Yahoo have launched Boomerang. Designed to help you improve your site and page speed. Speed is one of the metrics Google use to rank your site.

Boomerang is slightly different to most of the existing tools available like Speed Tracer and YSlow. It measure the speed from the perspective of the end user. This real-world test incorporates hard-to-measure aspects of development like:

• Geography (where is the user located)
• Network and ISP
• Connection Speeds
• Browsers
• Cache

How do you Implement it?

A simple Javascript file that collects data and sends it back to your server. What could be easier than that? Yahoo Boomerang is currently in beta but the code is open source and they’re looking for testers. You’ll then get information such as:

• A page’s perceived performance – it takes into account the moments at which a page becomes usable for a reader
• Performance of dynamic pages
• User bandwidth
• Component load time
• Network latency

What is Yahoo Boomerang? Where does Boomerang come from?

Boomerang was created by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team and the Yahoo Developer Network. You can download Boomerang from Github. Or, read more about it here.

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz has just written a great post about the Linkscape update. Linkscape is one of the APIs that we use within the Link Juice iPhone App.

“We’re also very excited about the popular and growing iPhone app – LinkJuice. They’ve just recently updated the software with a few recommendations straight from Danny Dover and me!”

Rand Fishkin, CEO and Co-Founder, SEOmoz.org

SEOmoz

We’re delighted that the chaps at SEOmoz are enjoying the Link Juice App. If you haven’t downloaded it for you iPhone, please do so now as the introductory price is about to rise.

New to the Link Juice App

If you’re new to the Link Juice iPhone App, we have built a simple, elegant, but jam-packed app for you. I’ve got a few websites that I like to keep track of. The Google link: command never worked well and only provided basic inbound links. So, I went looking for an alternative. When SEOmoz released their OpenSiteExplorer tool – I was delighted, it provided excellent analysis about my domain and my competitors!

I wanted to include this information and more in a single ‘dashboard’. I thought that it would be even better if I could access this on my mobile. I now can. The Link Juice App includes data from the Linkscape SEOmoz databases but also includes data from SEMRush, Twitter and MajesticSEO!

The screenshots below show the ‘dashboard’ that provides all the data about my domain (in this case, we can see analysis on a fine website called distilled). I have selected two metrics, Top Pages and Anchor Text. This sort of information is just what I need to keep track of my SEO campaigns and allows me to see when all my hard work is actually working for me!

Yes!

We can’t keep the introductory price this low for much longer so download it now before it’s too late.
Call to Action: Download it. Then write a comment below or contact us to tell us what you think

Thank you and I hope you find the Link Juice App as awesome as I do.
Charlie
Link Juice App

We have built what we think is the best SEO iPhone app available. Can it be better? Of course it can! We’ve listened to your feedback and we’ve made it even better!

Firstly, many, many thanks to all the testers and those who have left us reviews around the web and via itunes. All that feedback, both positive and negative is great – we use it to make our app even better. So, what did you ask for? Well, let’s highlight a few of them.

Usability

“It took me a while to figure out how to change the domain”
“It is not intuitive that you must hit back to submit the new URL”
Many of You

You’re right! We’ve improved this by making the domain entry field clearer and making it more in line with apple standards (HIG). We’ve also removed the slightly annoying edit screen that required you to press back to go forward. Duh! Now, it’s clean, simple, elegant and more importantly, it works!

More Metrics

“I’d like to see Top Pages”
“I would like to see mozRank”
“Domain mozRank shouldn’t be rounded”
Danny Dover, SEOmoz

Your wish is our command. We’ve included the Top Pages metric available from SEOmoz. This metric gives you a page by page analysis of your domain ordered by linking root domains. A drill down on that page provides you with individual page information. Wow! That’s good. We’ve also added mozRank and given you more decimal places where relevant. Cool!

Sorting Settings

“What are Linking Pages sorted by (some kind of indicator would be nice)”
Danny Dover, SEOmoz

We’ve introduced a new settings button that is specific to the metric that you’re looking at. If you click on the gears icon (at the top right), you can select the sort order of the metric.

