Lots and lots of people sign up for SEOmoz's PRO membership, and I have to tell you that on a personal level, every single one makes me feel honored, humble and yes, even a bit guilty about reading comic books last night instead of working on new tools/q+a/tips/etc. One of the big frustrations PRO members have, though, is that they can't find (or don't even know about) a lot of the cool stuff PRO membership provides.
For example, at SMX Advanced, I did a few demos of PRO at our booth, and lots of folks gathered to watch. When I showed off the Q+A Section, someone commented that they didn't even know it existed (or that they could ask questions and see everyone else's past Q+A in the knowledge base), despite being a PRO member for the last 3 months. Even worse was our PRO Tips which, when I showed it, elicited audible gasps from members who'd never known we offered it. Thus, although I feel a bit uncomfortable about promoting our paid service, I want to let PRO members know that the tips section is REALLY valuable and useful. I also thought I'd give this post some real editorial value and share an example of how PRO Tips work - here's a sample (note: this one's new and hasn't been published before):
Discovering the Relative Crawl Speed of Googlebot on a Site
As Jonah Stein noted at SMX Advanced, crawl frequency may be the new PageRank (as far as valuable/usable external measurements of a site/page's relative importance to the engine). Knowing how often a particular page is crawled or how quickly Googlebot reaches new content on a domain gives insight into potential ranking ability, bot behavior, and the percentages of content getting spidered and included.
Google exposes this data with date-specific range queries, such as https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aseomoz.org&as_qdr=m2 - which uses the &as_qdr parameter plus either d/m/y (and a trailing number) to show results from a given time frame. You can expand this query to be creative by using subfolders or keywords, as well. For example, I can see how many threads from our q+a section have been spidered in the last 10 days with https://www.google.com/search?q=site:seomoz.org/qa+inurl:view&as_qdr=d10&filter=0.
Using this query, particularly several times over the course of a few days/weeks, can help you puzzle out how frequently Googlebot is crawling a site, even without log files. I wouldn't take this as far as saying that sites that are crawled more frequently are always more important (they may just produce less fresh content), but certainly improving this metric over time, especially on a large site or blog, can have very positive effects. It's also valuable as a competitive intelligence tool to get an idea of what new content is being produced, how frequently, and which portions are getting indexed.
UPDATE: Hamlet Batista wisely points out in the comments below that looking at the cache date for the pages is also valuable, as this differs substantively from the indexing date (and that information can be valuable as well). You'd also want to calculate which URLs you've updated and when to match against the data Google provides, for a more complete picture.
If you like getting tips like this, do check out the PRO Tips section for lots more (they're typically updated 1-2X per week):
Naturally, this brings up issues of how to make the SEOmoz PRO interface better, particularly from a navigational and discovery perspective. If you're a regular user of PRO, and you've got insight about what you'd like to see, we'd love to hear from you. We're working under the gun on a very ambitious set of projects for October (sorry - they're extra top secret), but after that, our goal is to build a more usable, friendlier site, and we want to make it as user-centric as possible.
In addition to collecting feedback here on the blog, we'll be asking some PRO members to demo some of our new products & interfaces in the near future. If you'd like to be part of that group, look for an email to PRO members in the next 60 days and we'll make you part of our alpha/beta testing team. Thanks for the suggestions & support!
BTW - Technically, the prize for least-known benefit of PRO membership has to go to the discount store. Even the link & social media directories get more love than that guy :-)
Also - Only 90 minutes left to run all the Trifecta reports you want before we start limiting to PRO (and 1/day for non-PRO).
Hi Rand,
As usual, great tips. A couple of observations/contributions:
1. The crawl rate alone is not enough to determine the importance of a page. You also need the update rate. Pages that are updated more frequently, get crawled faster. The indexing rate is another good metric too.
2. In order to identify the crawl rates, you need to look at the cache timestamps. The date you get from the date range query tells you the tine the page was indexed not the time it was crawled.
Keep up the great work!
~Raises hand.
