Just a few short weeks ago we launched the last index update... and here we are to do it again. Ben's gotten faster at his parts of the update, from four or five weeks to just two, with me dragging my feet for another week or so. So that's right, we're down to just three or four weeks between updates, with accompanying data freshness (which we still want to improve substantially).
But I'm not here to tell you about the same stuff you've already heard about. Instead, let me unveil another PRO-only SEOmoz Labs project: Top Pages.
We're building Linkscape not just as a tool, but as a data source on which we and 3rd parties can build new and innovative tools. Top Pages is a showcase of some of the things we're hoping to enable.
Enter a subdomain and this tool will show you the top pages on that subdomain, based on the same criteria we use for our Top Sites list. Oh, and did I mention that we've got a lot of these top pages?
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Wow, that's a lot of pages. We'll go up as high as 10,000 in this tool. But if you get this far and want more, check out our custom reports. Or get involved with our developer community to stay up-to-date on getting access to more of our data.
So what can you do with this tool?
- Investigate which pages make a big link impact, even if they're not generating substantial traffic
- See which pages have ranking potential with keyword tweaks, if they're not already ranking
- See which competitor pages are getting traction
- See where competitors spend link-building energy
By coupling Top Pages with the Labs Backlinks Tool we launched a couple of weeks ago, you can get a pretty good idea of which pages on a domain have ranking potential and what links are powering that potential.
Enjoy, and be sure to send us feedback if you like this!
Another useful metric that these tools in conjunction can be used for is to identify good potential pages to 301 to content that is more apt for search/conversions/revenue.
As a point in example. my second page on our main domain is for an "expired" product that we no longer promote (all our products are in essence cyclical) and the links that this page has generated are in the main part organic.
Using this data, Im experimenting with a 301 on the page to an upcoming product which is having its peak in about 9 days, where we have an equally stable serp position of 4th on our regional google.
I will post the results in this thread next monday, but irrespective of the success of this one Im enthusiastic about using the tool more in future, good work guys!
MOGmartin
I like that idea! As long as the content you are redirecting to is similar (a product with similar functionality), it'll help users click through to something expected, searchers find what they're looking for, and you convert visitors into sales.
Nice :)
this is why linkscape is my favorite tool!!
Holy wow batman!
These labs tools are becoming as useful as the finished tools. This gets a big thumbs up from me - I think this will become a standard tool in our SEO process, both for site reviews and for link building.
Wow! Here's another great info found through Top Pages:
Looking for the top pages of one domain, I discovered a page that used to belong to the previous domain's owner and that's still hosted/indexed!
Fantastic Exclent
What a great new tool! It's already been useful for us in finding outdated pages that need to be 301'd better.
Question - will this tool be compensating for the 'canonical tag' at any point? We use lots of affiliates and so there is a lot of duplicate reporting on some of the top pages.
Thanks!
The canonical tag is something we're already pulling out in our crawl. So we'll have it. But what we do with it is another story. We'll probably just treat it like a 301.
But that begs the question, what do we do with 301s in our tools? Currently we show you them and (sometimes) show that they 301 to another page. This tool doesn't do that. So if lots of people are linking to it, the 301 will show up in the list of top "pages".
That will be interesting to see- I'll have to take a more in-depth look at the report I generated.
I like that you show the 301 redirects- that way we can see what's pulling people in - but it'd be nice to have a tool that showed top canonical landing pages. Currently Google Analytics shows us landing pages, but doesn't have a way to regularize for canonical. With lots of affiliates, it's be helpful to see which of OUR pages (even though they might be affiliate scraped) are pulling the most traffic.
Thanks for a great tool!
On the 301 discussion, are you saying that this will show where you are still getting traffic to even though you are 301-ing it to a new page? I'm not sure I follow. The entire point is to tell the SE that you want the juice thrown over to the new page... Is just so you know if you can take the old page down yet? If so - Who cares. Just leave it up...
I have a feeling I'm missing the point a little... As usual.
I don't think you're missing the point at all. For our calculations 301s pass juice (in the same way we think the engines do). But we still keep information on the 301s themselves around.
You ask a good question, "What's the point?" Yes, it's so you can see if the 301 is still important to keep in place, but maybe people should just leave those up anyway, so "who cares?"
But we want to keep as much information available as possible. It's possible that you used to have an important page, have retired it and are redirecting it to another page. But maybe you want to repurpose that 301? How can you know what kind of your juice is still flowing over that 301?
Also, we frequently have people asking for just 301 information. They want to know about site architecture issues because, perhaps they're about to do a site migration or something along those lines.
guys, would you stop coming up with newbies for a couple of months, please, I am having difficulty trying to assimilate so much SEO resource goodness? : ) well done, keep up the good work
Amazing work Nick!
Just wanted to point out that unfortunately, we're having a bit of downtime on it around 14:15 GMT (6:15am Pacific). Should be back up as soon as our Seattle-based dev crew awakens :-)
It's back up. Things went down around 6:30am EDT/3:30am PDT. We're monitoring the situation.
Yes! You know I've wanted this for a while. Great stuff. Thanks for the late night work.
This is also the first time we've actually listed any pages on a domain. Previously we've only had access to urls via links. So this lays the groundwork for all kinds of neat tools (e.g. site auditing)
Oh I like this part "See which pages have ranking potential with keyword tweaks, if they're not already ranking".
This tool is ridiculous! :) On the top of my list is to devote about a week to immerse myself in the Linkscape artlicles and posts so I can really start to master this thing. Thanks for adding yet another feature.
Any specific recommendations for reading from anyone that I might not know about? Thanks!
Fantastic, always wondered why nobady had thought of this before. Thanks guys
Thank you Nick. I'll really have to think about how this could help me.
Greate job again as we all would hear more.
thanks