For the last two years, SEOmoz's Page Strength tool has been one of our most popular features. Using data collected from sources around the web, it aggregates, measures and scores a page based on its relative popularity and importance. But, it's always had one huge flaw - not everything on the web is a page.
Goodbye, old friend.
Back in January of this year, we brainstormed a method to fix this missing piece by measuring websites, blogs and pages using separate formulas that grab data relevant to each type. Thus, while Blog Strength might look at factors like how many Bloglines subscribers you've got and the authority score reported by Technorati, Domain Strength compares the total number of links to your domain according to Yahoo! and the average & median PageRank score for the top 10 pages on your domain. All in all, there's more than 30 factors between the 3 systems, giving a very robust look at third party data about a given URL.
Naming the tool was a bit of a quandary - internally, we'd been using the code name "Trifecta" (to describe the 3 types of URLs measured), but rejected everything from "Web Strength" to "The PopURLarity Tool" before settling back on the original. Each report is still "page strength," "domain strength," or "blog strength," but the interface that lets you access them now features our catchy new moniker (and Timmy's clever new racehorse icon).
Trifecta's landing page has a very simple, 2-step process. Just plug in a URL and choose what kind of report you want to run. Be aware that choosing page strength for a domain or blog strength for a non-blog will give some strange results AND that it's very important to choose the canonicalization of the URL correctly (www vs. non-www). After 1-2 minutes (sometimes faster, and probably slower today since it's just being launched), you'll be taken to a report dashboard with 5 tabs (4 tabs for page strength):
The dashboard itself shows you your score, gives an explanation for where on the strength scale your URL falls, and provides links to the other sections of the report.
From here, I like to look at the "data calculation" tab, which shows each scoring factor, the number reported by the third party service (everyone from Yahoo!, Technorati, and Google to Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa is a data source).The blue bar below the factor will also show you what percentage of that factor's score your data point represents. In the example below, you can see that 75,600 domain mentions at Google gives me a score of 55% on that factor.
Back in 2004, one of my favorite tools was Marketleap's Link Popularity Tool (it's diminished in value now that only Yahoo! is reporting accurate link counts) because they featured a built-in comparison system. We've taken from their lead and built the same concept into Trifecta. On the "Compare Your Score" tab, you can see how your site matches up to those more and less popular in any given vertical (this feature is only available for domain & blog strength reports):
All of the features above are free to registered members of SEOmoz to run a report once per day. If you decide to go PRO, you can not only run an unlimited number of Trifecta reports, you also get access to the custom comparison feature (which is, in my opinion, the most valuable part of the tool).
At the bottom of the homepage (for PRO members) and in the "run another report" tab, you can access the interface below, which lets you choose your page/blog/domain and up to 4 others at once:
Trifecta will then run the chosen report type on all of the URLs entered and give you back a comparison scoring chart illustrating how well you stack up to the competition:
It also provides comparison on the individual scoring factors, so you can see where you're losing out and where you're kicking tail :-)
All in all, this is one of SEOmoz's most polished, most valuable tools to date. For many pages and domains, the score can help illustrate the gap between popularity and importance, and even for advanced users, it's both useful and convenient to have all of this information quickly collected in a single place (and if you're PRO, we store old reports so you can re-access them in the future).
While Trifecta's data certainly isn't the only thing I'd consider when buying a domain or getting links from a page or seeing how my blog compared to others, the quick access to so much information and the surprisingly accurate scoring scale (we've literally tested more than 1000 reports and re-crafted formulas so many times that Nick's regression tool nearly burnt into my screen) makes this a must-have.
Questions, comments and feedback are welcome below - and don't forget, since this tool is brand new, there will still be a few bugs here and there and the speed will be slower than normal (due to high volume). Thanks for your patience and enjoy the new Trifecta tool!
p.s. Just as we did with Page Strength, we're keeping reports cached for 48 hours, so if you re-run a report within 2 days, we'll show you the data from the first run (although we know factors update constantly, this helps us maintain a reasonable level of bandwidth).
UPDATE: For the next 48 hours, you can run as many reports as you like. After that we'll restrict usage to registered members only, and 1 report per day (unlimited for PRO members). We're still restricting access to comparison reports to PRO members only. :-)
Current Known Bugs:
- If you run domain strength on a URL that Technorati has marked as a "blog" (and thus redirects the search request to the blog information page), the factor will return as "0."
