First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.
As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar! However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.
So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I've also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.
1. New SERP Overlay
This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.
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"I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow
2. Page Authority and Domain Authority
Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don't despair! You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.
3. Surf Like a Search Engine
We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.
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"The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice." --Richard Baxter
4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay
Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including
- Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.
- Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.
- HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.
"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin
"The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There's not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports - this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page." --Rob Ousbey
5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties
The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.
I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon 
on the toolbar.
I know Rand mentioned (can't remember if it was on the blog or in a webinar) you were looking at Google Chrome as an option for the toolbar. Any update on that? Thanks for the update, btw. This may actually get me to use Firefox again... at least until a Chrome version is released. ;)
I don't have an exact timeframe for you yet, but a Chrome verison is on our roadmap, and we will begin looking into it very soon.
Another vote for Chrome version!
in the meantime you should check out SEO Site Tools it was featured on the main blog a couple weeks ago :)
Yup, have that one! It's definitely good...
And thanks Adam...
I vote for a chrome version, as well :)
Chrome support please! After trying out the speed and reliability of Chrome, I can't use Firefox anymore - not if I actually need to get anything done!
Chrome is blazing and amazing.
Excellent toolbar that gives me a quick overview of the most important metrics. It would be even more excellent when the Chrome version is released! What is the ETA?
My first toolbar ever was Google. It stayed at the top of my browser way past it's usefulness, but I kept it up there out of habit I suppose.
No more! The old Google toolbar came down yesterday. I no longer wish see page rank staring at me. It just looks so dingy and pathetic sitting next to this shiny new toy of yours.
A hearty thumbs up!
The SERP overlay feature is absolutely brilliant.
As I see it, the SERP overlay has two important impacts on the daily SEO work:
First, it makes linkscape so much more actionable! Quite easy to see what you need to do to improve the rankings.
Secondly, it is very educative as we are constantly "forced" to see how much domain authority vis-a-vis page authority matters in the rankings.
It's an absolute wonderful product! I think the upgrades were definitly worth the wait!
I must say that the SERP's now look a bit messy (or maybe 'unusual' is a better word), but the fast info provided is definitely golden!
Great work!
Congrats on the big improvements to the Mozbar, because its based on Linkscape data the SERP overlay you shouldn't get the side affects like other seo tools of being blocked by Google for being a bot and scraping the top results.
So the question is now that the data is more visible does it mean that there are going to be more updates and geographic expansion of the Linkscape data?
thats the exact same conclution i came to when developing my SEO toolbar... then i got to thinking about it and thought of a way to pull pagerank fast :)
but your totally right because they own the data it is way cool...
it also works on bing and yahoo... way cool
Thanks!
To answer your question - we are continually working on improvements the Linkscape index, which should make results better overall, both in the U.S. and internationally. Also, an upcoming improvement will allow Linkscape to better handle non-English character sets, which should help improve international coverage as well.
so..... when can we start submitting urls to you linkscape?
I chatted with Nick a bit about this. We're investigating supporting site maps for some select domains and partners (particularly API partners). But in general we have to be careful of spammers in the same way that search engines have to.
Awesome! This is a great improvement. I liked the last version, but this has some really nice upgrades! Good job TEAMmoz.
Now that you have added the Yahoo! Links feature to the Tools, the one thing that I would find more useful is if there was an option that also took you to Yahoo site explorer and directly showed you all Inlinks "Except from this domain". It is one of my most used backlink tools for a quick assessment to better understand a sites link profile. This feature will probably work by adding a URL parameter that can be appended with "&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u".
Thanks for the suggestion James! Sounds like a good addition to include in our next update.
It's awsome... I love using it!!!
Love it, though I hope to see the "Tools" menu and the "Analyze Page" functionality available through the right-click menu as well :)Also, it would be great if it was made it possible to choose default tab to be shown when using "Analyze Page".
Very cool. I installed the new toolbar this morning and have already enjoyed using it. More to play with as the days pass.
FYI... I gave you guys a bit of additional link love in an article I posted on Sphinn titled, "He with the Most Links Does NOT Always Win."
Keep up the good work.
- Eric Itzkowitz
Thanks Eric, really appreciate reference!
It would be nice to have cookies disabled when surfing like a search engine..
Just a quick note: we just shipped a quick update to the toolbar. This version has an authentication fix, and some other small fixes (like the Explore link not working in the SERP overlay)
Thanks for all of you feedback on the blog, Twitter, and through the toolbar feedback link!
The new toolbar is full of sheer awesomeness. Exceeded my expectations for sure. Great work SEOmoz!
It looks lovely... Downloading it now! :)
Congrats on your first post Adam!
Awesome update! Maybe I shouldn't say it's an update, as there are some many more awesome features being added.
Don't forget to update your firefox to latest 3.6 version, it doesn't work on my firefox 3.0.
