Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... unless they are stealing your code

Hey there! I'm Carter Cole, the developer of the wildly popular SEO Site Tools Google chrome extension. It's currently boasting a little over 34,000 active users and it's my 2nd most pride and joy (I've got a son, Seth). My extension took a lot of hard work and time to create and today I found someone had stolen my work and reskinned it, calling it their own, adding only minimal changes to the ui and almost no functionality. As a kind of counter, to hopefully shame the person who stole my code, I'm going to run through all my code. How it works, the history of how I created it, then im going to show the copied UI elements and finally I'm going to show the copied code stolen from my extension.

Skip to copied code or Skip to copied UI (warning i kinda go on a rant to explain why I care so much about this little tool).

I like to think of my tool as the Borg of SEO tools. I first got the idea to build it when I heard SeoMoz had a free API. I hoped to create a 1 to 1 copy of the SeoMoz extension for Firefox as a Google Chrome extension and give it to SeoMoz to try and give credibility to get a job there and also to take credit for the chrome version. They didn't want to go for that and were going to keep it in-house but would help and give feedback. After my first prototype it felt like something was lacking. There were so many more data sources that the moz tool didnt show... So I downloaded every Firefox and chrome SEO Extension I could find and started sniffing the API calls they made (or scraped off serps, the best way to do this is with something like Fiddler). By combining only the metrics that really matter and adding in a few of my own ideas I had something awesome. Thats why I call it the Borg, it was made by replicating the best parts and as soon as another extension (in this case that was "Chrome SEO") created a new feature I would replicate (but not steal) the functionality and add it to my tool. I was doing almost weekly update and the user-base was growing like crazy. Then I got a new job and things stagnated. My extenstion is run on almost 10k pages a day and because of scope creep I've lost sight of my original goals and haven't made an update in months. I really need to block out time to make updates. My tool getting stolen has been a rude awakening that I need to get coding again. So enough about why this matters so much to me. I'll get into how they stole my tool.

Now, because of the nature of Google Chrome extensions (they are all just HTML and JavaScript) it's quite difficult to protect your source code so you expect it to be seen. Knowing this, I didn't even try to obfuscate the code because its pretty easy to reverse and if they really want the code they will get it. But there are some trade secrets you want to keep so you do them in a way that's not that hard to figure out but will trick a few. One of the problems I identified with SeoQuake (my closely following competitor) was that they only hit one Google datacenter, that caused there pagerank queries to look automated and thus get the violation of tos message. Google has tons of datacenters and I figured not all of them are telling each other who's asking for pagerank, so if we loop through all of them then we will have a kinda snowshoe that will let us make as many pagerank queries as we want without hitting those rate limiters. Cool, eh? Well, here they are, all the Google Datacenter IPs DWORD encoded to try and help hide what they were. They appear in my SEO Site Tool like this: and here is the stolen copy... on his server. Hmm, those kinda look the same... that's a little weird! But hey, I mean, that's just some regex and IP constants. There's nothing really magic in there right? Not so bad.
Then we look at the gwebtools.js. It's obfuscated on his server, where it's here gwebtools-remote.js but that packer is easily defeated by the JS Beautifyer and we find that its an exact copy. Except, he removed my branding logo.

Making sure your pages are returning proper http codes is important to your SEO efforts... (especially with redirects) but another problem that can use up your crawl quota with googlebot is an infinite space problem... these pages can be driven from a database but are often soft 404s or pages that dont exist but still return a 200 code

You should make sure your pages are returning proper 404's alot of webmasters choose to add some little joke to break the users frustration of missing a page but while digging around in google's help docs i came across a little script they wrote to include pages urls who may be the correct version of the wrong url

Just drop this code on your 404 page and be sure to change the domain name to match your own

<script type="text/javascript">
  var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
  var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.cartercole.com';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js">
</script>

and another cool trick i just though of would be to add something like this to the page aswell

<script type="text/javascript">
  _gaq.push(["_trackEvent", "SEO", "404 Error", document.location]);
</script>

then you can see any 4040 errors that your getting and figure out what you need to redirect to so any link love the url may have doesn't get lost

PS:

"Google Bombs" are when a number of sites all link to a certain site with exact anchor text (like carter) to cause the search giant to move a page onto a SERP where it would usually never show. Some of the bigger ones was choosing "im feeling lucky" for "French military victories" would show "did you mean French military defeats" but now anti-abortion e-protesters have caused abortion to show under murder SERP using SEO to make a statement about their political views. It will be interesting to see if Google takes any action to move it out of that position. When George Bush was Google bombed for "miserable failure" they removed the bomb so it may make a political statement based on what they do (or dont do)

Google Murder

Do you know of any other bombs that still exist?
Id love your help to get me to rank on the first page for "carter" that president is killing me with his domain authority. to help me drop a link for me on something you control
Isnt SEO funny? Ill let yall know when im ranking for "carter"

Heres how you could do the alt HTML for a java applet

One of the things that you should know about redirects and SEO is that only 301 Moved Permanently if there is more than one redirect then the crawler will use the "weakest" code it saw... You can test the tool below and see how it behaves... after about 5 redirects GoogleBot will stop following them so my script also cuts off around that point. You can put any url you like below and it will show you the destination url with any hops it makes in between

To see code and use tool you need to be on original post

Enum Redirect Chain
You can see that this default one makes too many jumps and it cuts off but lets talk about formats and how to use the API. It can return a JSON or JSONP (requires attribution link) and will follow up to 6 redirects and return info about each leg of the journey
This is a sample call, it takes 1 required parameter url= which is url to check and an optional callback= parameter if you want a JSONP response. (an object wrapped in function as output)

Ok heres the example API url

http://cartercole.com/dev/api/redirectchain.asp?callback=testCB&url=http://migre.me/TAVJ
and a sample output from its response... it has a original url, a destination and its status code, as well as an array called "chain" that holds each leg of the jump

I created this for use with new version of SEO Site Tools but im releasing it publicly because I dont know of any other SEO APIs avaiable that do this kind of results so use the tool and I hope you find it useful. If you have questions bother me at one of my social profiles... im pretty sure theres hundreds now :)
built with CarterCole.com tech

A while ago doing a Mozinar I mentioned I had written a little snippet of JavaScript I used to enforce link attribution requirements on widgets or API I release (and for my clients). Heres what I came up with and optimized... it currently just checks for meta robots tag and a clean link but I may add a robots.txt check after I convert the rule parser into javascript

but this is what I came up with and how you can use it on your scripts and APIs. the first part where new RegExp("http://cartercole.com","i") thats the regular expression that checks the links on the page, then you got window.open("http://cartercole.com"); thats the line thats true when the page isnt passing rank... that means its meta robots is nofollow or it dint find a link matching requirements without a nofollow directive

Code:

I put this code on the end of my JSONP API responses. It requires 3ed parties consuming your API to have a clean link pointing back to you, which is really cool because links are like the money of the internet

if you want to hide your javascript tests a little better you can try using this popular packer but like all popular scripts it has been reversed and beautified shh :) its nice for formating JavaScript your reverse engineering too

if you have any questions: im @cartercole; follow me now.

AboutUs.org lets you create a wiki like listing for your domain... its also a nice way to get a strong backlink if you complete your profile and ask the nofollow to be removed... but after their promoted listing service got knocked by Google for being too close to selling links they were forced to turn nofollow back on for the entire site.

Exactly about 2.7685 hrs ago i got this email

I had previously asked about the dofollow links disappearing so it nice to see they have been turned back on now... so if you have a site and a looking to increase visibility and get a quick link dont forget to create your domains profile

CarterCole.com's AboutUs.org Profile

Ive been working on v3.0 of SEO Site Tools giving it all kinds of cool new stuff and one of the things i really wanted to work on was SPAM detection, because this is a plugin in the browser we have advantage of access to entire DOM making some types of test much more practical. The following tweet shows exactly what i want to automate... but to be able to detect spam i need samples... so im putting out a call for all the SEO spam yall can send me...
Ive got some requirements for the spam. scraper sites are everywhere and a dime a dozen... the kind of stuff im looking for is

• user-agent/ip based cloaking
• bad doorway pages
• hidden text and links on pages

please send your samples to seospam@cartercole.com your helping to fight spam on the web :)
oh and heres a new sneak peek of the Google Analytics Page Details in SEO Site Tools v3.0

Be sure to rate SEO Site Tools 5 stars!