- Bloglines subscriber counts for blogspot/wordpress/etc hosted subdomain blogs are off due to our fetching system. We should have this fixed in the next few days.
- UPDATE: After some difficulty the first 7 hours after launch, we're back up and running, albeit a little slow. Reports should take 60-90 seconds. Those that take more than 2-3 minutes have probably died, and you'll need to re-run them - we should have that fixed up soon as well.
- If you encounter problems, please leave a comment in the thread below, or email [email protected]. Thanks!
Good job Jeff & homies for all the hard work on the new tool.
One thing I don't quite get: why did you change the name? The page strength tool has been running for years, building an identity for itself that people are familiar with.
"Trifecta" means very little to most people, while "page strength" denotes exactly what the trifecta tool is all about: "Test the Strength of Your Page, Blog or Domain." Dropping the name because it uses "page" instead of blog or domain is just semantics.
I would have just called it PageStrength 3, because it's the third version of the software as well as because it now supports 3 different types of reporting.
Also, my muscle-guy icon could benchpress your sissy horse...
..while chewing on aluminum cans..
and strangling a velociraptor.
Lovely imagery - man benches horse... hmmm.
The reports themselves are still "page strength" "domain strength" and "blog strength," but since the tool incorporated so much more, we thought a re-brand was in order, particularly so those familiar wouldn't say "oh, it's just an upgraded version of page strength," when in fact, it's three unique tools.
We did consider the name "Page, Domain & Blog Strength Tool" but thought it might be a little challenging to build a memorable brand with that moniker :)
BTW - Thanks again for creating the first version of the tool; you did a really top notch job with that.
Actually I cannot see my old reports and I want them. Where do I find them
It's a feature we're adding right now! Look for it by next week. In the meantime, we do cache reports for 48 hours, so if you run the data again, you'll get the same results, and of course, if you bookmark the report URL, those stick around permanently.
Hey gang - wanted to apologize for our significant slowness and downtime. We think we're out of the woods, but depending on traffic levels, things may be a bit slow again. Appreciate the patience and the support.
:( I thought you were going too violently shake me and wake me up out of bed when it was ready.
Thanks Rand. Things seem a little sluggish but it's AOK ! Everyone needs to be patient with project launches as glitches do occur. I've seen it myself as a Director.
Thanks again for the post to keep everyone informed of the delays. Again - great tool...
Awesome. This is EXACTA what I was looking for! Great work!
Sean, that was really, REALLY bad. But I am a sucker for bad puns so I still gave it a thumbs up.
Interesting and very cool. One thing I'd point out is that I'm not sure if the Bloglines subscribers alone should warrant a heavy ranking on blogs. After all, most of us are using Feedburner, and less than 5% of my subscribers are using Bloglines. (Speaking of which, Bloglines has its own problems and isn't calculating the number of subscribers properly for my blog since the actual number is double the number it reports, but moving on...)
To summarize, it'd be nice to see some Trifecta Feedburner integration and not put so much emphasis on Bloglines. ;)
Tamar - yeah, we made Bloglines a small portion of the score (we keep that number proprietary, but it's definitely not a huge factor), but the nice part is that they report subscribers for everyone, while Feedburner doesn't apply to every blog on the web. Plus, even though Bloglines subs may be small, they're universally representative, so if you have 50 and someone else has 10, chances are, they are read by 1/5th your audience size.
Rand and team -
Absolutely awesome new tool! And to offer it free (even one run per day) is even more incredible. Kudos to you guys and gals for improving upon Page Strength and also keeping it as a free tool.
This is definitely one of the best new tools around and sets SEOmoz apart from other SEO sites.
Cheers,
Justin
Love the tool. But am confused: for our URL www.seeanz.com; even though our "Ranking At Google For 1st 4 Words In Title Tag" which is #1 for "Australia Luxury Travel Agent" we are getting no points under the algorithm. Is there something wrong with our code?
Cool tool. An improvement on Page Strenght, for sure.
However, I have a "bone to pick", if I may:
as with other tools, when you analyse a site which is using a free sub-domain type, like geocities for ex., the analysis on the domain almost always gives you results for geocities and not the actual page stored in the geocities sub-domain.
My site is https://omj.no.sapo.pt and www.sapo.pt is a well known portal in Portugal, which offers free pages for its users, and I have my site there. But when I analyse my site on these tools, they go for the sapo.pt part of my URL and kinda ignore the fact that my site is not actually a part of the big portal, but a free page stored there.
