I’ve been testing NerdyData, a recently launched search engine for Web source code that has an easy to use interface, including handy features to help with our SEO activities, such as the ones that can be seen in the following image, letting us search directly on titles tags, headers, meta descriptions, and for any pattern that we want to identify on the websites code:
The tool has a freemium model: requires to register after a certain amount of searches and pay for some of the advanced functionalities. Although they describe that their “…crawler has visited over 140 million homepages and collected terabytes of HTML, Javascript, and CSS code.” the truth is that the results at the moment are still far from being comprehensive.
Nonetheless, I understand that they are still in early stages and when their index grows I can see how it can become one of the most useful SEO tools, not only because of the pre-defined searches for SEO, but because of the possibilities to search for anything on a any Website source code and use the filters they provide to segment the results, as well as the possibility to sort them from a relevance or popularity perspective, which can facilitate some time-consuming tasks, such as link prospecting. You can also download the results you get as CSV, Excel format, json or plaintext.
To explain what I mean here are 7 examples with different ways to use Nerdy Data for SEO purposes:
1. Identify sites using certain images or badges
If you want to claim credit from your images, videos, badges (or any original content of yours) or see how successful are your competitors with it too (and take the result into consideration to establish your own strategies), NerdyData facilitates this task by allowing us to search for the badge snippet or image URL, and easily get in touch with the site owner:
2. Identify the different properties from a Google Analytics account
You can search for sites from the same Google Analytics Properties, AdSense or any tracking code, script or code pattern that they share.
Although there’s a built-in option where you can search for a full Google Analytics ID (as well as AdSense, SiteCatalyst, Mixpanel, Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer), you can directly identify the different properties that belong to the same account by searching just for the desired account code from the ID:
3. Identify sites using a specific theme, extension or plugin
Let’s say your competitors have a theme, extension or plugin and you want to check how many (and which) sites are using it. You can do it by searching for a specific part of their code:
4. Identify sites mentioning your competitors but not you
One of the most useful functionalities of NerdyData is the “refine” option, where you can specify if you’re looking for pages including any of many code snippets (or terms) or all of them, and also exclude the pages that feature a specific pattern in their code.
These types of “refining” options can be useful to easily identify the sites that are mentioning your competitors but are still not doing the same with your own site and contact them to build a relationship with them:
5. Identify sites where your competitors personally collaborate or interact
Another of the handy built-in features of NerdyData is the “social media search” option that allows you to search for pages that belong to the same Facebook Admin, Google+ Authorship, Twitter user and Youtube channel.
This can be useful to search for the sites where your competitors participate or contribute, by searching for their Twitter account or Google+ Authorship code:
6. Identify sites that accept guest posts and are not nofollowing their links
By using the refining option you can also search for sites that include information about your sector, for example, “Spanish Food”, that also mention “guest post” in their content, –so it’s likely that they accept this type of contribution– and that are not nofollowing their links (with no “nofollow” in their code):
7. Identify sites about a topic in a specific language, targeting a country, that are not mentioning your competitors
With the refining options again, you can search for the sites including the term that you want, targeting the desired country (by including the relevant hreflang annotation) and excluding any sites that mention your competitors.
For example, to get sites about “turismo” (which is “tourism” in Spanish), that are featuring the “hreflang=”es-es” tag, excluding the ones that mention rumbo.es, tripadvisor.es, edreams.es and muchoviaje.com:
As you can see the tool has a lot of potential for SEO related research so you might want to give it a try, and certainly, that we all keep an eye on it to see how it evolves as its index becomes more complete and their functionalities are extended.
