Announcing the New SEOmoz Toolbar – Plus 5 New Features

First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.

As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar!  However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.

So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I’ve also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.

1. New SERP Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

“I get the best ‘feel’ for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I’m familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time.” –Will Critchlow

2. Page Authority and Domain Authority

Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don’t despair!  You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.

3. Surf Like a Search Engine

We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.

“The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice.” –Richard Baxter

“I don’t want to take credit for an awesome feature. OK. I want to take credit for an awesome feature. After constantly forgetting I was surfing as googlebot and getting chucked out of Google calendar etc I asked for this feature and it’s just as awesome as I hoped it would be. ” 

4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including

• Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.
• Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.
• HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.

“The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it’s using rel=”canonical” or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using ‘view source’ and searching through code; overlay FTW!” –Rand Fishkin

“The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There’s not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports – this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page.” –Rob Ousbey

5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.
 

I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon on the toolbar.