Deep Linking

“Link through to the correct page on MajesticSEO”
Dixon Jones, MajesticSEO

We’ve now built in the MajesticSEO and SEMRush statistics. Right in to the iPhone app. When you click on More Detail, you’ll open up the relevant page on the MajesticSEO or SEMRush site. That’s cool.

What’s next?

One popular request is saved domains and history. We’re looking in to this but it could be tricky – drop us a comment below if you’ve got some ideas. Also, many of you have said:

“What about Android?”
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

We’re looking in to it and we’d really like to make it the best SEO app for android!

The Update

So, if you haven’t downloaded the app or if you haven’t updated, go and do that now!

Here’s a collection of the reviews and testimonials from the App Store, Twitter and messages from Link Juice’s satisfied SEO customers.

Link Juice App Reviews

Buying it now! Let me know if I can ever help on it – I would gladly for free. Looks fricking great!
Russell Jones, CTO at Virante

First thoughts? Probably the best SEO app I’ve found so far. I’m an SEOMoz pro member and also use Majestic tools and the data seems spot on. I particularly like the anchor text info which is going to be handy for client meetings.
Carla Marshall, Founder of Sorbet Digital

Downloading http://www.linkjuiceapp.com which allows you to use seomoz, majestic & semrush to do SEO on your iPhone!
Patrick Altoft, Founder of Blogstorm and Branded3

Link Juice App is really exciting.
Nick Gerner, Software Architect & Search Engineer at SEOMoz

SEO to go :D
Aaron Wall, CEO of SEOBook

Link Juice app looks very nice!
Alex Chudnovsky, Managing Director at MajesticSEO

Cool iPhone SEO app – http://www.linkjuiceapp.com – uses Majestic SEO supplied data :)
MajesticSEO

@linkjuiceapp your link juice app looks great :)
Tamar Weinberg, Tamar Weinberg from Techipedia.com

It’s awesome. Very handy to have in your pocket when talking to new clients.
Darren Shaw, @edmontonseo

Gives you a quick and easy insight in to a domain name, utilising the best of the industries resources including MajesticSEO and SEOmoz, a link will also take you to that resource so you can get more detailed information. With Link Juice App you can see the top performing pages of a website and get further details such as Anchor Text.
Didski, via App Store Review

Are You Missing Out?

Judging by such positive reviews for the Link Juice App from some of the SEO industries top personalities as well as a range of SEO practitioners like you and I, if you don’t already have the Link Juice App you’re probably missing out!

SEO iPhone Apps

We’re doing a full review and analysis of all the important SEO, SEM and Analytics iPhone Apps.

Here are a 9 very hot tips gleaned from the membership area of SMX London.

1. Title Tag is still a fundamental ranking factor
2. H1 Tags are devalued
3. ALT Attributes on images are MORE important than h1 tags!!
4. Get in Google News using these tips:
   1. You must have multiple authors (ok to fake)
   2. Generate (at least daily) content every day (for at least 7 days before you submit to G News
   3. Include a thumbnail in the post
   4. Size should be 300×250 or 180×50
   5. Include at least three digits in the URL that are NOT date based
   6. Make ‘news’ content available under a different url to blog content
5. Embed video (preferably youtube) on your page for increase rankings
6. Video is 50X more likely to appear on the first SERP
7. Use microformats (like hReview) to increase your chance of getting in Google Universal Search
8. Repuation Management Issues can be handled by flooding the twitter stream with positive, proxied, twitter accoutns
9. Links higher up the page pass greater authority

Some more Friday fun – Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts on another Link Juice App Battle:

Background

Google introduced personalised search many years ago. Google has taken this one step further with ‘Stars’. If you are logged in to your Google account, you can ‘star’ a result so that it will appear next time. This feature allows searchers to ‘rediscover web content’. But, does it make a difference to Search Engine Optimisation?

Google Personalised Search Stars

What’s In It for Google?

