Another SEO toolbar has been published. Oboy.
Wait! There’s another one!
There’s another!
Another….
What is the search engine optimization community’s fascination with Firefox SEO toolbars? They all basically tell you the same thing: NOTHING HELPFUL FOR SEO.
Let’s run down the usual victims of SEO toolbar spam and see what potential value they offer to someone who is actually trying to optimize for search. All of these features may be found on two or more toolbars (with the possible exception of MOZrank — I’m not sure about that one, yet).
- Google Toolbar PageRank
- Yahoo! Backlinks
- Yahoo! Linkdomain
- Google Backlinks
- Microsoft Backlinks
- Directory listings
- Technorati backlinks
- Domain age
- Number of EDU links
- Number of GOV links
- Alexa ranking
- Rankings on Google, Ask, Microsoft, Yahoo!
- Keyword density
- MOZrank
Okay, that’s just a smattering of the Toolbar options I have seen, used, reviewed, and found wanting. There is nothing useful in this data when it comes to optimizing for search. I’ll explain why below. What I cannot do — what I am prevented from doing by company intellectual property rights policy — is suggest what I think WOULD be useful. You won’t see Visible Technologies put up its own toolbar (so far as I am aware, but we have a lot of programmers on staff and God only knows what they have been up to) and if it did put up a toolbar I probably would not be the genius behind it (because, frankly, I would never share that kind of intelligence gathering capability openly).
Google Toolbar PageRank – Everyone loves to pick on Google Toolbar PR values but most SEOs like to know the numbers anyway, just in case. I can actually think of a few potential benefits but none of them can be implemented through a knobby on a toolbar. Ask yourself, “What else can you do with Google Toolbar PR besides look at the most current value“?
Yahoo! Backlinks – These backlink counts might as well include bridges being offered for sale. Yahoo!’s backlinks data is so full of non-existing links I still don’t understand why anyone in the SEO community ever bothered to use it (does ANYONE check the details before blathering about these concepts in SEO forums and blogs?). You want to count imaginary links? Fine. Do it. But don’t call that search engine optimization, competitive intelligence, or useful.
Yahoo! Linkdomain – While this is sort of useful for analyzing Yahoo!’s search results, it’s not provided in the context of optimizing for Yahoo! search. So why do you even bother looking at this data? Google doesn’t know or care about which domains Yahoo! has indexed.
Google Backlinks – There was a time when everyone thought this made sense. Now everyone knows that it’s just a random sub-sample and therefore most people in the SEO community poo-poo it. Actually, this is the most useful knobby you’ll find on any SEO toolbar. Unfortunately, it’s not being used in a helpful way.
Microsoft Backlinks – A lot of people have given up on Microsoft in the SEO community. That will go down in history as yet another major blunder by the SEO community, considering the fact that more than 100,000,000 people use Microsoft search every month. But does knowing how many links Microsoft may or may not report help you in any way?
Directory listings – This will tell you how many directory links people have bought. Hm. I guess that’s an indication of how much money people have to waste on buying links. Maybe it indicates something useful but it’s been a long time since I could easily tell the good directories from the bad directories. How is a knobby on a toolbar supposed to know the difference? Why should I rely upon some toolbar programmer’s choices?
Technorati backlinks – Actually, I think there is some useful data in Technorati. Well, unfortunately, they improved the service a while ago and now I cannot get to the useful data. I am not aware of any SEO toolbar knobbies that can get to it, either.
Domain age – Who in the world thought up the stupid idea of checking Archive.Org for the age of a domain? That is so braindead stupid. WHY? Because Archive.org doesn’t magically know when to crawl a newly populated domain, because many domains block Archive.org, and because Archive.org doesn’t distinguish between when a domain belonged to Owner A versus Owner B and etc. Is there any useful reason for knowing how old a domain is? Yeah, at a glance it [CENSORED] and then you can [CENSORED]. Think about it.
Number of EDU links – There was a time when I thought links from EDU domains might be helpful. I have a few of them myself. But then I learned about EDU spam. It’s ugly. It’s cheap. It’s easy to get. Oh well.
Number of GOV links – No two GOV linking pages are alike. It’s an interesting idea but, unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to it.
Alexa ranking – I still don’t know if Alexa rankings can be manipulated as easily as before the Great Alexa Update of 2008 but does anyone actually care any more? Actually, if I were to want an Alexa knobby on a toolbar I would [CENSORED] because knowing [CENSORED] makes more sense to me. Do you see what I mean?
Rankings on Google, Ask, Microsoft, Yahoo! – Dear Mom and Dad: Today I ranked 1st on Google, Ask, Microsoft, and Yahoo! for [INSERT KEYWORD HERE]. Please send more money.