Ok, I'm done rambling. Good work and congrats on the new tool!
Thanks rand (and others involved). I'm looking forward to trifectering the crap out of my site. :)
Well Rand, all I have to say is CUDOS !!! "what a great tool" and I hope the tweaking goes well as small changes take place. Each of the tools your operation has created for both non members and PRO, in some way helps each of us daily. I just wanted to acknowledge your teams hard work with this new addition and I'll keep coming back!!
Keep the tools coming I say, I know there are those of us that thank the lord we have a wizard like you to help guide us!
Keep em' coming my friend... !!
Great tool !! Thanks for the tool :)
Regarding the URL mentions metric - if a website displays my URL on their page but it's not an actual hyperlink, how does that "mention" impact my ranking? Yahoo reps have publicly stated at SES NY that they have a hard enough time keeping track of real links and that it would be near impossible to assign value to URL mentions.
Good bye page strengh tool, good bye trifecta, good bye semoz, good bye seomoz blog...
It took me 3 hours to get to log into semoz and place this comment. Have not been able to use trifecta, takes long, long, long time to log into the site.
Hope you get to fix things soon Rand, can't wait to be able to try the tool.
It's been 3 hours and I keep getting this message:
" We're throttling Trifecta currently, due to the high usage load. We should be back in 5 - 10 minutes."
Is it just me? or is everybody getting the same message? Just wondering.
I'll wait till tonight, maybe it won't be so crowded.
Hi Rand. Thanks for this gret tool. However, it just sits there after waiting a long time (> 10 minutes), appearing to hang. Is that normal?
Its not going to be the norm. But its normal right now because, as they've noted several times, there is a tremendous load of thousands of reports being run right now. :-)
Trifecta hasn't worked for several days. Is this issue going to be resolved? Where can I fid out more about the eta of this coming back online? Trifecta is the primary reason for my pro membership.
I too have problems with Trifecta and indeed is the primary reason for paying for SEOMOZ services.
When will the service restore?
Russell Jones UK
Tool looks great so far!
I do have a comment about wikipedia, though.
My situation is probably very different than most people, as my site deals with a niche topic (anime). Here's the problem with including wiki in the results: the anime "community" on wikipedia (ie, a group of a few people who deem themselves experts) have decided that the only links deemed good enough to post from any anime topic are, well, there's only one really: animenewsnetwork. Any other site listed (including a wiki page solely for the site, regardless of how large it is) is flagged and removed by that clique of people.
Frankly, I think it goes against the point of wikipedia, but their strongarm techniques insist that a site like mine, even though it's quite large, will never be posted. I have no idea if other types of communities (media? electronics? etc) have the same sort of bias.
So, in my case at least, the results are probably skewed with that point. Obviously it's niche enough to not change the tool, but just thought I'd share. :)
Hmm...It seems people like the tool. It sounds good but I don't like waiting. So, I'll try this again later. New tool...it doesn't work for me. I'm too frustrated to share my issues with the site support people. I'll just wait till another day to try this new tool out. :/
It's hanging on the loading page again and the developers are in a meeting, but I'll let them know it's having trouble when they get out.
Sorry about the inconvenience... they'll be onto it shortly :)
Im very suprised by the choice of name. Being obviously a horse racing term this is going to put you into the realm of gambling sites and get you lots of horse racing enthusiasts, which will be a lot of bounces..
It worked fine for me, apart from getting about 31% or something awful haha Like many similarly intended tools tho, may be useful to see how your links etc grow in each area of importance when comparing it to reports using the same tool.
A bit mis leading to say that your score of sub 29% or whatever means you are not competitive tho. Who decides that statement?
If Im top for my one hundred short targeted phrases then I more than competetive on the terms I choose, so thats worth 90% in reality to my own needs and therefore equates to blase inacurate statements as oppose to inacurate data. :-)
Great idea for a tool, however it should probably have a Beta sign next to it as its given some odd results.
Its not reading dmoz data or page rank data correctly among others.
Can you print reports?
I could not see any way to do this. I had to recreate the report in Excel. The info was so good that I didn't mind. I used the data to establish a starting point with a client.
I'm pretty confused what the result for "Ranking At Google For 1st 4 Words In Title Tag" means. Can anyone describe this for me?
Sorry about that - it just means that we check where your page ranks in Google if you perform a search for the first 4 words in the title tag. So, for example, on this blog post page, we'd search for "seomoz goodbye page strength" and see where it ranks.
