You might have noticed that SEOmoz has been heating up with some spiffy new changes of late. Our engineering and product teams are in a groove, and that means cool new stuff every 2-3 weeks. Last night, some really slick new features rolled out and today, Linkscape's updated too (our last one was only 21 days ago - meaning data is awesomely fresh).

Let's start with the fun part.

Our old term target tool has been dying for a long time. In fact, we've been wanting to replace it for so long that today, with it's demise and the birth of the new on-page optimization tool, we simply had to hold a wake.

Our customer service team wore black armbands and brought out a cart with old pictures of the tool, whisky and Guiness.

In fact, we might have gotten a bit carried away. I actually wrote a eulogy (which you can watch on video below thanks to Jamie's quick thinking):

Yeah, we're more than a little weird. But we're also crazy excited about the new On-Page Optimization Report tool:

It mimics the functionality of the web app's keyword recommendation system, but can be used on any page + keyword combination on the web. For those of you working outside the web app's campaign environment sometimes, it's a lifesaver.

Next, we've changed the way rankings are gathered to remove the previous geographical bias that existed. When you run keyword searches through the web app to track your rankings, you'll now see geographically agnostic results. You can see a comparison below for the keyword "SEO" on Google (both are from logged-out, non-cookied, non-personalized browsers).

We've been testing this system internally and with some of SEO friends and thus far, the results appear to provide a much more "universal" ordering in the SERPs. For many keywords, this won't have any impact at all (as Google only geo-biases ~25% of queries from what we can tell), but for those who've been troubled by the number of searches that contain suspiciously "Seattle-focused" results, this fix should help. Note that unfortunately, it's not yet in keyword difficulty or the classic rank tracking tool (separate from the campaign web app).

And last, but not least, Linkscape's index updated today with brand new link data which is now visible through Open Site Explorer, the classic Linkscape tool, the mozBar and the sweet new link analysis tab in your web app:

Statistics for this month's Linkscape update (index 37) are below:

  • URLs: 42,969,159,966 (43 Billion)
  • Subdomains: 393,943,689 (394 Million)
  • Root Domains: 110,533,726 (110 Million)
  • Percent of Links w/ Nofollows: 2.15%
    • Percent of Nofollows that are Internal: 57.14%
    • Percent of Nofollows that are External: 42.86%
  • Average Number of Links per Page: 61.96 (9.49 External)
  • 8.31% of URLs crawled were 404 errors
  • 6.05% of URLs crawled were 302 redirects
  • 4.56% of URLs crawled were 301 redirects
  • 3.57% of URLs were blocked with robots.txt
  • 2.54% of URLs used meta noindex

We've got a ton of cool new things coming to the web app and PRO membership over the next few months, so please keep an eye out and thanks for joining us on this exciting journey. We hope to knock your socks off with releases throughout the year!