Useful SEO Toys, Tools, and Packages

Some of these have been mentioned from time to time on posts here, but here's a summary of what is available so far (and everything free) on the brand-new SEO Toys, Tools, and Packages site.

1. Freebie: in establishing your site's Google Page Rank, size does count. The Freebie package will, with just a few minutes of one-time set-up customizing, give your site an extra thousands of relevant, daily-changing pages requiring no maintenance by you. What it does is tack an Amazon bookstore onto your site, with book listings on a generic topic (that you select) relevant to your theme. The look of the title presentation is completely customizeable--fit it into a page of your design. The package is free, but we split any book commissions earned (which, for sites not already running their own bookstore, is probably not much--it's the page count you want).

2. Via: a really small, simple php script that lets youhide any outbound link whatever. While ethics requires that you legitimately return others' backlinks, you surely don't need to bleed PR on links to sites that don't know you exist. Very easy to use, and (unlike JavaScript dodges) will remain bulletproof to any search engine whose robots obey the robots protocol.

3. Weather: If you're looking for a way to put a little dropin content on your pages that changes frequently without maintenance, and if the weather for some location (anywhere in the world) is plausibly relevant for you, here it is: you can have four sizes of display, from "tiny" that gives a little gif, the conditions in a word or two, and the temperature, up to "full", that gives 5-day extended forecasts. The colors and size are completely customizeable.

4. Rates: if weather is not relevant, how about international currency exchange rates? You can select any IMF-reported currency as the base, and any number of other IMF-reported currencies for which to show conversion rates (both ways); you can even show cute little national flags in the display. Data changes once per business day.

None of these items is held out as cutting edge or revolutionary; what distinguishes them is that each has been tailored for really simple installation and zero-maintenance use by folk interested in SEO augmentation of their sites. While technically all but "Via" are still beta, thanks to some fine people from this forum, each has been tested and seems solid enough.

If neither spot weather nor international exchange rates float your boat, what would? What sort of data that changes at least daily would you like a dropin for? Let me know and I'll see what can be done.

I hope to also add fairly soon easy toys to: legitimately change the date/time stamp of a site's page files on a daily basis ("legitimately" meaning that there will be some corresponding small but real change on the page); submit your site pages nightly to third-party html validation and issue a report of nonconforming pages; and some other stuff still in the concept stage. Again: what could you use? Let me know.

 

Its a nice resource, the via trick is nice for linking out to some of my own pages that are good resources but I didn't want to have recip links on.

 

"Via" is as far from original as it gets, but there it is in a neat package with install and use instructions.

A link to a script like "Via"--a link that is not followed out because it cannot be--is what Google calls a "dangling link". One credible online paper discusses the topic and quotes a pretty reliable source:

"'Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.' - extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page."​

If you click on the link above to "online paper", you will actually be passing through an instance of "Via". (Be sure to mind your browser's message bar, because while "Via" responds quickly, the called site does not, and you shouldn't mistake their sloth for anything to do with the script.)

 

Great set of resources...

The PR article you pointed out is a really good read...

It's the first time I've read something that tries to explain how PR works, that actually makes sense...

It'll take a few reads to get my head around it completley but it's a really good find...

Cheers for pointing it out!

Our of interest, is it possible to use *rates* from a GBP point of view instead of US$?

That would be really handy.

 

Boy! I'm philisophically opposed to the Via concept. If another page is of sufficient value to link to isn't it just good manners to at least pass to that site any value the link can give. Otherwise it is just a selfish, all take and no give, philosophy.

Then I think this entire issue of "PR bleed" is over done. A single out bound link from your page is not going to have any significant effect on your page's PR. In fact there is a lot of evidence that your page will be rewarded for additional relevance or as a "hub" for out bound links.

In addition we all know that PR value is becoming less and less important. The importance of a backlink is it's anchor text and contribution to the relevance of your page. Tools like Via just perpetuate the PR bleed paranioa and probably hurt the web pages that use them.

 

Further to my last post here is an exchange in the LED Digest. The Author is Dirk Johnson a recognized leading expert in the field of links:

The Truth about linking -- Dirk Johnson

 

Absolutely. Any of the four dozen or so currencies reported daily by the IMF may be set as the "base" currency, and any one or more (up to all the rest, though I reckon the display would be impossibly wide past maybe 10 or so) set, in your preference of display order, as the "foreign" currencies to and from which rates are given. While this is not a real-time display like, say, xe.com has, being taken from the IMF's daily report, it is good enough for most purposes. I originally used the FRB of NY, but the IMF has many more currencies listed.

