If you're anything like me, you spend several hours each month (maybe more often) preparing elaborate worksheets of ranking analyses to help uncover why a particular site/page is outranking another and what it will take to reach top rankings. Which is why the screenshot below has me pretty excited.

That's the first version of the new SERPs Analysis Tool, and, even in this early form, it's a thing of beauty. There's data on nearly every point I'd put in a worksheet comparing search results (social data and more sophisticated on-page analysis is coming soon). It's exportable to CSV so I can put the data into Excel and make cool charts and graphs, and it automatically generates based on any keyword set in a matter of 10-90 minutes (might be a bit longer this week since it just launched). Here's some more views:

Ever since Adam tossed out that awesome preview last month, I've been dying to play around with this. Now that it's finally here, I can almost feel the pain of manual SERPs analysis disappearing. Feel free to give it a spin and provide feedback. To get the full data, just run a keyword difficulty report and click the "run full report" button.

In the next few weeks, we'll have more data, some additional UI elements and a version in the web app, but for now, feel free to save enormous amounts of time + energy with this first version.

Of course, that's not all!

Linkscape's index is also updated as of Monday of this week (we accidentally had a brief rollback, but the correct data's out there now) and have some new analyses of our metrics correlations, too. This is part of how we measure whether our data quality is improving - on the whole, our correlations should improve over time if our index quality (what we crawl, how we handle duplicates, canonicalization, etc) is getting better.

The short story is that there's barely any change from the prior index from May (a couple metrics fell by >0.01), but we have improved somewhat from the figures presented in the ranking factors from late March (when, for example, Page Authority was as low as 0.28) .  We've also improved the coverage of the index for URLs we found in Google's top 30 results across a large sample set of keywords from 84.27% to 85.59%. In the future, we'll continue to try reporting regularly on these numbers to stay transparent about our own data confidence and quality.

Here's the stats for the latest Linkscape update:

• 39,407,840,728 (39.4 billion) URLs
• 371,306,396 (371 million) Subdomains
• 119,104,781 (119 million) Root Domains
• 397,844,228,049 (397 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.28% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.81% of nofollowed links are internal, 43.19% are external
• Rel Canonical - 7.91% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 60.67 links on it (down from 61.00 last index)
  • 51.50 internal links on average
  • 9.17 external links on average

This index also features the first time we're treating the rel=canonical attribute like a 301 redirect. After several tests internally and observing the search engines' relatively liberal handling of rel=canonical, we feel this is the best behavior from a link-juice / metrics calculation perspective. You'll still see these as regular "links" in Open Site Explorer for now, but we plan to update to show rel=canonicaling pages with a special notation (like a 301) in the tool soon.

Enjoy the fresh link data, the spiffy new SERPs Analysis feature and let us know if you've got feedback or suggestions.

p.s. The new tool is PRO-only, but if you want to give it a spin, there's this spiffy free trial thingy we've got going :-)