It’s becoming increasingly expectant that SEO’s become more flexible and holistic in their approach to website optimization.
In that spirit, taking time out to find better and more efficient ways of doing day to day tasks is something I find myself doing regularly. I’ve tried tons of tools, worked with dozens of fellow SEO’s and I still firmly believe that bookmarklets have a place in a search marketer’s repertoire.
So, I’ve hunted through the mass of useful and useless bookmarklets and found 15 of the most useful that you can start using right now to save time, smash your deadlines and make you an unstoppable force.
What is a bookmarklet?
Well, bookmarklets have pretty much been around since the inception of JavaScript in 1995. In short, they are tiny scripts packed into a bookmark that perform a command within a browser to add a little nugget of functionality.
In other words, they perform similar actions to chrome extensions without the crippling browser slowness and they rock.
How do you install bookmarklets?
It’s super easy.
Copy the bookmarklet script you’ve found, right-click on your bookmark bar (or press CTRL + D or CMD + D on mac), click ‘add page’:
Then paste the code into the ‘URL’ field, name it whatever you like and click ‘save’:
Done.
The bookmarklets below are all hyperlinked meaning you can simply drag them into your bookmark bar.
Try it out:
The following code will perform a Wikipedia search for any text you have highlighted on any web page. Pop it in your bookmark bar and highlight any word on this page and then click the bookmarklet in your bookmark bar:
Drag this into bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function() {function se(d) { return d.selection ? d.selection.createRange().text : d.getSelection()} s = se(document); for (i=0; i<frames.length && !s; i++) s = se(frames[i].document); if (!s || s=='') s = prompt('Enter%20search%20terms%20for%20Wikipedia',''); open('https://en.wikipedia.org' + (s ? '/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=' + encodeURIComponent(s) : '')).focus();})();
Cool right?
Now I’ve converted you to bookmarklet love, here are 15 of the best bookmarklets for SEOs. Some you will use on the regular while others you might not use for a while. I’ve included all my favorites, the ones that I find myself using regularly.
Note: Although I’ve tested and used every one of these, some popup blockers might affect how each bookmarklet works. If it’s not working, check your adblocker.
1. View cached versions of this URL with Wayback Machine
If the URL you once visited doesn’t exist anymore, has been deleted by a foolish colleague or you need to look back at the
contents of an old page to inform a 301 redirect, this one is really useful.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:location.href='https://web.archive.org/web/*/'+location.href
2. List every link on the page
Short, sweet, mega useful. One-click and get all hyperlinks from a web page in a window. I use this regularly in combination with screaming frog for super fast insight.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function(){ var a = ''; for (var ln = 0; ln < document.links.length; ln++) { var lk = document.links[ln]; a += ln + ': <a href='' + lk + '' title='' + lk.text + ''>' + lk + '</a><br>n'; }; w = window.open('', 'Links', 'scrollbars,resizable,width=400,height=600'); w.document.write(a); })();
3. Show cookies
I’ve had clients in the past with serious cookie issues that have impacted site security, international targeting and even crawling! This is a one-click action to see all content associated with cookies the site is running.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:document.cookie='';function hjK(S4p){D3p=/; /g;return S4p.replace(D3p, '<br><br>');}if(document.cookie.length<1){alert('No cookie from this site!')}else{with((na=open('','','')).document){write(hjK('Cookie for '+document.title.link(window.location.href)+', dd. '+new Date()+'<hr>'+document.cookie));close()}}
4. Last modified
This one will alert the last modified date of each document and each frameset, along with the names and the locations of each frame in a dialogue box. Ideal for competitor research and auditing.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:javascript:function Lmi(w,p){var i,t='';for(i=0;i<w.frames.length;i++)t+=Lmi(w.frames[i],p+' ');return(p+w.document.lastModified+' '+w.location+' '+(w.name?(' ('+w.name+')'):'')+'n'+t);}alert('Last modified:nn'+Lmi(window,''));
5. Instantly extract URLs from SERPs
The simplest bookmarklet for downloading SERP URLs. Set your google settings to return 100 results and you can grab the top 100 results for any query with one click. Combine it with your favorite crawler and you’ve got some great analysis tools.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName('a'), arr = '';for(var i=0; i<a.length; i++) if (a[i].ping && !a[i].href.includes('google'))arr +=('<p>' + a[i].href + '</p>');var newWindow = window.open();newWindow.document.write(arr);newWindow.document.close();
6. Audit internal duplicate content
Auditing duplicate content can be time-consuming if there’s a lot. Use this bookmark as part of your audit to check snippets of content you believe to be unnecessarily duplicated. Copy and paste the snippet into the dialogue box and see roughly how often it appears across the site with a simply search operator.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function() {var targetUrl = 'https://www.google.com/search?q=';new Promise(setQuery => {var input = window.prompt('Enter your query:');if (input) setQuery(input); }).then(query =>window.open(targetUrl + 'site:' + location.hostname + ' "' + query + '"')); })();