I’m not going to say that rankings are dead, but if there is any way that an SEO Toolbar can tell me something useful about rankings on search engines, I haven’t seen it yet.
Keyword density – It slices! It dices! It blinds SEOs in the flick of an eye! It’s the AMAZING KEYWORD DENSITY ANALYZER! Yes, friends, just type your keywords in here and this little gem will tell you what ratio of words on the page you’re currently viewing match your keywords! “I don’t know, it almost sells itself! …Are you getting this, camera guy?”
It’s scary to think that any decent, self-respecting SEO would want to talk about keyword density after 6 solid years of being told that it is a meaningless metric. HELLO! Is this thing on?
MOZrank – I evaluate SEOmoz’s LinkScape tool every month. The MOZrank feature is interesting. Rand and I had briefly discussed an alternative to Toolbar PR a few years ago by email. I’m sure he has discussed the concept extensively with many people over the past several years. We all agree that Google’s Toolbar PR is bogus for any number of reasons (the hand-jobs Google applies to the Toolbar PR data as a “punishment” certainly eliminates the last possible vestiges of credible usefulness from the reporting system).
MOZrank at least offers you a different opinion on the potential value of a Web site, but if you’re basing your search engine optimization on what the little SEO toolbars tell you, you’re doing it wrong.
All I Want For Christmas Is A Good Toolbar
Toolbar SEO is very popular, very big. It’s overwhelmingly permeated in our pre-industrial search optimization society. I tolerate its use on my team because, frankly, it doesn’t do much harm to their good SEO work as I don’t accept any reports or analyses that refer to Toolbar PR, backlink counts, rankings, etc.
Toolbar SEO needs to be vastly improved in ways I cannot, dare not divulge. But think about what you’re doing. You’re capturing snapshots of data that is unrefined, in many cases bogus, and which lends no focus to your analysis of what you’re doing.
Ideally, you should want toolbar functionality for each area of search engine optimization. That doesn’t mean you cannot have one humongous toolbar. I’m just saying that you should want the data categorized, organized, and presented in a logical fashion.
Imagine you have a Keyword Research toolbar. What would you want to do with it? What information would you want it to report? Keyword research can gather data from a variety of resources. A good keyword research toolbar should be able to work with several of them. And I can easily imagine at least 2 or 3 models for keyword research toolbars — after all, we don’t all think alike, so people would need to approach the matter in distinctive methods.
Most of you spend far too much time obsessing over links. If you had a link building toolbar, you really would NOT want it to tell you how many backlinks any service reports for a site. That kind of information is useless, meaningless, and irrelevant to search engine optimization. Your ideal link building SEO Toolbar should tell you something useful about the [CENSORED] because that is where you need to focus your time and effort.
Search results rankings are not really dead. What is dying (hopefully) is the SEOs’ blind trust in and dependence upon achievement through rankings. Any Web page can (and should) rank for a large number of expressions that people actually search on. Your toolbar should not be telling you what a page ranks for and it should not be asking you for keywords. If you really want to know something about a page’s rankings, you have to develop better questions. Ask better questions and people will improve the quality of the answers (and information) they provide you.
All of these toolbars lack one very critical ingredient for good, reliable, successful search engine optimization snapshot analysis. They don’t have a snowball’s chance in a blast furnace of providing you with useful information the way they all currently look and function.
If you feel compelled to disagree with me, ask yourself one question: “If I could not have all the toolbar functions I currently love — if I HAD to do without them — what would I want in their place?”
You don’t have to agree with me. Just look beyond your nose and see there is more out there than you have been shown.
To the toolbar makers out there: Take comfort in the knowledge that so many people appreciate what you do for them. But please, please, PLEASE rise up, shake off the lethargy of download success, and look for ways to build a new generation of SEO Toolbars that go beyond what we have today.
Absolutely none of the SEO Toolbars available today are worth using. They all suck, they all suck big time, and they’re not likely to get any better until people start asking for different, much more useful data.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
James Pardoe 01.22.09 at 8:29 am
What’s with all the cencorship?
Michael Martinez 01.22.09 at 8:57 am
Maybe it’s just a poor attempt at humor, but I thought it would help get people to think a little bit about alternatives to common assumptions about the value of the toolbar button data.
And I really AM barred from openly sharing developmental concepts on the blog by corporate intellectual property policy.
Ben_McKay 01.22.09 at 11:16 am
I was going to ask the same question! I would love to pick your brains Michael.