Update
the API that runs SERP demographics broke... ill have it fixed tonight  the api is now gone... looking for suitable replacement... standby

Original Post

This update has a bunch of cool new tools for SERPs and I wanted to showcase them here because Ive used all my text on the chrome seo extension download page So lets jump right in...
First you never have to wonder about Google Personal Search or how to disable it the tool knows and displays the status... and if you want to disable personal search just go to the options menu and any Google searches will have the pws=0 parameter added.




Now this is also really cool I call it Domain Highlighting any result that appears in the domain list you set in your options will be colored for higher visibility. you can even change the colors for different domains
Now remember this words in all major search engines (thats Bing, Yahoo, Google)

and the finally we are also adding demographics, search volume, CTR and PPC cost to all the SERPs


oh and here and here in Google Webmaster Tools you can now have 1 click access to the Insights for search






id love to hear feedback and any feature ideas... remember all these can be turned off in the options menu

 hello all, i was reading SeoMoz today and they released their Facebook Status Optimizer... so a little work later im excited to announce that we have our own!

Start Using Carter's Facebook Status Optimizer

fully funtional it can create the most click worth updates that users have no choice but to see it... get ready to see a big jump in your CTR!

Update II

we've added even more features to enhance SERPs read about the update with things like personal search status and Insights for search integrated into Webmaster Tools and SERPs of the major 3 search engines

Update

Well thats funny... @merrillg pointed out this is the data from the anchor text tab in the links section... makes sense its there considering it is anchor text but it shows in the keywords feed and not the keywords section which is where i got confused... I was wrong about it not being published anywhere else but this data is still pretty important... I cant believe I didn't notice that tab before... I guess I was distracted by the link data... sorry :(

Original

The keyword data that Google Webmaster Tools shows you is only part of the data that exists for your site... its up to 200 internal keywords, this comes from your pages and you can manipulate it based on the keywords you use in your content. But thats not whole story, what about that all important anchor text? Now of course you could go look at Open Site Explorer but wouldn't it be great to see what Google sees as your anchor text? I found the other keywords, the external keyword data hiding in a little known feed in webmaster tools... now aside from this guy who sounds a little like a consparicy nut and a short mention in the feed documentation nobody is talking about this data... Unfortunately i couldn't get pass through authentication so you have to put in your password but thanks to my new extension SEO Site Tools for Google Chrome you can navigate this data all from the safety of your favorite browser :)

heres how easy it is to get the data... open the tool from the Page Terms / Tools section

put in your login and it will present you a list of sites associated with that email addresses Google Webmaster Tools... choose one and you will see something like this
it will show you up to 100 external keywords... but what is this data that is published nowhere else any why is it so valuable? well lets take a look at bit of the list from my blog...

carter cole
carter cole developer
http blog cartercole com 2009 10 awesome syntax
16.52 del icio us easily embed tweets in
syntax
this feed is from my technology blog
embedding your google profile social icons
my technology blog
http blog cartercole com 2009
some code for asp and php

you know how sometimes when you do a search and look at Google's cache and see that "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page" thats what this keyword data is... its the external keywords Google has associated with your site... when I searched for some of the unique ones like "this feed is from my technology blog"
my site was the first result... i append that text with a link back to my site at the end of my rss feed so if someone republishes my content i can get credit for creating it... so the scrapers are sending that anchor text back to my site and whats even more interesting is that some of these keywords are from links that are no-followed so it might be that those links while not passing juice are passing something possibly even more valuable... their anchor text

the tool is still super beta and has some errors so please send me feedback to the email provided in the tool with any ideas/thoughts you may have about this very interesting data feed thats hiding in the webmaster tools data feed

again you need SEO Site Tools to get to this data and aside from doing some HTTP Gets yourself i know of no other tool that shows users this data

Update

i found some screen shots of the old tool on SearchEngineLand before it was removed

Be sure to rate SEO Site Tools 5 stars!

Update II

Theres been another update... theres alot of new functionality and way cool stuff so please refer all questions / feedback on this post

Update i

My post about SEO Site Tools was promoted to the main blog on SeoMoz (something that really doesn't happen very often) it has gotten

23,828

views so far and the number continues to rise and with over

2,919

clicks to the bit.ly links with over

450ish

tweets in a few days im gonna say its officially gone viral... and is currently preforming the 11th most popular article in the last year on SeoMoz. the response has been awesome lets keep making this the best SEO extension on chrome!