Yes, this is a important point I should have included to the post. The new toolbar only works on Firefox 3.5 and above.
Actually it works with 3.5+ - It's definitely time to upgrade your Firefox! ;)
Upgraded already :D
Thanks Jen and Adam, I just realised how lazy i was!
Hurray! I purposely held off on updating Firefox, because I couldn't imagine living without the SEOmoz toolbar. :-)
That makes two of us Dana! :)
What an amazing toolbar! It's just a pity that the SERP analyses are covered with PRO ONLY RDs" :(.
I wish I could afford a PRO membership.
I totally feel your pain trax. Lately I've been selling off some of my "stuff" to keep the pro membership active. The next item to go will be my football autographed by Joe Paterno :*(
But I'm considering it all an investment in my career that I'm expecting to pay big dividends in the future.
Unfortunately I can't justify spending the money on a PRO membership at the moment. When I started working where I do now, I was under the impression that I'd be working on some SEO strategy but I haven't at all yet really. Apart from the odd on-site suggestion (though I'm always undermined).
Hopefully a few years (months would be better, but it's unlikely) I'll be able to get a PRO membership when I start to do some more SEO.
Well done you guys!
Just downloaded the upgrade now and loving it.
I especially love the SERP display. One Liner, only the important information you need at a glance with the option of exploring more. I definitely look forward to the day when Linkscape will be updated more regularly and that way we'll definitely be able to ditch YSE once and for all...
Great work but i think you are missing some thing, Face Book and Delicious. I can see the twitter but it will be better if i have FB and Delicious or atleast FB. Facebook and twitter are competitors so i will be happy to see them at one place. Thankx adam for creating this
Thanks for the suggestions! I agree that further social media integration would be a great addition. We'll keep this in mind for a future update.
Hi...
I installed the new version of the MozBar... great! but I have to point to a big BUT: I checked both on Google.es and Google.it and I've not seen any infos in their SERPs even if the option was on.
Maybe that is because Linkscape doesn't have all the inlinks panorama for spanish and italian sites, but I suppose that is something else, as no result had any DA and PA shown under. Is it that this function works only on the .com version of the Search Engines. If it so I claim an upgrade :).
Ciao
We're taking a look into this. The overlay is supposed to work for international versions of Google, but is not working in some cases (as you noted). We hope to ship an update that fixes this soon.
Already downloaded it.
Fantastic toolbar. Looking forward to some Chrome Love!
I agree. Love to see a Version for Google Chrome. Firefox it's been a bit slow these days on my system - even without addons.
The more information i or my staff can see quickly is key. thanks.
Its not working with FF 4 :( when i can find seomoz toolbar for FF 4?
Thanks for the heads up! We just shipped an update that will work with FF 4.0. You should get the update automatcially when FF notices it, or you can download it directly here: https://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar
Don't know if it is just me, but the subdomain thing isn't working, nothing comes up on any of the blogspot.com or wordpress.com subdomains when I try to check them. Also, switching it to subdomain causes the domain mozrank and domain moztrust to disappear when I switch it back to Root Domain. I have to go to show metrics and uncheck both, then recheck each again to make them reappear.
I'm not getting any data for secure sites/pages. Was looking for info on this above and didn't find, nor do I see anything under settings. Was the tool designed that way or am I missing something?
It's just amazing! I can't believe all the stuff you can do with this toolbar. You guys are unbelievable. I feel like a kid in a candy store with all these tools so handily available my disposal.
Something that's happening in my FF browser. I have all six numbers turned on (Page authority, rank, trust and Domain authority, rank, trust) and if i'm logged out the length of the item on the new Moz toolbar causes my scrollbar to disappear. The number of items is too many and runs over and confuses the browser causing the scrollbar to disappear. If logged in, it's fine.
Thanks for the report! We are looking into this and hope to have a fix soon.
Great tool. Much better than the previous toolbar I was using and doesn't clash with Quirk.
V. happy with it
i can't get the it to work for the most recent FF update (3.6.2), anyone else having the same issue?
I can't believe I've been able to uninstall Search Status, User agent switcher and Live Http Headers since I got this new toolbar. Thanks, this makes everything MUCH easier.
I gonna test this right now and see how it goes. I have few problems with SERPs overlay with my other toolbars...
Thanks
Awesome ! I really like it.
The display SERP overlay feature is a great improvement.
I tried to download the plug in and got this message
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression.
Any clues?
Looking forward to using it!
Josh
Trying clearing your cache and trying again, it should work. It's always worked fine for me.
Remember that it's only for Mozilla Firefox too, so don't try and install it for Chrome or anything - it just won't work.
Now I can tell everyone what a toolbar SEOmoz is. (Yeah I know, what a lousy joke)
Hi, this looks like a great improvement over the previous toolbar. I have a few questions.