I was and am concerned about unethical use of "Via" (and like toys), and there is a discussion of some length on the matter in the install doc. By and large, the first paragraph quoted above is correct, and such links ought not to be hidden. But it is not the "single outbound link" that is the chief issue: for example, a site that has, as some of mine do, thousands of per-title links to Abebooks' used-book listings is losing some PR to Abebooks, who scarcely care if your link to them, which is a link to a product they are selling, is direct or referred (or is a doubly redirected link--it would really be Commission Junction that would get the link). I see no harm or ethical lapse in hiding such links.

The question of reward for outbound linking is an interesting one, and I would be pleased to see some citations to hard evidence on the point, which I have heard mentioned by several sources.

In short, though, I do not advocate hiding links indiscriminately--quite the opposite. I only suggest it for links to places to which one has no reasonable ethical obligation (or personal imperative) to link.

 

I have now read the Dirk Johnson article quoted in full on another thread hereabouts.

It's a curious piece, which, when read closely, is almost like a politician's speech, heavy on fists pounding the podium, but also heavy on words like "seems" and an implied "trust me, I'm an expert". That is not to say that anything in it is not exactly and fully true: it is to point out that hard particulars demonstrating that presumptive truth are in short supply.

"Maybe it holds up mathematically in the famous PageRank equation, but . . . ." followed shortly by "real world examples . . . refute the effect . . . very consistently" -- but we see no such examples.

"There is emerging and very strong evidence that . . . ." But we are not given any of it.

" I suspect that . . . . " "My guess is that. . . ." "[T]hisconclusion is not readily apparent, except to those of us who do advanced analysis of competitive link back situation reports on a daily basis."

Would you elect this man President on those bases?

OK, that's the con. Pro is that a deal of what he says does make sense, and several of his points are almost certainly so. But the bottom line seems to be that SERPs are achieved by methods that match the yogis' assessment of enlightenment: "those who know do not say, and those who say do not know." Ya pays yer money an' ya takes yer chances.

Were there any clear evidence that this or that theory of SERPs was correct, discussion of the topic would be moot, and virtually nonexistent.

 

Compar, as I have pointed out in another thread about javascript redirects, the one legitimate time I think the via script could be used is with affiliate links. The merchants openly compete with us in the SEs and PPCs so why should we be helping them out by giving them even more of an advantage?



Fully agree with you for all other situations.

 

Owl, is there a link to anysite using the 'freebie' tool. I would like to see it in action, see how it functions etc...

 

I think the idea of "bleeding" PR is nonsense. For what possible reason would Google deem that a site's PR is "leaking" or "bleeding" to another site. A link is a link. A site's PR is not going to be penalized for having a link to a site with a lower PR. That's just ridiculous in my book.

 

The problem I see is when you get these link farms crawling and linking to your site. Then, when a site like Yahoo! decides to hammer on these farms you can be in trouble as a result. I have tested this theory and know that it is the case. I had a 3 back links from a site that was cloaking. It was an old domain that I was not keeping and so the result of the link farm linking to me was ok. Sure enough, it was dropped the same day as the farm.

Kinda scary, I now take a lot more care in who is linking to me and making sure my site does not start appearing on more farms.

PS: Anyone know anything about this site www.greece.snn.gr? They indexed my page and now are spamming me. I am going to contact and ask to be removed. Any ideas...

 

Sure. Remember that the look of the pages is 100% customizeable, so what you see is the look a given site happens to use: it is the functionality that is common to all. (That is by way of saying that I don't go in for much graphics or fancy design).

. http://ritzville-museums.org/bookshop.shtml (that one also uses the "Weathher" tool on-page)

. http://seo-toys.com/mybookshop.shtml

I have a few others, but those will show the thing in its base state (meaning with minimal customization of page "look and feel").

There are also already some sites not mine that are using it, but I am uneasy about listing any without first getting some ok from their owners.

It is up to v. 0.81 beta right now, and I expect to issue a 0.82 (just something to make the install a tad easier) today or tomorrow. One major SEO company that has been using the package on a test basis, and with whom I have been working as the beta versions advance, seems to feel that it is now ready for prime time.

I alpha-test the new versions by doing a complete new install, exactly following the package instructions, on a "site" that is simply a subdirectory of an unrelated site, which is sort of a worst-case situation. So far, so good.

