I released SearchStatus 1.27 earlier today and thought I'd take a minute to describe a few of the updates. For those who haven't heard of it, SearchStatus is an extension for Firefox that is particularly useful for SEOs and anyone else who wants to look under the hood of a website.

First off, there is now an option in the right-click menu (right-click on the Quirk q) to open up a tab with the sitemap.xml file of the site. This file uses a standard endorsed by Google to present a list of the pages in a site in a machine-readable (XML) format. Although it's designed to be read by bots, it's still pretty interesting to see what's listed - it's one way to determine how well the SEO on the site is being performed.

Secondly, there is another WHOIS provider - who.is. WHOIS information tells you who registered the domain and is responsible for maintaining it. You can access the WHOIS info for the domain you are browsing by right-clicking on the q and selecting 'Show Whois'. This most recent update adds another site to the list of WHOIS providers SearchStatus can use - you can make it the default in Options (again right-click on the q). From what I can see, who.is looks like it may provide a little more info than the basic WHOIS data.

A regular user emailed me a while back with a bug - SearchStatus was counting word fragments when doing it's keyword density check and highlighting. For example, when checking density on the keyword 'for', it's presence in the word 'forget' was being counted and highlighted as an occurrence as well! This has now been fixed and the density checked should be more accurate.

Finally, a small bug regarding the switching of nofollow highlighting on and off on a page has been fixed. Enjoy the new version, and please let us know if there are any problems!