Firefox extension ‘Search Status’, view your Google PR and Alexa ranking while surfing.
In order to make the life of a webmaster or rather a blogger who’s both addicted to statistics, I’m using various extensions and enhancements in my Firefox browser. The reason a lot of people want to know their ranks is the fact that prices of advertising or posting about certain products are often directly related to the Google PageRank and Alexa rank you’ve got, making it pretty interesting to know if you can make some more money anytime soon. In case you’re not really into Alexa yet, I posted about Alexa’s update and way of working a couple of days ago, explaining most of it. A good example of one of my favorite plugins (extension) for Firefox is the ‘Search Status’ one you can see on the screenshot below.
On the first sight Search Status only seems to offer a couple of a numbers, for your ranks, this is indeed the main functionality, or main usage in my case, but many more options are available. The first submenu, shown above, you first have the standard options menu for the plugin itself, allowing you to configure some of the web services used, but further down the list it becomes more interesting. Let’s take the ‘Link Report’ submenu for example, using this little tool you can see the amount of outgoing links in just a matter of miliseconds, also divided into ‘internal’ and ‘external’ links, very useful if you want to make sure you’re not sending all the webspiders away to crawl other peoples websites.
Besides these counters, such as the Link Reportts, Keyword Density and Meta Tags, also a bunch of other ‘hot keys’ are set in this extension. The one I consider most useful is the ‘Show Backward Links’ option, that submenu lets you find all backlinks to the page or domain you’re viewing on Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search.
More options are hidden under the other menu’s, that become visible when you rightclick your PageRank or Alexa Rank, almost too many to mention. However, there is also one very interesting feature that doesn’t directly give you feedback: All pages you visit will be send back to Alexa, if you allow the plugin to do so in the ‘Options’ dialog. Most likely you you wont visit your own website all day long, but all bits help, it will no doubt help to improve your website ranking, as well as other websites you frequently visit.
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