Yes, it really is butt-kickin’. The Page Strength Tool is designed to replace the often inaccurate and infrequently updated Google PageRank score in the toolbar. Sure, we don’t have access to nearly the amount of data they do and we’re not purporting this to be 100% accurate or even a perfect metric for relative importance (though, in our testing, it was very good at that).
Nifty graphics never hurt, right?
What the Page Strength tool does do is to give you a great idea about a lot of the important factors affecting how search engines consider the importance of a page. For link data, we pull from links to the page, links to the domain, edu, gov & mil links and links from places like Wikipedia, DMOZ, etc. This isn’t to say that these are always going to ensure rankings, but, like it or not, more often than not, more important sites do find themselves with more links from these sources than less important sites. It’s not a universal truth, but it’s enough of a trend to make it worthwhile to have them as factors.
A few of the scoring factors used in the tool – the percentage bar indicates what portion of the maximum is contributed to the final scoring.
We’re also pulling from sources like del.icio.us and Alexa, offering a peek into whether the sites are popular with techie types. Again, neither are perfect metrics, but the data is relatively accurate for the majority of sites (i.e. those not spamming or being spammed).
Finally, we pull some additional pieces to help complete the puzzle – domain name visibility as measured by the number of results for a Google search, internal link percentage (how many links point to deep pages vs. the domain), the age of the domain from the Wayback Machine and yes, even the Google PageRank itself.
Along with a score, we provide a bit of droll commentary 😉
Even if the number we spit back isn’t all that valuable, the data certainly is, and having it neatly collected in one place (typically in under 30 seconds) makes for my definition of “kick-butt.”
Kudos go out to Matt, who built the tool in between at least 3 other projects. My favorite part about this tool is actually the browser toolbar hotlink. You just drag the link over to your favorites and use it on any page on the web to run the tool on that page and get all the factors. I’ve already used this 3X on the phone over the past week to great effect. I suspect it will be great for live demos, conferences, client meetings, etc. too.
Oooo… Browser buttons are cool and useful.
Like it? Hate it? Experience problems? Please do tell.
