The SEOmoz team has been beavering away lately, adding more and more data to Linkscape and chipping away at the coalface of cutting edge R&D with SEOmoz Labs. One of my favourite new toys in the Labs section is “Top pages on domain”.
“Top pages on domain” gives you a page by page analysis of your domain (or someone else’s) ordered by the number of linking route domains:
Where this tool really adds value is the ability it gives you to investigate old domains and their previously indexed (and linked to) pages. Take the example above. This old domain is 301 redirecting somewhere else, but the following URL in the list, with another 3 links, leads us to a 404 error page.
What we just did in the example is pretty difficult to do with an actual search engine. The problem is with old domains is past a certain point, if a site has been taken down, Google and Yahoo will eventually stop reporting the number of indexed pages with the "site:" operator. That’s because eventually, 404 error pages are removed from the their indexes. You don’t know what URLs were previously in the index so your investigation into previously indexed URLs can only go so far.
With "Top Pages On Domain," you can easily find old, deep URLs that contain lots of great quality links that aren’t being properly redirected to your site or choose to redirect specific URLs to other regions of your site.
Here’s my checklist of 5 things you should be doing with the top pages on domain tool:
1) Run all of your owned domains through the tool. Check for linked to pages that should be redirected, but aren’t.
2) Redirect URLs that have link value to deeper sections of your website for better rankings.
3) Run the tool on your main domain to understand where your highest value URLs are, and gain value by getting internal links from those pages. You might even find a few old but valuable URLs from a legacy version of your site that have no redirects set up!
4) Redirect old / “out of stock” product pages or vacancy pages that have links to newer, more competitive products or jobs.
5) Analyze your competitors strongest URLs, get a list of their back links together and start link building!
Enjoy, and have fun with all those redirects ;-)
Richard Baxter is Founder and Director of SEOgadget.co.uk, a UK SEO Agency. Follow him on Twitter and Google...
Must agree - this is an amazing tool - a few more things I like to do with it:
As I said on Twitter, this is a game changer. It's already going into our standard "best practices" application for client projects.
Thanks for quoting those additional information Rand. Useful tips.
I like it :) This is exactly what we are thinking about with this tool.
Great Post, I haven't had time to try this yet, so i appreciate the jump start.
Love #2: this alone could really change some pages ranks pretty quick. Its an unbelievable common issue.
This is really great. This tool needs an export option though! ;)
Agreed! It needs CSV export just like Linkscape
Being in labs it's sort of rough shod. But given the feedback we'll certainly give that some serious thought.
If you had CSV export, would you want up to 10k rows? That seems like a bit much, but I don't know.
Yeah, top 10,000 is rarely useful. I'd say top 100 or so would be fine for almost all sites. Not quite so helpful when you look at amazon or someone massive though.
Could we have the option of top 100 or top 10,000 but downloading 10,000 uses a linkscape credit perhaps?
Yes please Nick! The full 10k rows mwa hahahah (evil, power hungry laugh)
As much as I love SEO tools, this post just made my day! Thanks, Richard. This tool really has plenty of possible uses.
I have to admit that I sort of skimmed this post the first time, but then re-read it, paid attention, and ended up finding 180 stranded links back to a client's site just on the first pass that were very easily fixed/301'd.
Nice mention of a great tool. I have used it and it is really too useful. Nice tool to increase the PR of the site. Finally one tool with many uses.
I am *loving* this tool. I have already used it to identify a very interesting piece of linkbait. Lucy is going to write about it in our weekly linkbait round-up, I believe...
Just curious about one thing... What did you all use for this type of research before this tool was released? :-)
Rechard,
Thanks a lot for the tool. Realy I appreciate it and It will helpful for my site.Anyway exilent post.
Best of luck
I really dont understand all these comments. Everybody writes that it is great, super, incredible etc.But did you analyzed it?
