For the last two years, SEOmoz’s Page Strength tool has been one of our most popular features. Using data collected from sources around the web, it aggregates, measures and scores a page based on its relative popularity and importance. But, it’s always had one huge flaw – not everything on the web is a page.
Goodbye, old friend.
Back in January of this year, we brainstormed a method to fix this missing piece by measuring websites, blogs and pages using separate formulas that grab data relevant to each type. Thus, while Blog Strength might look at factors like how many Bloglines subscribers you’ve got and the authority score reported by Technorati, Domain Strength compares the total number of links to your domain according to Yahoo! and the average & median PageRank score for the top 10 pages on your domain. All in all, there’s more than 30 factors between the 3 systems, giving a very robust look at third party data about a given URL.
Naming the tool was a bit of a quandary – internally, we’d been using the code name “Trifecta” (to describe the 3 types of URLs measured), but rejected everything from “Web Strength” to “The PopURLarity Tool” before settling back on the original. Each report is still “page strength,” “domain strength,” or “blog strength,” but the interface that lets you access them now features our catchy new moniker (and Timmy’s clever new racehorse icon).
Trifecta’s landing page has a very simple, 2-step process. Just plug in a URL and choose what kind of report you want to run. Be aware that choosing page strength for a domain or blog strength for a non-blog will give some strange results AND that it’s very important to choose the canonicalization of the URL correctly (www vs. non-www). After 1-2 minutes (sometimes faster, and probably slower today since it’s just being launched), you’ll be taken to a report dashboard with 5 tabs (4 tabs for page strength):
The dashboard itself shows you your score, gives an explanation for where on the strength scale your URL falls, and provides links to the other sections of the report.
From here, I like to look at the “data calculation” tab, which shows each scoring factor, the number reported by the third party service (everyone from Yahoo!, Technorati, and Google to Compete, Quantcast, and Alexa is a data source).The blue bar below the factor will also show you what percentage of that factor’s score your data point represents. In the example below, you can see that 75,600 domain mentions at Google gives me a score of 55% on that factor.
Back in 2004, one of my favorite tools was Marketleap’s Link Popularity Tool (it’s diminished in value now that only Yahoo! is reporting accurate link counts) because they featured a built-in comparison system. We’ve taken from their lead and built the same concept into Trifecta. On the “Compare Your Score” tab, you can see how your site matches up to those more and less popular in any given vertical (this feature is only available for domain & blog strength reports):
All of the features above are free to registered members of SEOmoz to run a report once per day. If you decide to go PRO, you can not only run an unlimited number of Trifecta reports, you also get access to the custom comparison feature (which is, in my opinion, the most valuable part of the tool).
At the bottom of the homepage (for PRO members) and in the “run another report” tab, you can access the interface below, which lets you choose your page/blog/domain and up to 4 others at once:
Trifecta will then run the chosen report type on all of the URLs entered and give you back a comparison scoring chart illustrating how well you stack up to the competition:
It also provides comparison on the individual scoring factors, so you can see where you’re losing out and where you’re kicking tail 🙂
All in all, this is one of SEOmoz’s most polished, most valuable tools to date. For many pages and domains, the score can help illustrate the gap between popularity and importance, and even for advanced users, it’s both useful and convenient to have all of this information quickly collected in a single place (and if you’re PRO, we store old reports so you can re-access them in the future).
While Trifecta’s data certainly isn’t the only thing I’d consider when buying a domain or getting links from a page or seeing how my blog compared to others, the quick access to so much information and the surprisingly accurate scoring scale (we’ve literally tested more than 1000 reports and re-crafted formulas so many times that Nick’s regression tool nearly burnt into my screen) makes this a must-have.
Questions, comments and feedback are welcome below – and don’t forget, since this tool is brand new, there will still be a few bugs here and there and the speed will be slower than normal (due to high volume). Thanks for your patience and enjoy the new Trifecta tool!
p.s. Just as we did with Page Strength, we’re keeping reports cached for 48 hours, so if you re-run a report within 2 days, we’ll show you the data from the first run (although we know factors update constantly, this helps us maintain a reasonable level of bandwidth).
UPDATE: For the next 48 hours, you can run as many reports as you like. After that we’ll restrict usage to registered members only, and 1 report per day (unlimited for PRO members). We’re still restricting access to comparison reports to PRO members only. 🙂
Current Known Bugs:
- If you run domain strength on a URL that Technorati has marked as a “blog” (and thus redirects the search request to the blog information page), the factor will return as “0.”
- Bloglines subscriber counts for blogspot/wordpress/etc hosted subdomain blogs are off due to our fetching system. We should have this fixed in the next few days.
- UPDATE: After some difficulty the first 7 hours after launch, we’re back up and running, albeit a little slow. Reports should take 60-90 seconds. Those that take more than 2-3 minutes have probably died, and you’ll need to re-run them – we should have that fixed up soon as well.
- If you encounter problems, please leave a comment in the thread below, or email [email protected]. Thanks!
FINAL UPDATE (07/18/08): Reports are now limited to 1 per day, and you must be a registered user to try it out (though you don’t need to pay). PRO members can make unlimited reports, including the custom comparison reports. The tool is now running both faster and more accurate than at launch (most reports take less than 20 seconds) due to the lower traffic levels.