Original Post

I decided i was going to do something good for the SEO community... i wanted a SEO plugin that wouldn't just show some page data it would pull all of it and practically do your work for you. With social media the new craze I wanted a way to quickly tell if a page was going viral and show all the page meta data and tag elements without having to look at the pages source... what came out of this was SEO Site Tools extension for Chrome it pulls data from all over and are seperated into 5 sections: External Page Data, Page Elements, Social Media, Page Terms, Server / Domain Info, and Suggestions but not only that it enhances some common SEO related tools like Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo site explorer and Google analytics. So lets get into the many features my plugin provides and how it can help you with your search engine optimization...

Click to watch the demo video


Privacy Policy
This plugin does not collect any web history or site data... i had to use a few scripts i wrote on my servers but they dont save any data on the urls they analyze... if anyone is interested i can provide the source code for the script... i have plans in the future to do some opt-in tracking of usage of sections of the tool to see how i can progressively load important pieces first and wait to load others when they are needed... the data collected would be used to help provide a better user experience and would contain no history of sites visited or analyzed and would contain no personally identifying information.

External Page Data shows domain metrics link links and rank

• Linking to page and domain from Yahoo
• Page links, trust and domain trust from SeoMoz
• Alexa popularity (with graph) links
• Google index date and PageRank along with domain trends
• Dmoz listing 
• SEM Rush Data
• Bing Cache Date
• Compete.com data
• Bing indexed pages
• Yahoo index pages

Social Media pulls shares and bookmarks from a number of places

• Page Diggs and Domain Diggs
• Recent tweets about the page along with total number of tweets
• Facebook shares, likes and comments
• Reddit points
• Stumble Upon Views
• Buzz Shares
• Delicious bookmarks

Page Terms displays relevant page elements to SEO

• Meta Robots
• Meta Description
• Canonical URL
• Anchor tags and follow attribute
• Header tags (H1-H5)
• Bold/Strong
• I/Em
• Meta Keywords
• Page HTTP headers

Server / Domain Info checks the domains Ip and country and displays it on a map along with registrar information and attempts to pull WhoIs info
Suggestions compiles a list of on-page SEO suggestions about title tag, links on page , meta description, img alt tags,GZip Compression, meta keywords (hey it can’t hurt)

Page Terms (still a work in progress) performs term extraction and lets you do keyword research with Google’s keyword research tool

It also has ability to enhance Google Webmaster Tools with links anchor text, if they are followed links and mozRank (or PageRank) of linking pages

Adds Social media reactions to Google Analytics page details with Facebook shares, likes and comments as well as Delicious bookmarks and Diggs

It also adds the link and anchor text info to Yahoo Site Explorer with mozRank (or PageRank)

Heres the install link for SEO Site Tools in case you missed it above

It is still being developed so I would love any feedback you could give me on it… bother me on twitter or in the comments here and ill do my best to add any features or fix any bugs you may find

Posts about SEO Site Tools for Google Chrome...

Awesome review in Japanese... ill be trying for multilingual support soon...

German review that it does everything an SEO does in one place (rough translation)
This guy says its the reason hes been looking for to leave firefox
Nice review wrapping up all the features
Spanish review of its completeness as a all around SEO Tool
Excellent review from another guy about how how comprehensive it is
Yet another praising review with some good suggestions(soon to be implemented)
This post calls it a "Distinctive Edge" for content writers

Awesome response from all the community and if you think your article should be listed here let me know and ill add it :)

UPDATE:

The dashboard below is great but if your trying to do some on-page analysis you need a good SEO Toolbar like my newly released SEO Site Tools to help you with your work... and if you interested in your external anchor text you should defiantly run on over are read about the keyword data I found in Webmaster Tools that is published nowhere else...

i find myself constantly wanting to have one place as a jumping point for me to review all my website stuff and the way chrome does bookmarks makes it where clicking to this post is actually faster(at least for me). but i figure this is one place to start from then i don't have to go looking through all the bookmarks. ill add more items here as i find more tools that i find useful for SEOs and Webmasters


SEO Site Tools is my Google Chrome Extension with over 21,000 users 
im sure you would love it too... try it today