One thing I hate about building sites targeting multiple locations is checking the serps manually in each region. The thought of manually altering the address bar from google.com to .co.uk or .com.au just irratates me.  It is such a mundane task that it should be automated and now thanks to Dave Davis and the fabulous team at Redfly Marketing it has been.

Redfly Marketing have developed a firefox plugin called Google Global. Google Global now allows you to view organic and paid Google search results as they appear in almost any location on Earth.

Some of the Features of Google Global:

• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.
• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.
• Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.
• View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.
• View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.
• View paid and organic search results from different language results pages.
• Custom advanced saved searches.

How to use Google Global

The easiest way to use Google Global is to simply do a search for something on Google. When you see you search results page, simply right click anywhere on the search results page, select “Search Google Global” and select what geographic location you would like to see the results from. It is as simple as that.

Get Google Global

To get Google Global, just click this link

When your link building for your site it is always better to get relevant links. Now there are many ways of finding relevant links, search engines, direcories, forums but one of the best ways is to see whoose linking to competitor websites or high profile websites in your niche.

There are two ways available to analyse competitors back links, one is the “link:” operator in Google, the other is Yahoo SiteExplorer. Now Google’s link operator will only show a handfull of a sites backlinks but SiteExplorer will show all backlinks but will only let you export 1000 of them.

Another problem we have with backlink analysis is the “no follow” tag. Not all links are valued equal and Google came up with PageRank to aid in solving this problem. PageRank is a value of authority assigned to a single webpage. An outbound link from a page will carry some of that PageRank. To allow webmasters control over their outbound links as webmasters do not always want to dilute their PageRank, Google introduced the “No Follow” tag. The “No Follow” tag informs Google not to pass any PageRank to the link, thus making the link have no benefit towards search engine rankings.

Not all Search Engines adopted the “No Follow” tag and Yahoo is one of them, so the problem with SiteExplorer is that it includes “No Follow” links and “Do Follow” links in its results. Well I’ve found a solution.

I’ve just begun using a firefox plugin called SEO Link Analysis by Yoast de Valk. SEO Link analysis adds to Siteexplorer the PageRank of the page that the links originate from, the Anchor Text used in the link, and offers colourcodes to explain if the link is a DoFollow link or No Follow link.

Below is a screenshot of SiteExplorer, before and after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer before SEO Link Analysis

SiteExplorer after SEO Link Analysis has been installed:

SiteExplorer with SEO Link Analysis installed

I hope this helps you with your competitor analysis!

PPC Web Spy

PPC Web Spy is a firefox plugin that will show you the destination url of any adwords. It will allow you to spot affiliate urls in PPC Advertising. In the below example I’ve highlighted where it’s showing an affiliate url:

The next nice feature is you can view some of the other keywords they are bidding on:

In the above example it shows that the affiliates are using direct linking, where they aren’t using their own landing pages, the next tool I’m going to show you will allow you to analyse an affiliates landing page:

SpyFu.com

SpyFu.com allows you to analyse an affiliates landing page and see what keywords they are bidding on and what they are spending in google adwords on a daily basis. For this example I’m going to use an affiliate website I came across call getdietsolutions.com.

When we put this site into SpyFu we get the following results:

Now straight away we can see that this is a big affiliate, they are spending between $500-$2500 daily and they have a keyword list of over a 1,500. The free version of spyfu only shows 10 keywords but the paid version will allow us access to all the keywords.

I hope you find these tools useful. If you know of any other tools as good as these please leave a comment!

If your a webmaster like me, you should be used to analysing your logs to see where your traffic is coming from (If your not, your not doing it right!). I always check my logs to see who is sending me traffic, if I see a referrer, I’ll check them out to see in what context are they linking to me. RefControl allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever web address you want including your affiliate website address.

What should happen now, is that the webmaster of sites you’ve visited on the internet will check your site to see how your linking to them. If you’ve got good content, it should earn you a link!

If you like this plugin as much as I do please leave a comment!