 

If one looks about the web, one finds folk who at least seem to have functioning brains and significant experience who will argue, vehemently, virtually all possible views on that question (among others in SEO). Each makes what reads like a persuasive case, often with citations of this or that authoritative source, yet they come to very different conclusions.

(There is an interesting online paper on the general topic of PR, but a common response by those who disagree with its findings is that it analyzes methods now superseded--though how anyone could know such a thing is beyond me).

I take no particular position. I offer tools. Those who believe that X, Y, and Z are appropriate SEO strategies and tactics will find some of them useful, perhaps others not. Those who believe that A, B, and C are the optimum strategies and tactics may find others useful but some not.

I do think that nowadays just about everyone agrees on these two things: increased page counts certainly help PR and probably SERPs; and freshness, frequent changes in page content, helps SERPs. Those are the main considerations my toys are intended to help easily implement on one's site. The "Via" toy was a trifling spinoff.

While we're at it, what is the sense of the house on the importance, or lack of it, of pages that validate? Would a tool to automatically submit one's all of site pages to the w3c validator (which could be done nightly) and return a report of nonconforming ones be useful? (I have one I use myself that could be made a general-use tool fairly easily.) There is, I believe, a school of thought that "clean" pages are easier for robots to understand, or at least that they're less likely to err if the html (or xhtml) is fully standard.

 

PR is almost certainly 'leaked' through outbound links. I've seen too many sites, articles, and posts from excellent SEOers to think otherwise.

 

Eric, I agree with NewComputer. You should seriously consider adding a link to a live demonstration of the system in action.

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Rats. I posted without noticing the thread had a page 2. I see that some examples have been posted above. Sorry about that...

 

Just an update note: the "Freebie" site-augmentation package is now at beta release level 0.90. The chief changes, and there have been quite a few, have to do with installation (since the package itself has been stable for quite a while now, as it was an outgrowth of a long-running personal package): the install process is now as close to automated as I reckon it can get, and the required items of user input are now mostly gotten in an interactive enter-input manner.

(One thing I did add to the working portion of the package is a microtimer, to be sure that the search calls to Amazon do not exceed the one-a-second specified in their Terms of Service; before this, the package was usually in minor technical violation, typically running at 100 calls a minute or so).

The already extensive documentation has been expanded yet more as well. I actually think it's ready for 1.0 status, but I want to leave some wriggle room if any unusual host system configurations turn up anything needing zapping, or if some minor last-minute improvements suggest themselves.

(I also figured out a rule of thumb for an optimum number of titles to capture with a search phrase, that being about 7,500 to at most 10,000, since at that point several letters of the alphabet, for the title-listing pages, will be"saturated"--page length at or over 101k--but that still gives you 15,000 to 20,000 extra pages for your site.)

Once 1.0 is out and running, I will be adding features. My first target, I think, will be internationalization, so one could use any one or more, up to all, of the Amazon international divisions as a source for book titles (in English).

Remember, this guy is free. More beta testers/users are wanted.

 

Hey Owl, I was all excited about the new update etc.... then it turns out I am not running apache on my server. I have another server where I may set up the site I want to use the tools. I have introduced them to a friend and he is very impressed. Would you consider the code 'open source'?

 

Owlcroft, would it be possible to substitute books with DVDs? Not asking you to do it, just wondering out loud at the moment and something for you to consider later. Perhaps not just DVDs but other products offered as well.

 

NewComputer: Q - "Would you consider the code 'open source'?"

A - Well, that's a little tricky. As is made plain throughout the package docs, the way it works is that if the user is, or becomes, an Amazon affiliate, the sales commissions are split 50-50 between the user and my Amazon ID. So long as no one fiddles that part of the arrangement, I suppose I don't mind what else they might do, though I'd like to hear about it (and so long as they don't redistribute any fiddling).

I suppose I should put some explicit statement in the docfiles.

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jarvi: Q - " would it be possible to substitute books with DVDs?"

A - Yes. I'm not sure if it would be easy to get as many extra pages, since there are a lot more books than DVDs (I think). But yes.

As soon as I feel the whole package is "gold" code, and release 1.0, I plan to at once dive into some expansions. The first on my list is internationalization, making it possible for the user to get listings from any (or any combination) of the national Amazon divisions (four of the six are so far available via AWS XML). But using other media is a good #2 expansion.

(The operational package code has been gold for a good while now--it is the install code and docfiles that are eating through the revision upgrades, as I try to make everything easier and clearer.)