all – there’s some other big features on the way, but we have to keep those secret (particularly the launch of something very exciting at Day 1 of MozCon).
If you’ve got feedback for PRO, don’t be shy! Use that "feedback" button on the left-hand side of the app or leave a note on our feature request forum and tell us what’s bugging you, what you want and all your hopes & dreams (for SEO tools that is).
