Posted by randfish
Today I’m excited to announce the launch of a new feature inside
Open Site Explorer—In-App Social & Contact Data.
With this launch, you’ll be able to see the
social or email accounts we’ve discovered associated with a given website, and have one-click access to those pages.
Initially, the feature offers:
- Availability today on the inbound links tab and in Link Intersect on the “pages -> subdomains” view. In the future, if y’all find it useful, we hope to expand its presence to other areas of the tool as well.
- Email accounts will only be shown if they match the domain name (e.g. rand@moz.com would be shown next to moz.com, randfishkin@yahoo.com would not) and if they appear in standard format on the page (we don’t try to grab emails in JavaScript or that use alternate formats to obsfucate).
- We show Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and email addresses we’ve found on multiple pages of the site (we take a small random set and analyze whether these social/contact data pieces are uniform). If we find multiple accounts, you’ll see this:
Use cases
There are three major use cases for this feature (at least for me; you might have more!):
1) Link/Outreach prospecting
It can be a pain to visit sites, find social accounts/emails, and copy them into a spreadsheet or send messages (and recall which ones you have/haven’t done yet). By including social/contact data in the same interface where you’re doing link analysis, we hope to save you time and clicks.
2) Link/site trust and audience reach analysis
We’re actually using this data on the back end at Moz for our upcoming Spam Score feature (coming very soon), but you can use it manually to help with a quick mental filter for trustworthy/authoritative/non-spammy sites, and to get a sense for the size and reach of a site’s social audience.
3) At-a-glance analysis of social networks among a group
If you’re in a given space (e.g. travel blogs), it’s a process to determine which social networks are/aren’t being used by industry participants and influencers. Social/contact data in OSE can help with that by showing which social networks various sites are using and linking to from their pages:
We need your feedback
This first implementation is relatively light in the app—we haven’t yet placed this data anywhere/everywhere it might be useful. Before we do, we want to hear what you think: Is this useful and valuable to your work? Does it help save you time? Would you want to see the feature expanded and if so, in what sections would it provide the greatest value to you? Please let us know in the comments, and by getting back in touch with us after you’ve had a chance to try it out for yourself.
Thanks for giving social/contact data a spin, and look for more upgrades to Open Site Explorer in the very near future!
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