Directorydump - PS.5 -Another SEOMOZ Joke

Thanks for the input - we'll do our best. And certainly, if we can start getting closer to providing accuracy, we'll open it up to allow more free requests per day - hopefully 3 or 4 if not 5.

 

What about making it open source and allowing people to host the tool on their own sites?

 

That does make very little sense. You mean that the tool will have value and you will offer more free requests? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

 

Lol --Jeff
I think you are kidding with Rand -- It takes a big-heart for doing things like you suggested.

Do they have it? I think No.

Most probably -- I can imagine where you are going with the suggestion

 

Open source??? I dont think Rand will do that cos thats the tool that makes them more popular and even defame them sooner if they stick to the 1 query a day policy... secondly this tool gets them thousands of visitors, letting others host it for free is a complete end to there traffic so ... what do you guys think?

 

I guess it no longer pulls any information for free users. ???

 

We could offer it for free, but as you so elegantly said, mikey, it does make much more sense from a business perspective to make it a part of our premium content.

That said, if someone wanted to replicate the Page Strength tool, it wouldn't be hard to do, so long as you don't let it get popular (once the requests get high, the inaccuracy skyrockets).

I wish we could provide all of it for free, but we're not a non-profit, and we have 7 people working at SEOmoz, 3 of whom outearn me (the CEO) and none of whom make more than $100K/year at this point.

You can see our financial statements from last year on the blog, if you're particularly interested.

 

But that is a MONTHLY price for usage and it would be understandable if it was a yearly plan. You may be aware that there are a lot of programmers here. All I am saying that in a very short time if you dont fix the situation instead of getting a pound of beef you might end up in a quarter or even less. And look around you not much earns $8.5K a month so that price is steep.

Thanks

 

Exactly Jude.

@ Rand - mate -- there is no need to see the financial statements of SEOMOZ. Everybody here understand --that --one has to give out something to get something in return that is good.

My proposition is --

Fix -the problem --
Get it on a dedicated server.
Make provisions for special account to use the tool --for $10/m.
Very few out here are interested for SEO notes/articles from SEOMOZ as most of them are good SEO themshelves.

So why to compel others for them? Thats business strategy --I know --
But as you can see --it backfired on you.
Hopefully --you read this post and give a serious thought.

 

You'd actually probably be surprised to hear that we currently run the tool on two separate boxes - one for serving web requests and fetching data, and a second entirely devoted to database queries. We're also running a third box for the rest of the SEOmoz website.

Those three boxes have access to other "proxy" ip addresses (not crumby free ones, but ones we pay for) on a few dozen other machines, for a total of a few hundred ip addresses.

Obviously, this isn't enough - and we're always working to add more. But SEOmoz has clients who require development time, we have other tools and projects and websites we manage, so spending lots of time and effort setting up new boxes is very difficult.

As for backfiring on us... I know this will sound weird, but the great majority of folks who sign up for the services - currently about 750 - use the page strength tool on average less than once a day. However, we see tens of thousands of runs from proxies, fake accounts, etc.

That said - your idea to have a $10/month account that just gets access to the page strength tool (unlimited usage) is a pretty good one. I will take that back to the team and see if we can set it up.

Obviously, though, we need to find a way to handle the 500K requests per day and make it more accurate, or it's not useful for anyone.

poptalk - I'd love it if someone wants to put together a rival product on page strength. The load for us is incredibly hard to handle and it actually makes all of our other tools much slower and less accurate. A competing product that someone else could figure out how to scrape efficiently in the long run would be a boon to us, as it would lower demand on our system. That's not to say I'm giving out the source code for free. But anyone who knows a bit of calculus (for the formulas) and codes regular expressions like a demon (and has access to a few thousands proxies and lots of beefy hardware) should be able to replicate.

 

Hey Rand,

Personally I appreciate the fact that PS was free for all this time as well as all the other tools and info that were provided for free.
One suggestion that might help is to do something similar to what digitalpoint is doing for the Keyword position tracker, ask users to upload a script on their servers so that the requests will be made from each user's server and you will just handle the database and the final output calculations. I am not a coder but this method seems to be working well for digitalpoint. Plus you may want to use the users google api keys for the requests so there won't be a need for you to use proxies or at least not a big number of proxies for google queries (mainly for the retrieval of PR)

 

Just great -- I don't think I am qualified to talk to you about business strategies -- -- but cheaper rates with less margins bring in more clients --thus more revenue --and better BALANCESHEET at the end of the Year. Thats what I believe in-- and used by most multinationals --isn't?

I saw you attended the last SEO meet where Matt Cutts gave a great lecture on SE/SEO/SEM.
This statement of yours suggest that--you have learnt his Arrogant manner which says that Google is the BOSS of WWW.

He answered in the same tone for my opinion that other SEs would take the opportunity to capture G's AdSense marketshare --due to G's policy of Report-Paid-Links

 

I have a tool that will hopefully be in development soon. I'd love to incorporate page strength into the equation.

I'm still waiting to hear back from a programmer about the cost, but it is in the brainstorming stage right now.

 

I can make one But I really do not want my tool to depend upon these data as most of them are irrelevant(Alexa,Dmoz,etc.,)

I hope you would add more features to this tool!

Also you can add sponsor links on the PS page so there will be room for some good advertising revenue! which could also support your servers!

 

Is there no other PR prediction tool other than iWeb's? Someone's got to have one on the web.