If you own/run/webmaster a website, SearchStatus should really be on your list of must have tools for Firefox. Where else can you see your Google PageRank, Alexa Ranking, and Compete Rankings in one easy to read interface? I don’t know of any other tools that do the same from within your browser. What’s better than that? Your browsing contributes to the Alexa and Compete rankings. More recorded traffic for both means higher rankings. And higher rankings can lead to more money in your pocket. Do you need any more convincing to get going with SearchStatus?
How?
Well, first you’ve got to be using FireFox. It’s Mozilla’s browser that has been gaining ground on Microsoft IE for a while now. I use it almost exclusively and rarely have any problems with it. Much less than I’ve had with IE in any case.
After that, getting and using SearchStatus is fairly easy to do. Take your Firefox browsing over to the SearchStatus homepage and click on the nice big button that they have for you that says “Download SearchStatus.” Then click on your browser (Firefox or Mozilla). You may get a blocked message (pesky yellow bar) at the top of your screen, if so click on it and approve the site for install and then click your browser again. You should get a popup that asks if you want to install the SearchStatus software. Click Install and you’re off. You’ll have to restart Firefox for it to be completely installed and then you’re ready to set it up and discover the wonders of this supertool!
It’s installed, here’s what’s next.
Once you’ve got it installed, you’ll want to turn a few things on. If you’ll notice, there is a little q with a circle that looks a little like a @ symbol. That’s the menu, just right click it to bring up all the options. The first ones you’ll want to fiddle with are the enable options. If you highlight the enable option, you’ll see a menu of three things. Pagerank, Alexa, and Compete. The pagerank is just for show and won’t affect your pagerank in any way, but the other two report to their respective companies and you’ll want to make sure that they are reporting. That’s how we’ll be increasing our rank.
One of the other things that you’ll want to check out is the Highlight Nofollow option. It gives all the rel=nofollow links a nice pinkish background so you can see what links are and aren’t being followed. It’s pretty surprising sometimes what you’ll find.
There are a bunch more fun and useful tools that come with this plugin, but I’ll let you discover them and give them a test run.
Before you make a comment below, I really should mention that your browsing history alone isn’t going to make any big spikes in your rankings. But every little bit helps and if you get your friends and readers to use the plugin also, you can make a difference. As you’re rankings grow, the amount of money that advertisers pay and your traffic should both grow!
I also should mention that I am not affiliated with quirk or the SearchStatus plugin in any way. I just like the tool a lot!
Technorati Tags: compete, alexa, pagerank, highlight nofollow, nofollow, firefox, searchstats, mozilla
About Shane Ede
I agree this is a useful tool. It is nice to have one toolbar to see alexa, compete and google pagerank. Each of those numbers has limitations but they can be interesting – and fun to watch if your site is rising.
This is great. As John said, it’ll be fun to see what happens with this plugin.
I use this plugin and it’s great.
This is an awesome tool for checking Pagerank directly from the browser, and is just one more reason why Firefox is much better than IE!!
This is a great plugin. So much more compact than sparky and offers more useful information at a glance.
Hi, I enjoyed using this tool for Firefox, but with the last update the function “Show Backward Links” was changed, for example with previous version links in Yahoo looked like this:
1) http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Aexample.com+-site%3Aexample.com&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
and now they look like this:
2) http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=example.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s
Can you please let me know what I should do so the links look like in option 1?
Thanks
I can’t say for sure, but I’d guess that Yahoo changed the way their link structure works. The search string is still in there (after the p= in both examples) so the usage is still there as well.