Trifects is a really nice tool. I am new to the Pro membership so I am still trying to figure it all out. Here is a questions I had. One of my competitors jumped up the charts for Alexa and I could not figure out why. After I checked trifecta it shows a huge jump in traffic for the month of July. Do you know why that could be? Are they accurate?
I don't know if it's still the case, but it used to be fairly easy to game Alexa. They get their data from their toolbar and "other diverse sources", and in my experience their numbers can be somewhat whacky when compared to their competitors. Someone demonstrated how they made their low traffic blog appear to be one of the most important sites on the internet according to Alexa stats a year or so ago by hacking the Alexa toolbar.
I would look at all 3 traffic measurements - Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast - and see what's going on. If Alexa showed a big jump but the other 2 are flat, then the Alexa number is probably bogus. Also look at comScore if that's available - their numbers usually have a high level of internal consistency, even if they trend somewhat low.
This has proved helpful, thanks
Well, i like the idea of the tool, but unfortunatly it seems to have some tec-problems. Right now i get no data. Still the Loading-Page.
I hope it will be better soon.
Could you perhaps activate the old page-strength-tool until the new one is working really fine?
The Page Strength application is extremely useful but is lacking the ability to measure the whole website instead of just pages. In terms of SEO, this application would be extremely beneficial if it would take into account, the other elements that make up a website. The comparison reports are ideal for those who wish to see how well their business is doing and the competition from other business rivalries.
Long time reader, first time poster. Looks to be an awesome tool, I'm miffed I missed the window. Perhaps I'll have to spring for an account.
BTW, don't listen to the name detractors, it's great. A rising tide lifts all boats, I'm already getting little crumbs of traffic. ;)
This is a great tool for educating clients and measuring results objectively.
Doesn't seem to be working in my Safari / FF3 (Mac). Maybe I'm just being impatient.
And I'm just trying to help out the dev team, not start any beef!
Great new tool!
Will it be possible to save the results generated by Trifecta for future reference?
Yes! That's something we'll have fixed up in a few days - PRO members will have all their reports saved in their "my tool reports" section.
Great! Being able to compare current to previous reports will make this tool even more valuable!
Rand, 1st of all thank you for this tool but it has a some bugs.
Your parser for DMOZ is a bit buggy. I was checking website templates.com and realized that we have 7 inclusions to DMOZ but we dont.
Otherwise its cool!
What I need
Thank you
Haven't had chance to try it yet, but I want to get a comment in here before it gets too lengthy :)
I'm really pleased that your team continues to add value to the pro subscription.
I'm going to go and hammer Trifector now and do my best to clog up your servers! Good job and I'll make sure I feed back.
Great tool.
Although it says my brand new, little, tiny, insignificant blog is much more powerful than my established blog with a handful of good inbound links. (I think this is due to the fact my new blog is blog.wordpress.com and not self hosted).
It seems to put a lot of weight on blog.wordpress.com and blog.typepad.com hosted blogs due to reader base - is this right?
Well what can I say? Thank you SEOMoz. You Rock!
Love all the SEOmoz tools!!!! Trifecta sounds awesome, though it's still churning for me. Thanks for the Marketleap shout-out. I'll be back later tonight.
Getting very lovely sensations from even hearing about it. Off to go play with it.
Something about that sounds ... wrong...
It's not working for me - it's sat for 30 mins on the doing-some-complicated-stuff screen. I'll come back tommorrow, if Sean likes it, it's good.
Try refreshing the page. Worked for me every time.
I hear that turning up the volume didn't do much good, though.
/bad F5 joke
And to think, we only launched it 12 minutes ago! :-)
Actually, for some browsers, the AJAX isn't auto-refreshing. We're looking into it, but try just hitting refresh manually in the browser and see if youre report comes up. It's being inconsistent in testing.
Congrats Rand & Mozzers. Another fine feather you have placed in your cap.
cheers! it's working for me now
So I'm seeing some of the same problems noted above, namely that some of my queries just "hang" for awhile. But I did get two to run to completion, and the result was very, very cool. I can't WAIT to run the comparison tool and go after a detailed analysis of what their strengths are vs. my strengths, their weaknesses and vice versa.
If people haven't joined PRO yet, this tool should be worth the cost of membership alone once you have had a chance to iron out the bugs. Great work, Jeff, Nick, Mel, and everyone else on the technical crew!
