http://www.bryaneisenberg.com/2009/09/free-tools-to-improve-your-website/

Here are a few of my other favorite tool lists:

SEO Guru Todd Malicoat’s summary of “Tool Time With Todd” twitter sessions: http://www.stuntdubl.com/tooltime/

An older, but still functional list of SEO tools: http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/seo-tools.html

Of course, the seoMOZ tool sets: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox

And then some excellent research tools from AdCenter Labs: http://adlab.msn.com/alltools.aspx My favorite is the Commercial Intent Tool.

Bookmark ‘em.

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Lists of Tool Lists

I used to Love your webmaster tools. You have lots of great features, like site map configuration, crawler diagnostics and top search queries and positions. But why must you tease us by pretending to report on incoming links?

Sure, you call it a “sampling” and carefully word your descriptions with phrases like “links we have available to show you.”

If “Links to your site” is a sampling, and the basis isn’t known or consistent, then what is the intended use of the report?

Case in point: Throughout 2009, Webmaster tools reports that one stable and quiet site (read not many new links) consistently remained at ~350 links give or take a few. Then Webmaster tools reports only 90 incoming links throughout the month of May. This is less than the 119 reported with your very own link: operator.

Then, last week, you report 600 links. All of which have been there for quite some time. From 350 to 90 to 600?

How is this useful? It isn’t. If your sampling varies widely with no consistent basis, then it is not useful for trending.

So I hate it.

While a tool link LinkScape or Yahoo! Site Explorer may not see all the links that Google sees, at least they have a consistent basis for detection and reporting. And that is the necessary foundation for relying on a report for decision making.

So Google, thank you for webmaster tools. Some parts are useful. Stop pretending to report on incoming links and use a consistent sampling method for reporting.

Your captive user,

-Michael

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What I hate about Google Webmaster Tools

Alan’s experience and knowledge made him a great partner for us at Market Motive. His character and kindness made it easy to be his friend.

Early Days at Market Motive: Alan, Michael, John, and Tyler in 2007

Our times working and visiting with Alan were truly a joy and we will miss him.

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Alan Rimm Kaufman

In the first land rush, Facebook imposed some account age requirements to limit name squatting and the organization offered some allowance for trademarked names, but this also has ended.

As of last Monday, June 29, 2009, the account age restriction has been lifted and new accounts may register a unique user name if it’s still available. Currently, a Vanity URL requires validation via text message to a unique mobile phone number.

I strongly advise any company with a trademarked name to avoid the rights hassle and secure your company name with a Facebook account under your control. You can decide later if or how you want to represent your company through Facebook. But you can’t decide if you allow someone else to grab your name before you do.

Do it now.

How? Visit the Facebook Vanity URL page for details.

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Facebook Vanity URLs Restrictions Lifted

For our own web sites and our clients’ sites, we monitor new links and links lost. It’s a good practice for any SEO. More importantly, we monitor when Google recognizes or disregards incoming links to a website as reported in Google Webmastertools.

We’ve noticed these events seem to occur in clusters, and last night indicated that Google is thinking less of links from Twitter. In one sweep, Google dropped the Twitter Profile “URL” incoming link for every site we monitor.

Examples from a few of our own sites:

Granted, the links from Twitter pages are nofollow. However the majority of sites that are active on Twitter see a subsequent boost in rankings on Google (we’ve seen the same). We’ll continue to monitor whether or not Google re-recognizes these links in the future.

UPDATE: July 1, 2009

Over the last three weeks, we have seen a gradual re-inclusion of the links from Twitter. At this point all original links are reinstated. Interesting. Very interesting.

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Google seems to be dropping links from Twitter

It’s very simple to view this new data:

Select the “Search Query Report” under the “Reports” tab in your AdWords account.

In the example above, we are prompted to place a negative match on the keyword “Free”.

Use this report on phrase match and broad match groups to find negative keywords as well as surprise phrases that generate better-than-average conversion.

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AdWords Now Shows Actual Phrase Used for Click

Anyway, here I am shopping for a new chain. Riders become very attuned to the feel of the shifting, and getting exactly the right chain that shifts smoothly is a matter of considerable experimentation and rest-stop chatter. I’m Googling for a KMC chain - prized for the special coating of 11 herbs and spices, I assume.

I click an AdWords link on the SERPs ‘KMC chain shimano 10spd’ and discover the retailer is breaking a fundamental rule of PPC ads: Show the products the consumer just searched for. Instead, I’m dumped into a page where I re-select the brand I want. I click KMC and find they don’t have the 10 speed version in stock - only the 9 speed. As I reach for the back button I momentarily switch from bike geek to adwords geek, and think to myself ‘yikes, I’ll bet their bounce rate numbers are scary’. Only I then realize they’re not.

The catch is that bounce rate in Google Analytics means ’saw only one page, then left’. But I saw two pages because I was forced to select the brand before seeing the products. It’s a bad campaign, leading to a bad landing page and then a product that cannot be purchased, but bounce rate won’t reveal that. Ouch.

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Dreadful Landing Pages Lead to Low Bounce Rate. HUH?

On the other hand, those doing SEO will repeatedly hear that you need good copy in your pages so Googlebot knows what the page is talking about.

So there lies the paradox: Googlebot is the only entity that can be bothered to read your carefully crafted copy, and even it does it solely to work out whether your page is relevant for a searcher who has a vanishingly small attention span.

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People Don’t Read Copy; Only Googlebot Has Time

Google then exploited these links as a way of determining which page is most relevant, creating the famous PageRank mechanism.

I’m wondering if people use these in-content hyperlinks less these days. After all, relevant stuff is just a search away. With the advent of browser toolbar search boxes, it’s even easier for people to search instead of using hyperlinks.

Will content writers continue to link to stuff, as the use of those links decline?

In many ways Twitter adds to the problem for Google. Lots of links point to a page but there’s no anchor text and the content is very transient.

This might start to undermine a fundamental aspect of determining relevance, eroding the quality of the results. Or are they already so washed-out that it makes no difference?

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Is the hyperlink headed for extinction?