I enjoyed the post, but still value the unnamed SEO toolbar. Just to explain why…it’s free, therefore I don’t expect it to be perfect and I have my own ideas for analysis and tools that I work with on the side. I do think it’s helpful to glance at though, and even to highlight ‘progress’ through yet more easily accessed means as possible. Data points that are easily accessed and easily analysed are never going to be the ‘ranking miracle’ that people may be seeking, as search engines would never make there algorithms so simplistic, needless to say it’s not information that I would turn away.
There are a great deal of data points than are drawn on by various SEO toolbars which have aged quite badly, but many aspects, even those that have diluted in value, still can quickly raise awareness to items of progress in SEO efforts.
A SEO toolbar is snap shot typically, and used without any (much) deeper analysis of the meaning behind those figures can be pointless.
My vote is for SEO toolbar’s but with a good deal of education around there usage and limitations.
As always, Michael, thought provoking!
Carlos 01.22.09 at 11:57 am
Michael I laughed out loud at the mental image of “the hand-jobs Google applies to the Toolbar PR data as punishment” I dare say that doesn’t mean what you intended, but, on to more concrete issues.
Your brief foray into the psychology of propaganda is more informative for this issue than most of this post is. Your general argument is that there are little nuggets of information that are useful when interpreted. Okay fine, but what do you expect?
Take your analogy of a house from the propaganda post. This time we are on the outside and there are a few people on the outside that can see in through one window and shout out what they see. Most toolbars consolidate a paraphrase of each view, instead of the full transcript. The purpose of toolbars is to save time. To give you a way to jump straight to the tool or source that the information is taken from and the good toolbars auto-populate the intended search.
Toolbars are never going to provide comprehensive data, that’s not their purpose.
I also have issue with your presentation of the information sources. I agree that Yahoo has dirty data, especially for big sites, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t offer insight into the link matrix. That Google and Yahoo assess links differently is unquestionable, but even you can’t deny that they both assess linkage.
There is plenty of useful information about competition and geography of the web to be taken from the sources you cite. I think that the true spirit of SEO-Theory should be making the connections between the data sources, not bemoaning the state of disconnected data.
olmei 01.22.09 at 5:55 pm
Michael,
Is the Compete data worth a subscription? You recently mentioned you were going to stop using them as the data was not reliable yet a while later seemed to include them as a source of data to argue a different point from within another post.
RE: this column, I’ve tried the SEOMoz tools and from my ~limited: perspective, can’t see a noticeable difference from the free ones.
Also, can you share experiences with any historical query and historical SERP tools?
Thanks again-
Keep on posting
Mike
Michael Martinez 01.22.09 at 10:41 pm
There is nothing wrong with snapshot analysis. We all use it, with or without toolbars. I’m just concerned about the quality of work being done by people who actually rely upon the toolbars. Basing all your optimization (or most of it) on snapshot analysis is not, in my humble opinion, a very effective or efficient way of doing the job.
Even I probably engage in it more than I should.
Michael Martinez 01.22.09 at 10:50 pm
olmei: “Is the Compete data worth a subscription? You recently mentioned you were going to stop using them as the data was not reliable yet a while later seemed to include them as a source of data to argue a different point from within another post.”
Michael: It might be worth a subscription depending on what you want to do with the data. Compete’s traffic estimates can be wildly wrong for one of three reasons:
The engineers at Compete doubtless tinker with their data models but in my opinion their accuracy (and Quantcast’s accuracy) is better for very popular sites with millions of visitors per month.
And just when I thought it was safe to turn my back on Compete a couple of months ago, they increased the amount of data they were providing. That is why I’ve gone back to looking at their reports. We’re doing some interesting analysis here and I hope to share some of that data next week on SEO Theory.
Michael Martinez 01.22.09 at 10:56 pm
olmei: “Also, can you share experiences with any historical query and historical SERP tools?”
Michael: I would have to think about that.
IntegriSearch 01.23.09 at 9:21 am
Well done, Michael.
I’ve tried to kick the SEO toolbar habit myself, but keep mine intact with the hope that someday they might actually provide me with some practical information.
Ben_McKay 01.24.09 at 1:58 am
Regarding this:
“Basing all your optimization (or most of it) on snapshot analysis is not, in my humble opinion, a very effective or efficient way of doing the job.”
…I couldn’t agree more…it’s kind of like a mechanic looking at a car without lifting the lid!
@Carlos This is a good point: “I think that the true spirit of SEO-Theory should be making the connections between the data sources”
…essentially it’s reminding users of SEO Toolbars (and other data points, I would hope) to analyse the data’s relationships and draw their conclusions, as opposed to reading it off the tool’s interface. That’s where the most value can be added in my opinion.
Thanks Michael.
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