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Engineering team accidentally changes SEO elements...so I built a tool.

by TomKaz
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I can't tell you how many times some folks in engineering/UI/product teams accidentally change/break SEO elements (or analytic tracking codes) - so I built a tool to monitor pages and let me know when a change is detected.

I don't care how much training or cheat sheets the other teams have, accidents happen - it's pretty much unavoidable at large companies.

I made it publicly available yesterday and thought I'd share it here.

It will also monitor Google PageSpeed (Desktop/Mobile), competitor sites, and track pages that require a username/password like a QA environment.

The way I use it is to look at my page-types (etc. - homepage, product detail page, state-specific product page) and then track 1 'representive url' for each of those page types/templates. This cuts down on noise and allows me to track sites that are small or large. Lastly, you can toggle sensitivity/elements tracked.

Anyways, hope you like it and would like any feedback!

Here's the link for SEO Tripwire: https://www.seotripwire.com

P.S. I'll be paying some large recurring percentages (likely 35%) once I get the affiliate stuff in place if anyone is interested in pushing the product.
#accidentally #elementsagain #engineering #seo #team
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    That's interesting, are you scanning exact URLs hourly that a buyer inputs or are you crawling the entire site?
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  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    Originally Posted by TomKaz View Post

    P.S. I'll be paying some large recurring percentages (likely 35%) once I get the affiliate stuff in place if anyone is interested in pushing the product.
    I would definitely get an affiliate program going if I were you. There's a bunch of popular tabloid SEO sites now that teach pretend SEO and I'm sure they would love to market that.

    If it has the word SEO in the title they will jump all over it and tell their loyal readers about it in a 16 megabyte infographic that they will share all over social media.
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    • Profile picture of the author TomKaz
      Originally Posted by irawr View Post

      I would definitely get an affiliate program going if I were you. There's a bunch of popular tabloid SEO sites now that teach pretend SEO and I'm sure they would love to market that.

      If it has the word SEO in the title they will jump all over it and tell their loyal readers about it in a 16 megabyte infographic that they will share all over social media.
      Awesome - well that's sounds great to me!

      I've done very little affiliate marketing in my past so I'm hoping to hang out here and pick up a couple of nuggets

      Should I start with CJ or would you recommend another route?
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      • Profile picture of the author irawr
        Banned
        Originally Posted by TomKaz View Post

        Awesome - well that's sounds great to me!

        I've done very little affiliate marketing in my past so I'm hoping to hang out here and pick up a couple of nuggets

        Should I start with CJ or would you recommend another route?
        Linkshare or preferably your own program.

        To recruit affiliates I would suggest you throw the following sites into a tool like ahrefs, get their backlinks, and then figure out which sites mention "SEO" and then contact them.

        Code:
        www.matthewwoodward.co.uk <-A marketing Site where Matt mentions SEO
www.backlinko.com <-Brain Dean's website about content marketing
www.seothatworks.com <- Brain Dean's Course on content marketing
www.quicksprout.com <-Brain Dean's Course with Neil Patel's Name on it
        You could also google "content marketing" get a list of valuable sites that actually know what they're talking about and get their backlinks as well.

        You should understand that I'm ripping on these guys but the plan is legit and rock solid.
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        • Profile picture of the author TomKaz
          Originally Posted by irawr View Post

          Linkshare or preferably your own program.

          To recruit affiliates I would suggest you throw the following sites into a tool like ahrefs, get their backlinks, and then figure out which sites mention "SEO" and then contact them.

          Code:
          www.matthewwoodward.co.uk <-A marketing Site where Matt mentions SEO
www.backlinko.com <-Brain Dean's website about content marketing
www.seothatworks.com <- Brain Dean's Course on content marketing
www.quicksprout.com <-Brain Dean's Course with Neil Patel's Name on it
          You could also google "content marketing" get a list of valuable sites that actually know what they're talking about and get their backlinks as well.

          You should understand that I'm ripping on these guys but the plan is legit and rock solid.
          Interesting, so essentially send them a cold email with a pitch/request to mention/discuss the product on their site and then give them the Linkshare link? Sorry for the question, but just want to be 100% clear.
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          • Profile picture of the author irawr
            Banned
            Originally Posted by TomKaz View Post

            Interesting, so essentially send them a cold email with a pitch/request to mention/discuss the product on their site and then give them the Linkshare link? Sorry for the question, but just want to be 100% clear.
            Well I would try my best to contact them in whatever venue they utilize the most, preferably social media. If you email them make sure it's in a way where they are seeking you to contact them (do not scrape their email from whois) so a contact form is fine. You would be pitching your affiliate program to them, saying hey if you talk about this product on your site and generate sales you get 35% recurring.

            I would suggest you contact a few affiliate companies and weigh out your options (sorry I'm not on that side of the affiliate business.) If the network tries to tell you that the network will get you a bunch of affiliates you need to understand that's not normally the case.

            As an affiliate marketer I really like Linkshare.
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  • Profile picture of the author TomKaz
    Thanks!

    I actually at first had it scanning the entire site, but then it wasn't working the way I liked - it essentially got too noisy especially if the site was large (like 100's of thousands of pages). Same with the ability to add via a sitemap/bulk.

    The way it works now is you load up 'representive urls' which are basically 1 URL for a page type/template.

    Using the case of Amazon.com, rather than crawl the site hourly which is not possible because of the volume of pages (and pinging that often would cause other problems)...you can simply say that Amazon.com has a homepage (add the url), a product page (add any product url and give it a nickname), a category page (add that url and give it a nickname), etc. Typically if one of the page types/templates changes than it's likely that someone made a change to all of those pages sharing that template.

    I guess over time we'll see if folks use it the same way I thought they would.
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  • Profile picture of the author nettiapina
    This is pretty interesting. I can see cases where this would be really valuable in the toolset. I'm usually the guy who does the changes, but there's a lot of larger companies that have a team of web devs. If there's a constant update cycle, and a lot of conflicting inputs it's easy to forget to verify every single element.

    Of course there's competition in both website monitoring and on-page analysis tools, but I can't think of any tool that specializes in monitoring SEO settings.
    Signature
    Links in signature will not help your SEO. Not on this site, and not on any other forum.
    Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.

    What's your excuse?
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    • Profile picture of the author TomKaz
      Originally Posted by nettiapina View Post

      This is pretty interesting. I can see cases where this would be really valuable in the toolset. I'm usually the guy who does the changes, but there's a lot of larger companies that have a team of web devs. If there's a constant update cycle, and a lot of conflicting inputs it's easy to forget to verify every single element.

      Of course there's competition in both website monitoring and on-page analysis tools, but I can't think of any tool that specializes in monitoring SEO settings.
      You nailed it on the head. The target audience is best suited for those companies that have an SEO team within the company. I've worked in-house and provided consultation for a number of large companies and those that have weekly sprints/release schedules are most prone to breaking things. Where there are a lot of moving parts and a lot of people involved in the product that's usually when it happens.

      I typically request that any publicly facing/crawlable page that has been edited needs to be signed-off by an SEO team member, but there are still those cases that things accidentally happen and next thing you know..20% down and impacting revenue in a big way. This is an additional layer of insurance and protection.
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