I have did it and it really dont work correct.
now i havent much time i cant write everything now, but please check yahoo's siteexplorer
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=https://www.seomoz.org
and seomoz's tool
https://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages?uri=seomoz.org&linktype=page
do you see? each tool gives different results. It means that one is false. Go and check the mozRanks of the links from both tools, you will see that yahoo's siteexplorer tool will give you better results, and true strongest pages of seomoz.
Maybe it takes the linking factor, e.g. number of inbound links, but it mustnt be criterion. It must take its mozRank not just the number of domains link to given page.
i love seomoz, dont want say something wrong but it really dont work guys. I tried to give useful feedback to make it better.
Vusal
Thanks for the feedback.
One thing that might have caused some confusion is that we will do the report for pages that match the domain exactly as you entered it. In this case you ran a report for seomoz.org. We break out those pages from pages like www.seomoz.org. So you should probably do the report on:
https://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages?uri=www.seomoz.org&linktype=page
Also, we're not claiming that this will give you the same results as Y!SE. Of course, Y!SE does a pretty good job of that :P I don't think that makes one or the other of us wrong.
What we're giving you are purely top pages by number of referring pages. This includes 404 pages, and pages which 301, etc. Y!SE will filter those out, which is nice in some applications, but won't show you what people are actually linking to. I think Richard gets at those things in his post.
Oh Nick,
so fast answer, while i edited my comment. :)
also with www. have some problems.
Nick, i did a reports for my site, now i dont give the address, but it didnt gave the some of top pages of the sites, yahoo's siteexplorer did it better.
I really appreciate your work, and waiting for the best performance ;)
good luck
Vusal
This tool is a great tool amongst all those companies claiming to do the same thing. I really like its comprehensiveness and detail, even for a free tool. Many other companies who do somewhat similar things fall fairly short of this tool. Not only in the detail but in the graphical representation of those details. But not only is a great tool for your own website is a great way to spy on someone else's. (Maybe I should mention that part and keep this a secret).
Fantastic job guys, as always very informative
I've been using the tool daily since release (kind of my first step when auditing a website, love it!) but only saw the 'next' link to the 25+ top pages today.
I think it's because I'm used to your UI and that you generally display something like:
Any way to have this in Top Pages too? I might not be the only one in missing the link...
I don't see how this is accurate at all. Some of the suggested stronger pages are absolutely not strong pages whatsoever by any measurement apart from this one I suspect.
It uses the logic of determining which pages have received the highest number of links from unique root domains. For example, if I have a page with 400 links, but 350 are all from *.nytimes.com, that page would not rank as highly on this tool's list as a page that has 200 links, all from independent, unique root domains (*.nytimes.com, *.cnn.com, *.newsvine.com, etc.).
"Stronger" is an accurate description only as it applies to rankings potential and ability to flow link juice for SEO purposes. It doesn't take any other metrics into account.
This post has found its way onto Sphinn - go for it Mozzers!
https://sphinn.com/story/107024
Thanks so much for these notes! I'm relatively new to SEOmoz and I've not been able to take advantage of all the tools yet, but I'll definately have to jump in there with this one. Thanks!
Awesome tool! As far as the post is concerned I especially liked how you gave specific and varied uses for the tool.
I've been so manic recently I've just not had the chance to play around with many of the new tools, or generally spend as much time on teh Moz as I'd like. This simple little post means that this is going to change over the next week or so.
Good work fella (as they used to say...)
They did, didn't they?
You definitely should. This tool is a masterpiece (so simple too!). I hear a rumour there's more to come, right Rand?:-)
Yep, nice application of the tool! I think this has sooo many uses.
Lovely write up Richard!
I've had a bit of a hectic week, so I haven't had a chance to play with this yet - hopefully I'll get a chance this afternoon.
Great work mozzers :)
Some great food for thought - the fact that this can be used for prioritising redirects for old or "out of stock" product pages is the one on the checklist that stands out for me. Good stuff.
Great post and a great tool!
Really nice write up mate and some good practical tips.
You guys are definitely on the cutting edge - great job!