7. Load page speed insight for current URL
Instantly load the URL that you’re viewing into page speed insights. If you want this to work with the homepage of the site each time change the window.location. to window.location.host in the code below.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:location.href='https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url='+window.location
8. Instant index check
This will only save you a few seconds but I use this bookmarklet a lot to start troubleshooting why a page isn’t doing well. The script will conduct a search using the ‘site:’ which should return the exact URL in the first result if indexed.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function(){ window.open('http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3A'+encodeURIComponent(location.href))})();
9. Clear your cache in fewer clicks
Change three clicks to one with an instant opener for the clearing browsing data. Most used when you’re testing a development or need to replicate a bug to report.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
chrome://settings/clearBrowserData
10. Keyword stuffing checker
Instantly check the number of times a word occurs on a page. This one is really good for checking keyword stuffing during an audit and being able to efficiently give stats.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function(){var T={},W=[],C=0,s,i; function F(n){var i,x,a,w,t=n.tagName;if(n.nodeType==3){a=n.data.toLowerCase().split(/[s():,.;<>&'"]/);for(i in a)if(w=a[i]){w=" "+w;T[w]=T[w]?T[w]+1:1;++C;}}if(t!="SCRIPT"&&t!="STYLE")for(i=0;x=n.childNodes[i];++i)F(x)}F(document);for(i in T)W.push([T[i],i]);W.sort(function(a,b){var x=b[0]-a[0];return x?x:((b[1]<a[1])?1:-1)}); s="<h3>"+C+" words</h3>";for(i in W)s+=W[i][0]+":"+W[i][1]+"<br>";with(open().document){write(s);close()}})()
11. Instant visibility & domain analysis
Instantly chuck the site into your favorite SEO tool. My go-to has always been Ahrefs. I use this daily as part of competitor analysis and content auditing.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:location.href='https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/v2/subdomains/recent?target='+encodeURIComponent(location.hostname + location.pathname)
To use this with other tools, replace the URL inside the single quotes with the following:
- Semrush: https://www.semrush.com/info/
- Majestic: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=
- Moz: https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/overview?site=
12. Change link anchors to full URLs
Super effective for backlink analysis. Being able to see the quality of outbound links on a page at a glance is really useful for auditing. I’ve used this on multiple occasions to illustrate poor out linking to colleagues and clients.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function(){var i,c,x,h; for(i=0;x=document.links[i];++i) { h=x.getAttribute("href"); x.title+=" " + x.innerHTML; while(c=x.firstChild)x.removeChild(c); x.appendChild(document.createTextNode(h)); } })()
13. Check structured data for the current page
Check your schema markup against a competitor with this one-click bookmarklet which instantly opens the page URL in google’s structured data tester.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:location.href='https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url='+window.location
14. Instant Meta display
I know there are a ton of extensions that will do this for you but this is an instant dialogue box that will display useful meta content for the page URL.
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function(){var url = document.location; var meta = document.getElementsByTagName('meta'); var found = 'Not Found'; var title = document.title;var output = '';output = 'nn##### Page Title #####nn'+title+'nnn####META DATA####nn';if(meta.length>0){ }for (i=0; i<meta .length; i++) {if(meta[i].getAttribute('name')!=null){output += '''+meta[i].getAttribute('name')+'''+'n'+meta[i].getAttribute('content')+'nn';}else if(meta[i].getAttribute('property')!=null){output += '''+meta[i].getAttribute('property')+'''+'n'+meta[i].getAttribute('content')+'nn';}}alert(output)})();
15. Broken image checker
Identify broken links instantly, no scrolling through, no inspect element, no screaming frog. Get a simple dialogue box with the broken image URL (I broke this one with inspect element to illustrate).
Drag this link to bookmark bar:
Script:
javascript:(function()%7Bvar ims%3Ddocument.images, brokenCount%3D0, brokenURLs%3D"", text, i%3B for(i%3D0%3Bi<ims.length%3B%2B%2Bi) if (! (ims%5Bi%5D.naturalHeight %7C%7C ims%5Bi%5D.fileSize > 0)) %7B %2B%2BbrokenCount%3B brokenURLs %2B%3D "URL: " %2B ims%5Bi%5D.src %2B "%5Cn"%3B %7D%3B text %3D brokenCount %2B " broken image" %2B (brokenCount%3D%3D1%3F"":"s")%3B if(brokenCount) alert(text %2B ":%5Cn%5Cn" %2B brokenURLs)%3B else alert("No broken images.")%3B %7D)()
Awesome bookmarklet resources
Final thoughts
Being natural problem solvers, negotiators, project managers, instigators, copywriters, web devs and many other things an SEO finds themselves falling into to get their work done, I strongly advise you to create a folder on your bookmark bar and stack as many script nuggets as you can.
Please share your favorite bookmarklets in the comments below so we can all benefit from them!
Happy scripting ?
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