SEO Tool Under Development: SaturationChecker

I constantly have ideas, but I rarely have time. (Not an issue – if you don’t need to sleep. But I need my beauty rest each night.) Sometimes, I get a bit of bonus time when I can actually work on one of my ideas.

That recently happened with my idea for SaturationChecker. It’s a simple script, but what it accomplishes can save the SEO-minded site owner a great deal of trouble and help them improve their site.

Here’s how it works:

  1. User submits the URL for the site they wish to check
  2. SaturationChecker (SC) then attempts to find either  an XML sitemap, or an HTML sitemap file, or an RSS feed. (In that order.)
  3. If a source for URLs is located, SC then checks each URL successively and writes it to the database. Each URL is recorded along with its status, and whether or not the URL was found in Google’s index.
  4. The unindexed URLs are then available to the user, so they can be targeted for promotion or perhaps simply rotated to the top of the XML sitemap file.

It’s up to the user to find a way to get the unindexed URLs “found” by Google; what SC does is simply shows where the deficiencies lie in a site’s index saturation. (So, if a site had 100 pages, yet only 50 of them were in Google, that site would have only a 50% index saturation.)

This tool was developed for my own use, and as such it’s a bit rough around the edges. (It works for me.) I do wish to polish it and then make it available for others’ use at some point in the future.

Some additions I will be adding will be:

  • The capability to track if a URL is added to the index, then dropped again. (This may indicate the URL was found, and added, but then dropped due to an on-page problem or simply a better page coming along from a competing site.)
  • A percentage report, as given in the example above. Very simple to code, but I haven’t added it as of yet.
  • Prettiness. The thing has no style, and if I release this for public consumption I want it to look nice!

Since I haven’t released this yet, consider this post as “pseudo-code” for you coders out there to make your own. It’s a fairly simple script – I began it one night in my hotel during this year’s SEOmoz seminar and had the basic functions, and finished the rest of it today. (And I happen to be a coding perfectionist.)

Additionally, I’m open to new ideas – so feel free to contact me if you have any suggestions and I’ll see what I can do.