Hi Folks this is Terry Van Horne of the SEOTrainingDojo and this article and video is the first in a series of tips for using Link Prospector to perform SEO and Webmaster tasks. Today I’m going to show how to use two tools to solve a common problem for anyone marketing a large website with multiple departments and webmasters constantly adding content to the site.
Here’s the video first (featuring Mr. David Harry), and then I’ll walk through the steps so you have the clearest possible idea of how to do this:
For an SEO it is important to know when new content is published to make sure it receives the support needed for search engines to discover and rank the content. This often doesn’t happen until after the fact so promotion of the content happens well after publishing and we all know QDF (Query Deserves Freshness). I am going to outline a semi-automated way to find the new content added to the site since the last check.
There are 2 tools for finding new content on the site – Screaming Frog and Link prospector.
Screaming Frog:
Screaming Frog will produce an XML sitemap which I generally save locally and import it into excel. Locate the last modified column and filter so the newest content is at the beginning. There you have it! All the content with a date after your last check will be at the top of the list. The advantage to using Screaming Frog is it will include all the new content provided it is not an “orphaned” page (a page with no links to it from within the site).
Link Prospector will do the same task, however, it will only return the pages found in the Google Index. I use Link Prospector as a way to verify that Google has discovered the content found using Screaming Frog and indexed it.
The advantage to Link prospector is it is all automated! Drop your site search (site:http://domain.com) into a custom search and don’t forget to use the date filter. Set it to the last date you did the check run the program and Bob’s your uncle you have a downloadable .csv of all the content added to the site and indexed since the the last time you did the task!
The cool thing for me as a webmaster and marketer is this is a very easy way to leverage my Screaming Frog usage. I use it to produce sitemaps so this is a way to leverage that into another report to provide to the promotion and SEO departments. Link Prospector is verifying discovery of and indexing of the new content which is what is needed for the other departments to begin working with the pages to raise ranks.