SEO Text Browser and SEO Score

Psychology of a Search Engine Crawler

Preview/screenshot shown on whois page.
Click anywhere on the SEO TB to launch it.

What does Google see? Or more importantly how does a webpage look to Googlebot and how will it rank a website in its search engine? We have started a project that answers the more general question of how a search engine crawler sees the world. The SEO Text Browser tells the user what things could be improved with the current web page they are browsing. New webmasters don't need to know every SEO trick, a quick spin around the block with the SEO Text Browser tells most of the major corrections that are needed to rank better with on-page content. Best of all this is a free service by DomainTools for all the white hats out there.

The SEO Text Browser allows even the newest webmaster to easily view a detailed and customized list of tasks to fix. For experts that know what they are doing they use lynx or study the source code. The browser actually gives easy step by step instructions on how to improve the web page the user is surfing.

Step-by-Step Instructions to fix Search Engine Optimization:
1) Enter a domain name into the whois form on DomainTools.com.
2) Click on the SEO Text Browser on the right of the whois record.

If you do not see the SEO Text Browser, then no webpage was found for the domain.

3) The SEO Text Browser will launch and give its first suggestion.
4) Complete the task/improvement. Refresh the SEO Text Browser.

The SEO Text Browser caches, you must use the reload button to clear the old copy from our server.

5) Repeat Steps 3 and 4.

Preview of SEO Text Browser rendering MattCutts.com Screenshot of SEO Text Browser

Above: What is seen inside the SEO Text Browser. Below: Actual source code from page.
The first suggestion the SEO Text Browser gave in this case was to add a meta description. The SEOTB will only show one tip at a time in the tip status bar, to get more tips click on the bar or click the "I" in the upper left corner.

HTML Source

<html>
			<head>
			  <title>www.mattcutts.com</title>
			<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
			</script>
			<script type="text/javascript">
			_uacct = "UA-52812-1";
			urchinTracker();
			</script>
			</head>
			<body>
			  <h1>Some fun stuff is <a href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/">here</a></h1>
			  <p>
				You probably want <a href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/">this</a>.
				Because, um, there's nothing else here right now.
			  </p>>
			</body>
			</html>

FAQ and Feedback

SEO Score and Calculations

We receive a lot of feedback on score
Let us start by saying that the SEO Text Browser and the components are all in Beta. The 'Beta' word can't be stressed enough because formulas are still changing and we are working on adjusting them daily. If your score changes and you didn't do anything then consider it something we did to the formula. We will be announcing the formal and allowing community input to help us improve the formula as our project matures. Our goal is to allow everyone to accomplish a 100% score. If no obvious html optimization methods exist and everything looks good we will be giving it a 100%. We will be picky about the obvious things like completing Title tags and h1 tags, webmasters should be using these. We are very hard on frames and lag of alt tags.

Pagerank
We are not using Google pagerank as part of the formula. Optimization is for all on-page content. No off page content is considered in part of the score currently.

Links
We factor in three types of links: On-domain links, Off-domain links, and No-Follow links. Each type of link is different and gives its own type of optimization to a pages it links to. We have derived our score to assume that the current domain wants to keep as much focused PR as possible so we mark down pages that link outbound more then a certain percent of the time.

On-Domain links: These help PR and generally boast a score because links are flowing back to the domain where the webpage is located and the pages inside the domain are likely to flow back to the original page.

Off-Domain links: They don't hurt a page but they weaken the domain's focusing PR power. We encourage people to link to good resources and it will not penalize a page if there are one or two links going off site. However if a page is 100% outbound links then at that point we drop the score a few points.

No-Follow links: We disregard these links and they are neutral. You can learn more about them by searching for "rel=nofollow" on your favorite search engine. We only want to see rel=nofollow links when third parties are adding the links. If you think the resource is quality then websites should not fear linking to it and giving them some PR. It actually shows search engines the site is a quality hub site. Another scenario for use would be if a link was to a third party and it was excessively used. This type of heavy linking to another site bleeds a site and we suggest it be sparingly use it in these cases.

Future Plans

Portable
In the future, this script will be portable and be allowed to launch from any webpage that embeds the our portable code. This code is not available yet. We expect to publish webmaster sniplets code in 2007.

More complex comparison scoring
We will fetch all pages on your site and calculate PageRank according to the Standford Whitepaper. Then display the results in a bulk layout and allow for downloading of the results.

You tell us
Let us know at support.domaintools.com what should be added or fixed.

Super Technical Q&A

User Agent
Requests come from the same user agent as the viewer of the SEO Text Browser. SEOBT runs a web proxy service that operates like a traditional proxy exception that SEOBT strips and parses the results and also does technical analyzation as well. The proxy is only for software provided by SEOBT.

JSON instead of AJAX
Cross domain scripting is allowed with JSON not with AJAX. SEOTB is written in Javascript and JSON so in the future we can share it on any website in the world.

Buttons and Features explained

Close button
Closes the current browser window and returns to the whois record. This has a docking effect and SEO Text Browser history will be lost.

Maximize button
Expand the current SEO Text Browser. Functionality of this button is clumsy right now and extremely beta. In the future it will not work the same way. Right now it expands in the current window. In the future it will navigate to a new page and fill the entire page with a dedicated viewing area.

Minimize button
To tuck the window up but not redock it and lose your page. If you have navigated inside of the SEO Text Browser then this may be the perfect button if you want to take a quick look at the content under the browser window.

Information button
To get the full analyzation of the current web page use this information button to toggle the optimzation tips page over the current page contents.

Settings/Preferences button
Long term preferences can be set. If you are logged in or if you are anonymous. When logged in the settings will go to any computer used. If anonymous the settings will be saved in a local cookie. The settings currently are color and font size. We plan to add more things to the preferences section in the future.

Font button
Adjust the font size and see more or less... To store permanent changes remember to set this in the preferences section. The changes made to this control are only stored for the current objects life. Perhaps with some AJAX or something clever we may store these permanently at a later version.

Refresh button
If the actual HTML of the real web page has changed you will need to use the Refresh button. We save a cached copy of the HTML for 7 days. This also flushes a few stats on the whois page. So it can be useful to actually updating the whois page as well.

Information Available button
When we hide the tip status bar we display the the Information Available button to get the bar back quickly. Hopefully this button is out of the way enough. Let us know your thoughts on the functionality of it.

Tip Closer button
If you want more room and don't want the tips, you can close the tip bar by using this button.