I recently shared a link building report template that simplifies our lives as SEOs. If you’ve looked at it closely though, you’d probably realize that a lot of the information doesn’t take human eyes to see nor human hands to record. The romantic undead could do it quite easily.
More seriously, lots of it is a schlepper’s job and could be automated with the right tool. The tool would likely benefit lots of SEOs – the link building report template has had over 800 downloads since its release a week ago, so presumably many folks will be using it going forward.
I figured we could crowd-source the tool’s creation, e.g., have it built open source by developers who feel like contributing. John writes the spider scraper and Sue does the Excel-export.
Another alternative would be to crowd-fund the tool’s creation. The specs are pretty straightforward, and if everyone chipped in we could likely afford to have it done through Elance or Scriptlance, etc.
The specs:
- Create a spider that crawls URLs according to a list that is input manually or read off an existing file you upload/copy-paste. We can release the user-agent for folks who care to block it. (Realistically, blocking is unlikely to affect the tool’s utility in the bigger picture, because a) too few webmasters will know or care to block it, and b) those sites that do block will make up a tiny percentage of the web.
- It then retrieves as many pieces of information off a pre-determined list (e.g., fills in the factor info) from the pages residing on those URLs (for example, whether there were keywords in the title at xyz.com/links, whether the link is nofollow/dofollow, etc).
- The information goes into a database.
- Then the tool takes those factors that are straightforward and adds/subtracts their value from the Base Value.
- All the data gets outputted to CSV, including the scraped information and the pre-calculated parts of the score.
That way, you just need to make whatever data and score adjustments are necessary for those factors that can’t be scraped or calculated automatically. It’s not 100% automation, but at least it saves you time from repeating the same work over and over again.
Thoughts? Crowd-source it? Crowd-fund it? You yourself want to participate in one or the other? Let’s hear it in the comments! (Sphinn promotion would be nice too 😉 .)
P.S. I’m looking for a quality WP developer to help finish a tool my current guy bailed on.