Hasn't worked for me either yet, but I'm on a Mac and presently using Safari, so I'm pretty sure that's it - this was even after a refresh. Gonna try Firefox and if it doesn't work, I'll be back.
Sadly, we're experiencing some technical difficulties right now - it's not you. I believe we did test in Safari, so it should be running once we get those issues fixed.
It's weird - you can test the heck out of something, but simulated traffic is never the same as live runs...
Rand next time you need some fat people to stress test a tool let me know. I weighing about 366lbs today.
Seems to be doing the hang on both FF and IE for me. Maybe some thing some where is connecting to the dev enviroment by accident.
In any event until you figure it out I will just sit here refreshing every 10 minutes until it is resolved....hope I get to sleep tonight.
If you follow me on Twitter, I'll make sure to send out an update once we're patched up (might save you the trouble) :)
cool....can we be like facebook friends too? lol
Actually since facebook removed the "online friends" tool and replaced it with that weak version in the chat I have a lot more time on my hands.
So normally when I hit refresh there I will just do it on the tool instead lol.
The tool is working great now. I've been able to generate a few runs. Thanks so much!
i like it !
What could be great is adding in the "improve" tab weak scores compared to other reports of the same level.
Thanks for the tool
Very exciting! Can't wait to try it out...except, I think I'll wait till tomorrow, hopefully it will be running a bit better by then :)
Love it nice guys
No Trifecta results for me at all. I'd tried running a single and a comparison report several times and all I got was:
Please be patient while we fetch your data... We're doing some pretty complicated stuff, so this could take a minute (or two if we're busy). If it takes longer than a 3 minutes, try again with your browser's back button.
Maybe Trifecta doesn't like my Site or is it because I'm in Costa Rica... He, he...
Thanks Rand anyways for developing this new tool for the seomoz pro membership. There's great comments on the tool, so I take it for granted. Will just have to wait until it starts working for me.
Firstly, congratulations to you all on improving the best tool at SEOmoz! Here's some (hopefully constructive) feedback:
Overall I think this is an excellent improvement and makes a lot of sense to separate pages, domains and blogs.
I am however still a bit sore from being told "Congrats! You scored a 5%" on a Page Strength report I just ran - way to rub it in, Triffy, I thought we could be friends...
Update: Dave Naylor agrees on the name thing... (plus that post is ranking higher in google for 'Trifecta' btw)
Hey Rand, great tool. I just ran a report...works well.
In case you might not have noticed it, but the Page Strength graphic still appears in the Pro Tools section: https://www.seomoz.org/users/pro/seotools/ , once a member logs in. You might want to replace it with the Trifecta counterparts.
Again, great job in adding cutting-edge tools for members.
First off - great stuff! really impressed by this tool and the way it allows us to measure against the three types.
However... couple of pointers - I tested this against a bunch of our international sites (its still a difficulty to test international sites when so many tools are US focused) and whilst the data is accurate you have to be carefull!
ie: Compete rank - for several europe and APMEA domains the data showing is 0 - whilst the rest of the data is relatively healthy - I'm guessing this is because Compete is US data only?
Quantcast rank - again some data not showing here that makes me suspect its US data again.
I may be wrong so please correct me if so - but thought it'd be good to raise this point.
Other than that fine job! Hope all the team on this had some drinks!
even though it has been said before : great job to Rand and your Team. It is good to see that someone is thinking ahead and developing the right SEO tools!
thank you for letting 1 free report a day!
I didn't get a chance to take a peek last night, but I'm def. going to do so today.
Thank you Rand et al for working so hard to provide what you do.
Just ran a few test searches there - and I must say I am impressed. Great job on improving the tool and with the "save reports" feature you are going to add it will be one of the best SEO tools out there!
As someone already mentioned, the dmoz portion is a bit buggy/fuzzy, if you search for idea.com and dmoz also has blahblahblah-idea.com or mygreatidea.com, it will count the nonrelated domains as well. Other than that, it is great to have all of the information in one place, as this tool provides. To me, the overall number score doesn't really tell me anything, but the all the data behind the grand total all in one place is fantastic.
Good luck squashing those bugs.
Hey, instead of throttling how bout you keep out those non paying members so us "pros" can get back in there :)
John - that's exactly the plan. We're just opening it up for everyone for the first couple days, then you'll need to be PRO to run more than 1 report per day :)
Good feedback on the DMOZ issue - we'll look into better ways to parse that more accurately.