Creating custom parameters

SEOquake covers a variety of parameters from Alexa Rank to Baidu Links. However, there may come a time where you would like to receive an uncommon parameter not supported by SEOquake. Well because SEOquake is an expandable extension, you can add any parameter within the Parameters section.

Parameters are presented within SEOquake with default fields. Here is an example of a parameter:

[NAME]=Alexa rank
[TITLE]=Rank
[URL_R]=http://xml.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=nsa&ver=quirk-searchstatus&uid={installdate}&userip={localip}&url={domain|encode}
[URL_S]=http://alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url={domain}
[REGEXP]=<POPULARITY URL=”.+”? TEXT=”(\d+)”

Here is what each field represents:

  • [NAME] - Parameter name. This is the way it will be displayed within SEOquake.
  • [TITLE] - Parameter title, which will be used on output.
  • [URL_R] - Webpage address; where the parameter exists.
  • [URL_S] - Webpage the parameter redirects to after clicking the parameter itself. In the example above we request for Alexa Rank value from xml-document, but in case we need to look at Alexa statistics for this domain, it would be handier to move to page with detailed statistics instead of xml-document.
  • [REGEXP] - is a regular expression used by SEOquake to pick out required value from a requested page [URL_R].
  • [ALTREGEXP] - is an alternative regular expression which will be used if the main regular expression returns no result.

[URL_S], [REGEXP] and [ALTREGEXP] fields are optional fields within parameters. If the parameter does not contain any regular expressions then it is considered to be a link.

[URL_R] & [URL_S] fields

In most cases, parameters are processed for a particular link or a domain. For example, it we are trying to find the number of web pages that Yahoo’s search engine indexes, it should redirect to the search engine querying the domain we are interested in. By using special tags within the [URL_R] and [URL_S] fields, they will be changed to values by SEOquake before the request or link is created for a parameter.

Let’s examine the [URL_R] field for the Alexa parameter. This is what appears:

http://xml.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=nsa&ver=quirk-searchstatus&uid={installdate}&userip={localip}&url={domain|encode}

From this example, {installdate} will be replaced with the SEOquake installation date, {localip} will be replaced with your IP Address, and {domain|encode} would be for processing web site domain before the request to Alexa.

The following special tags are able to be processed by SEOquake:

  • {installdate} - will be changed into SEOquake installation date;
  • {localip} - will be changed into pc ip-address;
  • {keyword} - will be changed into current search request (works on the search engines result pages only);
  • {gchecksum[|string or tags]} - will be changed into a google checksum value for a link or a random string;

SEOquake also processes the following link tags:

  • {url} - will be changed into a processing link (for example, http://www.slovari.yandex.ru/search.xml?text=some);
  • {domain} - will be changed into domain of the processing link (for example, www.slovari.yandex.ru);
  • {clean_domain} - will be changed into domain of the processing link without www at the beginning (for example, slovari.yandex.ru);
  • {topdomain} - will be changed into second level domain of the processing link (for example, yandex.ru);
  • {scheme} - will be changed into a protocol of the processing link (for example, http);
  • {path} - will be changed into a path of the processing link (for example, /search.xml);
  • {query} - will be changed into parameters of the processing link (for example, ?text=some);

You can specify the encode modifier in tags as well. This means that if there are any special symbols or non-English symbols within the tags, you can choose to have these coded or not in their url-representation.

Now that you understand how these parameters work, we are now ready to create our own parameter.

Lets try to add something from Web Developer Toolbar and implement it within SEOquake. You will want to begin by opening the SEOquake panel and selecting the “Preferences” selection from the dropdown under the Settings gear. Once you are here, you will then select the Parameters tab. In the top left of your screen you will notice the blue “New Parameter” button. Once you click this a popup will appear. You will want to enter the following within this field:

[NAME]=W3 Validator
[TITLE]=validate
[URL_R]=http://validator.w3.org/check?uri={url|encode}
[REGEXP]=

You will want to leave the [REGEXP] field blank since this is a parameter-link and not a parameter-value.

Once you have entered this, you will want to make sure you have both SEOquake enabled along with SEObar and SERP Overlay. Once you have done so, try navigating to any SERP Result or to any landing page. Look for the “Validate” link to appear in either the SEObar or SERP Overlay to make sure the change has taken effect. Once clicked, this will take you to the given page.

Now that you understand the main gist, lets try something a little harder.

For example we want to add Stumbleupon views count. We know its API endpoint looks like http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url={url}. So lets start filling necessary fields.

[NAME]=Stumbleuppon view count
[TITLE]=SU
[FAVICON]=//nb9-stumbleupon.netdna-ssl.com/-G-ChSR8MQAl3Skvq8oNZg
[URL_R]=http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url={url|encode}
[REGEXP]="views":\s*(\d+)
[TYPE]=page

Here we added additional REGEX field that help us take necessary values from the api output.

Now that you understand how to make these parameters, you can write them whenever you would like! With this information you can now create parameters on your own, without the assistance of an SEOquake developer. All you need to do is how the web address of the webpage is defined and how to get this parameter from there.

Please Note: SEOquake cannot provide support on creating custom parameters.