Google is always looking to re-rank the SERPS and to add metrics to their algorithm. This ensures they are providing the best content to searchers and also staying ahead of the spammers. (Some will argue that Google do this to maximise profits but we won’t go in to that here). In June 2004, Google were awarded a patent on Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data.

What do we want to find out?

Does starring a website in your personal Google results have an impact on SEO? If it does, can we use this to our advantage?

Ready the Test?

We need a website that artificially gets an increase in stars. We can then measure the ‘value’ (we’ll come back to this later) of the website before, during and after the test. The Google Star Test was created by Patrick Altoft.
Patrick asked for all his readers to log in to Google and star his website when using a particular search term. After one week, at least 20 people (Google Accounts) performed the test (however that number is likely to be much higher as we only know about those that commented).

What did we record?

We have measured the results by looking at the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) of the keyphrase [search engine optimisation]. We have monitored these resutls by recording the search positions of the top 100 websites.  We want a large number so that we can spot any trends in the data.

• Top 100 Websites according to Google.co.uk for the search term [search engine optimisation]
• Of the top 20 websites, those that appeared in the top 10 at least once are shown
• Results scraped three times per day, every day
• Data started three years ago (but we’re just looking at this year)

Notes

• We are using a US based IP address which will change the results slightly but we’ve kept this constant
• We allowed Google to decide on the datacentre (which alternated) so that we would get a good sample of the results
• We peformed the search from a non-account (not logged in) so that personalised search didn’t affect the results

The Results

Search Engine Optimisation Rankings for 2010

The rankings over the last year have been fairly consistent (particularly in the top 5). Positions 8-20 are fairly constant but they jostle for position (probably to get that sweet spot of 10th place).

The ranking of blogstorm (the test site) has been fairly static since the begining on the test with even a slight drop on the 14th May. Before the test, there were some advances as blogstorm went from being a competitive 10th up a few places starting on the 24th March.

Blogstorm SERP Ranking by Hour

One Conclusion

One obvious conclusion is that these stars have made little to no effect on the SERP ranking of the target website. If anything, a week later, the rankings have dropped by one place from 7th to 8th. Is this a sensible conclusion? Well, we don’t really think so. Read on for what we think might have happened.

What could be affecting the results?

• QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) – The query has likely generated some press so will have an effect on the rankings. Often this improves the ranking whilst the query is hot, it then drops down to its original position.
• Twitter – the link to the website was published on twitter along with a retweet request. Whilst these twitter links are nofollowed, they still hold value similar to 301 redirects.
• Double Listings – If Patrick is to publish his results, it’s possible he will start getting double listings in google (if he chooses his title/keyphrase correctly).

What are we missing

We’re missing two key pieces of information.

• How many people starred the website
• The traffic

We have got a rough idea of the number of people who starred the website but there will be many more who we don’t know about. There will also be a few that starred the website naturally, ie. not intentionally contributing to this test.

The traffic levels to our target website (Blogstorm) are vital as we can only look at SERP position. What we’ve got is position but we may see that the click through rate (and therefore final traffic) of the website increased as a result? How can we get this data? We can ask Patrick nicely and hope that this post encourages him to provide us with the data :)

Scientific Method

This is a start but it fails miserably at adhering to the scientific method. We’re not allowing for other factors that are changing in the experiment (such as other SEO like linkbuilding (although this is at a minimum) or natural increases of traffic to the domain). We’re also not measuring the efficacy of this test; we’re not testing whether it’s statistically significant. For those without a Mathematic background (I’m sure the Cambridge Maths geek, Will Critchlow will offer a better description); we are not sure that the change is a direct result of the test as it could have happened by chance.

A result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance

With more data, we would like to perform some statistical tests (perhaps chi squared)  to see whether it really is scientifically significant.

What’s Next?

We’re delighted that the search community is performing tests like these and there are many more to be done. We would love to see some more raw data published (get in touch if you’d like the ranking data), over a longer period. Wouldn’t it be great if some of the big seo traffic players in this industry started playing!