1) What is page download time based on? DOM ready event? content 100% loaded and rendered?
2) What info are you sending back to the moz servers? Just the current url being navigated or something else?
3) Can you explain the difference between the Authority metrics and the previous mozRank & mozTrust metrics?
4) In addition to the text to code ratio, how about a text to links ratio?
Thanks.
MF
Great questions!
1) We are counting the time from when the request is started to when FF reports the request is completed (state_stop) event. This generally relates to when the DOM is ready.
2) We are not sending info back or specifically tracking the pages that users are visiting when surfing with the mozBar installed. We are only keeping aggregate info about installations and traffic from the mozBar back to the SEOmoz site.
3) I recommend this post to learn more about Domain and Page Authority metrics: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics
4) Excellent idea!
Having had a sneak preview of this for a while, it's easy to forget that not everyone has had the cool new functionality. I love this version.
Adam, nice 1st post & well done with the screenshots.
I'll be unstalling some other Firefox add-ons. Thanks SEOmoz for helping us un-bloat Firefox!
Joining the party a little late here, but congrats Adam, I know how hard you've worked on this! I've been using the new Mozbar for actual client work for a little while and I really, really like what it does.
Just a big WOW... SERPs overlay is awesome.
If it is your first blogpost, then I recommend you do one daily; Giving us such good news everyday would be awesome! ;)
One question though; It seems that when I first do a query on Google, the overlay doesn't work on SERPs; I must click on a result URL, then hit back in my browser to get the overlay.
Am I the only one with this problem?
great improvement.......been using it for a few hours now and its making my research flow quicker !
Tony ;~)
congrats on the new mozbar. i particularly lovthe SERP display. To me this is one of the best improvment of the new toolbar because i can compare a lot of competitives website with just a click! amazing
Whoo hoo!!!! I'm not even stopping to read. I'm on my way to download my shiny new toy. Be back later.
I'm only back for a sec. This new toolbar is AWESOME!
OK, I'm going back to playing with the new mozbar some more.
On the SERP display I have to click the magnifying glass to get to OSE - clicking the Explore link does nothing. Anyone else?
Yeah, I'm seeing this too. We will try and get a fix for this out relatively soon.
Yeh, I am getting the same thing Bradley, also getting an error occasionally which appears to be do with the ascii code for the slashes.
Is text to code ratio considered important now? Have I missed the SEOMoz posts talking about it?
<3 So much juicy goodness all in one place!! Thanks mozzers!! :)
great toolbar, all in one place, keep up the good work!
I loved Surf Like a Search Engine feature. Thanks!
Good work guys, this looks really good! The Seomoz toolbar is without doubt the best plugin I have in my browser, use it on a daily basis! Keep up the good work..
This is a very nice refinement. But to this day, the pro features don't work for me. I sign in and sign in and I still get the PRO ONLY message.
Make sure you have 3rd party cookies enabled. This is the only way for you to be logged in to both the site and the toolbar.
Thank you. That worked. You're the only person at SEOmoz that was able to fix that since you originally launched the bar. Now if I could just log in with Safari and Chrome I'd have no more complaints :)
Happy to help! That's odd though, it's actually the biggest issue we receive about the toolbar. We're working on that Chrome version for you! :)
Looking forward to the Chrome version jennita!
Ohhhh I absolutely can NOT wait for that. If you need a super sneaky beta tester let me know haha. I'm running on Snow Leopard!
Yeahh! Pretty good work on the new tool bar guys.I love it.
Just a quick thought that it would be great if we can see what the text to code ratio should actually be compared to our site metrics. Kind of making all the metrics actionable in terms of if its good or not because it can force users to act on it. Adding color coding (green / red) should also make it more usable.
I really liked the idea of having a bar showing progress for key metrics like domain and page authority because it forces me to act.
I really like it.
One request, can you add a keyboard shortcut like StumbleUpon does that allows you to turn the toolbar on/off from the function key Ctrl+F11?
Dave
Great work! I use the SEOmoz toolbar on a daily basis and these improvements will make a big difference in my day-to-day SEO work. I've played around with some of the new changes and can already see the tremendous value they will provide me. Thanks so much for all your continued work at making a good thing even better!
- Evan
Why is there no 'who is' button anymore? This was very valuable and its a shame to see it gone.
You can still get to whois information directly from the tools menu. Go to Tools>Domain Tools>Domain Tools.
Sorry about the confusing wording. In the future I'll look to make that clearer.
ah I see, thanks for letting me know.
Is there a guide somewhere on the Toolbar? Like what each metric means? IE PA, DA I know those mean Domain Authority, Page Authority but there are so many little metrics it's tough to keep track of sometimes.
Great toolbar, I installed it this morning and am so far liking the new features - very useful! I like the Twitter and WhoIs resources in the tools section especially.