Toolbox: SEO

Since I talked about SEM yesterday, it should not come as a surprise that today I want to introduce the SEO-module. The general idea is that I want to have SEO-relevant information at hand in a quickly and neatly. Everyone who regularly has to deny process advertisement-inquiries linktrade-inquiries or similar offers knows how time-consuming this is. Time that is being need to do routine tasks when you could be using it more wisely. Similar to the SEM-module, I will explain the functionality of this module with the help of some examples and screenshots.

After you enter in a domain, you are directed to the domain-overview. Besides the visibility-index (more on this later) you will be shown the current Google PageRank, the number of indexed pages in Google as well as the amount of different hostnames of the domain in the Googleindex. If lately there are major changes, you will be notified as can be seen in the screenshot where the PageRank, which has risen from 7 to 8 during the last update, is emphasized.

The SISTRIX visibility-index is based on the about a quarter-million mainly German keywords that are calculated from the Googleindex. Besides the anticipated clickrate for the resulting positions one to one hundred we also weigh in the anticipated traffic for each searchphrase into the quantification. This way rank 15 for a keyword such as “Immobilien (real-estate)” will still receive more “points” than the first spot for “Reihenendhaus Immobilien in Bonn Innenstadt (end-unit real-estate in downtown Bonn)“. This way we receive a easily comparable while at the same time accurate indexfigure for the visibility of a domain. Regular readers of this blog should already be (unconsciously) aware of this value: it is being used for the calculation of the monthly “IndexWatch” which shows the winners and losers in the Googleindex. In this screenshot I compared the values for Yigg and Webnews: we can clearly see how Yigg has noticeably lost ground due to the relaunch while Webnews had a problem with the design of their title a few weeks ago, though it seems they have caught up with that now.

After a click on the small green arrow behind the PageRank or after selecting the feature through the navigation you are led to an overview of the domains PageRank development. In this screenshot we can clearly see how the PageRank of sistrix.de resembled that of sistrix.com, which then fell after the Juli update and which has risen again after the last update. The small markings on the time-axis are the dates of the updates which makes it easy to compare. These data can also be interesting for another reason, as can be seen through the values for “koeln.de”: a strong regression from PR6 to PR4 outside of a regular update strongly suggests that there was a manual adjustment because of linksales.

We also have historical data for the number of sites for a domain that are indexed in Google. As we can see in this screenshot of yigg.de, their assertion that the missing traffic is mostly due to the fact that after the relaunch there are still pages that are not indexed with the new URL-structure is hard to comprehend.

For comprehensive projects with a multitude of subdomains it can be interesting to have a listing of them. In the screenshot we can see the example of focus.de, where everything is fine for the hostnames that are ranking well but if we scroll down through the list we will quickly notice hosts like “www315.focus.de” – a classic duplicate-content trap, which can quickly become a problem for a domain that is not as strong as focus.de.

Another large part of the SEO-module deals with keywords as well as positions. You can get readouts on how many keywords ranked for a domain, how many of them were in the top10 and how their development over the last few month has been. There is also a list of keywords that are on top of the second page of results, which have the possibility to make the cut for the front page with some extra work, which will then equate to more traffic. Just as in the SEM-module you are able to click through the complete list of keywords and look at them in detail. Another interesting feature is the appraisal of the relative ranking-allocations for all encountered keywords on the respective result-pages. If we use this feature to compare the results for Technorati and Wikipedia it quickly becomes clear which domain has a rankingproblem.

For the keywords there is the option to obtain past results to answer questions such as “in fact, how has domain XY been doing for keyword Z three month ago?”. The screenshot shows this through the example of the keyword “Immobilien Bonn (real-estate Bonn)” from the three major real-estate portals, however it is also possible to get an accurate listing of the SERPs. When you are trying to solve rankingproblems, this data is usually that what is missing. I am sure that I have now covered and explained the interesting part of the SEO-modules features and I will now go and make some changes so that the tools can go live today.