If you’re looking for an iPhone application to provide you with SEO tools and backlink analysis, then please click for our linkjuice application via the appstore. You will also get a  free upgrade if you download now.

We’re loving the feedback and ideas that tons of people are sending us. What’s more, we’re planning to release an update to the Link Juice App very shortly which will address some of the finer points. Some of the bigger updates are coming too. But what would Tamar say?

For every winner, there’s a loser. For every gold medal, there’s a disappointed silver and bronze. We live in a competitive world. Much is made of how many friends someone has on Facebook. Or how many followers they have on Twitter.

But who’s the king in the online stakes? Who’s got the most popular blog or website? We’ve used the Link Juice App to see how a variety of online heavyweights match up when they battle it out online.

Stephen Fry vs. Alan Davies

We all know that Stephen Fry is a Twitter heavyweight – an area Alan Davies could never hope to compete. Alas, it appears as though this Link Juice App battle is also a foregone conclusion with Stephen weighing in with an impressive 34,921 inbound links to his website (a well design and maintained WordPress site). Alan can only summon 20 recognised inbound links to his website (of dubious quality). No match …again. Winner: Stephen Fry

iCrossing vs. Big Mouth Media

The big boys of search engine optimisations come head to head in this Link Juice App battle. Recently seen at the top of the spend list for SEO agencies, these two should know what they’re doing. And it’s Big Mouth Media who come through with over 15k inbound links, compared to iCrossing bringing just shy of 6k links to the table. Interestingly though, the mozRank score for Big Mouth Media is 5 (compared to iCrossing’s 6). At the same time, iCrossing have a homepage authority of 48% compared to Big Mouth’s 58%. A few differences indicating differing inbound link profiles for these two closely matched companies. Winner: Big Mouth Media

Holly Willoughby vs. Fearne Cotton

Back to the celeb world and it’s another close content between these two friends. Fearne Cotton appears to have the edge over Holly Willoughby with more than 3k inbound links to her site. But the authority and mozRank for both domains are almost identical. Winner: Fearne Cotton

Patrick Altoft vs. David Naylor

Two hugely popular SEO specialist (personalities, some might say!). And there’s barely a hair to split between them. The stats show that Dave Naylor would win a photo finish but it’s tight. Mind you, Patrick’s targeting of the search engine optimisation (!) phrase is proof of his quality. Winner: Dave Naylor (Just – but Patrick also gets a useful link!)

GioCompario vs. Compare The Meerkat

Nobody knows how or why the Meerkat became a cult figure whilst the equally annoying Gio Compario has grated on the nation since his first appearance. It seems as though the Meerkat also has the edge in the Link Juice App battle! A high domain authority, a higher page authority, a higher mozRank and vastly more inbound links. Sergei is the clear winner here. Winner: Compare The Meerkat

Suzi Perry vs. Ortis Deley

These Gadget Show colleagues know a thing or two about gadgets and gizmos, but not much about online promotion. Despite a little cheating from Ortis by piggybacking on the MySpace domain authority, there’s little else on offer from his online presence. So this Link Juice App battle goes straight to Suzi Perry with a handful of links and a respectable domain authority. Winner: Suzi Perry

Valentino Rossi vs. Casey Stoner

Barely separate on the circuit, Rossi and Stoner are also hard to separate online. Rossi edges out his Australian counterpart with the total number of inbound links but Stoner nips in with the higher domain authority. Perhaps Casey is one for the future and Valentino is the king for now. The online world reflecting life on the tarmac. Winner: Valentino Rossi

Jenson Button vs. Lewis Hamilton

Jenson and Lewis are battling hard as McLaren team mates in this year’s Formula One and they each have a decent online presence. Both have a number of commercial duties fulfilled through their sites, but this hasn’t put off the linkers. Jenson weighs in with 4,866 inbound links but Lewis has 6,685. Authorities and mozRank is roughly the same for both domains so it appears as though the Link Juice App battle gives another fair reflection of real life – not much between them. Winner: Lewis Hamilton