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Hi, everyone. You may or may not have noticed recently that our sign-up for SiteJuice has changed. In fact, you can no longer sign up for SiteJuice as it was before. Instead, you now have the option to sign up for the SiteJuice 2.0 beta in anticipation of when it launches in the coming weeks.

We know this might come as a bit of a shock, so we took the time to sit down with Pear Analytics CEO Ryan Kelly to get you some answers. We demanded satisfaction!

PABLO: What happened to SiteJuice? I tried to recommend it to a friend and when they went there it was gone. You made a monkey out of me.
RYAN KELLY: Sorry about that. I have some banana treats for you if that will make you feel better. After a year of developing SiteJuice, we decided to retool and go back to the basics. Everything is being re-engineered from the ground up as we speak, and we’re inviting folks into our private beta, which we will launch in waves after July 4th.

Probably the most burning question for anyone familiar with SiteJuice would simply be: why the change?
To be honest, the old SiteJuice sucked. It was slow, buggy, and people just didn’t understand it. We tried to build too many features instead of focusing on the great ones. Some of our coolest and most useful features were hidden. Now, you will see a simpler, faster and more actionable interface.

Give the readers a sneak preview of what they are signing up for in the new SiteJuice?
In a few weeks, we will invite you to see the analysis we did on the website you gave us when you sign up for the beta. It won’t be jam-pakced with a thousand features, but rather 15-20 really important things you should be looking at in terms of basic SEO for your website, and how to go about fixing them if they need fixing.

When will we finally get flying cars?
Everyone in the world will completely understand SEO before that happens.

How is the new SiteJuice different from all the other SEO tools out there?
Every tool out there (and we’ve used pretty much all of them) focuses on one thing or another, but none of them at the individual page level.  Our goal is to analyze every single page of your website and tell you what needs work and how to fix it in a way you can understand.  No information overload here, or tech speak – just the essentials you need to know to drive more traffic page by page.

For our old subscribers and clients, what do they need to know?
Anyone on the old SiteJuice can continue to use it the same way they have been. Paying subscribers will continue to get support, whereas the freeloaders will have to… well… buzz off, or sign over to SiteJuice 2.0.

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We’d like to thank Ryan for taking the time to answer questions about SiteJuice 2.0 beta. It’s an exciting time at Pear Analytics. We hope you’re as excited as we are. Keep following our updates as we get closer to launching the beta.

No Comments »Tags: beta, interview, ryan kelly, Sitejuice

We wanted to write this blog post to help you understand the accuracy of our data, just in case you were thinking of canceling your subscription

Where we get our data from

We get our data directly from Google, Yahoo and Bing’s API’s.  Some of the information is free, and some of it is not.  The information related to search volume, competitiveness and getting keyword suggestions is something we have to pay for.  We make roughly 3-4 million calls per month to the Google API to get this data, and it’s not exactly cheap.  However, what we get from the API’s can be different that what you might see in the Google External Keyword Tool, or other front-facing applications that can get this information.  We suspect the search engines selfishly like to keep the latest and greatest data to themselves, and probably lag the data available in the API.  This causes a mismatch in what we are getting and what you might be seeing from Google directly.

On another note, Google is a bit finicky in getting search volumes.  If you see that search volume is “0″ and you know for a fact that is wrong, there is a reason why.  Google will only give us the search volume data if the keyword is relevant.  In other words, they don’t want us sitting there hitting the API and caching all their data, so what we’re asking for has to be tied to a URL and has to be somewhat relevant, otherwise they will return null information.

We also use the Alexa API for Competitor Monitoring, and recently removed the Compete.com API since it was causing reports to error out.  We also use the W3C validation tools as an open source application on our servers to run your HTML and CSS validation tests.  We DO NOT screen scrape any data whatsoever.

Why are my rankings off in Keyword Watch?

If you are seeing a result in a Google ranking for a keyword that is different that when you type it in and search for it yourself, it could be related to personalized search.  We get your keyword rankings straight from the Google API, and we request this from a random server in Dallas.  If you routinely search for yourself by doing Google searches, you may have personalized search turned on, which will almost always give you a higher result than you really have.  For example, you may be seeing that you rank #4 for a keyword, when in fact you rank #9 or #10.

We test our data daily

Every day we run a 35-point test on at least two random reports that were run in the last 24 hours.  We check the data against some other tools to see how were fare.  For example, we test keyword rankings with the SEOBook Rank Checker plugin for FireFox.  We check the HTML and CSS validation directly with the W3c.  We check your inbound links directly with Yahoo SiteExplorer, and we query the page including and excluding links from interior pages.  We check your load time and page size with Pingdom.com to see what they get.  If any of the data is off by more than 5%, we create a trouble ticket and our development team looks into the problem and deploys a fix.

Are you seeing other data inconsistencies?  We’d like to know about them.  We can look into the issue, deploy a fix and re-run your report usually within 24 to 48 hours.

Update May 21, 2010 4;45p

The last two tests we ran scored over 80% accurate.  We are still having some issues detecting the meta keyword tag properly so we can populate the Keyword Watch feature, and sometimes pages with a Google PageRank of “0″ show “4″.  We are also working on getting the proper inbound link number for the domain that INCLUDES links from interior pages.  Search volume has been difficult to get “on the fly” and you may be seeing “0″ for many terms.  We are working on a fix for this.  Lastly, the HTML/CSS validation checks are all coming in as “passing” when many have errors.  We will have a fix for this next week.

No Comments »Tags: data accuracy, data consistency, Sitejuice

Several of our users have wanted to write a review of our search engine optimization software, and so we thought we would come up with a way to reward them!  Here’s how it works:

All you have to do is write an article, review or blog post about SiteJuice and send us a link to it and we will credit your SiteJuice account with $10!  And if you use your affiliate link, you can earn even more if someone signs up as a paying subscriber.  There are just a couple of requirements though:

a) the article must be original and at least a few paragraphs long.  We want your readers to know what the product is, what it does and why you like it, and maybe they’ll come and check it out.

b) link to our site at least once with “search engine optimization software” or “SEO tool”, and be sure to use your affiliate link.

And that’s it!  Not a SiteJuice subscriber?  Sign up for free.

2 Comments »Tags: Sitejuice