Suggestions? I do. I do. First, to get to a nice navigational panel you have to go to the blog, where you get the left hand nav that displays User Profile, rank, Comment Tracker, Write a blog, Pro Content, SEO Tips & Tricks, and SEO Q&A. It'd be nice to incorporate this into the Pro Dashboard (even though the links already are) but highlighted under the user info. It'd also be good to incorporate those same links into the personal profile page.
I don't know if you do this already because I've never killed it, but you'd definitely want to resurrect the dashboard for a user every time something is new. The user window or dashboard would also be a good place for highlighting news. (Similar to the logo example from the previous blog post) That's how I notice new tips. They're highlighted in my little left hand user window.
I'd do something similar with the Q&A ratings, and let the ratings not just be a poll of how well the person thought their question was answered, but how useful SEOmoz thinks the question would be to the community. I kno wthere are some that catch the moz' collective eye and become blog posts, or were private and become public. I'd suggest highlighting things like these just as new tips are highlighted.
Now it's time to get in line for demo testing.
I never had problems noticing PRO content available at the dashboard and sidebar: PRO tips, tools, ect. So I guess if you include more detailed information there, that should work.
Besides, have you ever tried some sort of newsletters letting PRO members know about new PRO content available?
I personally use the "SEOMOZ PRO DASHBOARD" far more than the "PRO Content" link in the top menu, and had no problems finding all the good stuff there.
Speaking of which, could you please update 'page strenght' to 'trifecta' in the dashboard? And, when you guys have the file open already, is it possible to be able to remove the notice "This is your premium member dashboard, use this for quick access to premium content and tools. To conveniently access this dashboard, we recommend installing our SEO dashboard browser button.", so the actual dashboard would be smaller in height? Thanks!
When I log into Pro I should see a page like this - https://www.seomoz.org/tools but with 3 columns and icons grouped tools/reports/guides.
Up until a few weeks ago I didn't realise that there were PRO only videos too!
https://www.seomoz.org/videos
Tsk tsk - Tom you should know better, being a Global Associate and all...
Re the pro videos, I like that you can download & save them but any chance of also offering embedded/streaming versions?
Thanks for posting that I didn't realize either that they had bonus videos.
@Tom_C Up until a few weeks ago I didn't realise that there were PRO only videos too!
https://www.seomoz.org/videos
Haha. Honestly. I thought I sneaked into that section. I tried doing some reverse engineering...and found it. Hmm. Should I have said that? Lol.
Just being a little honest, it was kind of hidden.
Since you're asking for feedback, I have found the "new" PRO interface difficult to navigate - more than the 1.0 version which had no tabs and mainly links. It definitely "makes me think."
It would be great to have some instructional content and a PRO tutorial demo. Upon returning from SMX Advanced, I recalled 20% of what I learned at the booth. :-)
Example:I was ecstatic to learn that the PRO Dashboard recently allowed >1 site. When I got home, it wasn't clear how to add the additional sites. I kept going to the Help? tab, which didn't help.
UI input:
Request for CSV download of all report data. I find myself using other tools for reporting and not using SEOmoz, even though I know it's valuable.
Thanks for the long hours you've put into this and the opportunity to provide some feedback.
A video of the advantages. I think reading on this site is normal. But why not an intro video saying, "These are the benefits to going PRO" or "Here are the new features".
I'd say, it shouldn't take more than a day to make this. Unless your analytical like myself...It might take a week or two. :)
I had submitted this when Pro was first introduced. Doesn't include everything, but it woudl be nice to have all navigation categorized and above the fold.
With regard to the "least-known benefit of PRO membership", I've had a difficult time navigating to the discount store. I still don't know where links to it are other than in certain blog posts, although I admit I haven't searched that hard. It is usually easier to use google to find it.
I agree everytime I have looked for it I end up having to use the search box. Still not sure how to just navigate to it. :)
I believe that, tragically, it's located in the "tools" tab of the PRO dashboard interface. We know it needs work, and we've got some plans, but really appreciate everyone chipping in here with recommendations.
I just signed up to the PRO membership this week, and already it's been a fantastic resource. (Especially the PRO Tips.)
You could be excused Rand, depending upon your answer to this question: What comic books are we talking about here?
On a related note... for any Alan Moore fans (and I know there are some lurking around here), the new Watchmen trailer is out... sheer awesomeness...