• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 1, 2007

aQuantive's Avenue A|Razorfish this week executed the broad launch of its Super-intelligent Link Crawler tool, which crawls Web sites to detect errors such as broken links and "404 Error Messages."

The tool, dubbed SiLC for short, analyzes why errors occur and can benchmark a site's performance against other competing sites.

"It is different than other Web crawlers because it can intelligently process why certain Web pages aren't performing well and integrate with other SEO tools to improve efficiencies not only within a Web site, but to other linked Web sites, portals and blogs," explained William Flaiz, vice president of search engine optimization and Web Analytics for Avenue A|Razorfish.

The agency has combined the tool with its search engine optimization and Web design expertise to improve search rankings and usability for major brands like U.S. News & World Report.

U.S. News & World Report recently redesigned its Web site to grow traffic within its education, health, money and news sections and to improve its search capability within the site.

After running SiLC, Avenue A|Razorfish discovered search engines were not ranking many of its Web pages because they were viewing pages as duplicate content. Within two months of the relaunch, organic visits increased by 24% compared to the same period in 2006. In addition, organic visits from Google increased by 45% compared to 2006.

"By following [Avenue A|Razorfish's] recommendations around social tagging and optimizing our news feed, traffic substantially increased from these channels by more than 500%," said Jennifer Simonds, director of online marketing for U.S. News & World Report. "Previously it was a manual process that would have taken us months to complete."

Avenue A|Razorfish has seen profits and prospects rise with international expansion this past year through acquisitions in the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, China, and most recently in Japan through a partnership with the country's largest ad agency, Dentsu.

In the fourth quarter of 2006, aQuantive's digital marketing unit, which includes Avenue A|Razorfish, had revenue of $80.6 million--up 50% from the same period a year before. Operating income was $20 million, doubling year-over-year.

Last week, Clark Kokich was promoted to the position of CEO for Avenue A, where he is focusing on less on regional operations and more on expansion through international growth and the development of emerging media.

Microsoft's board is scheduled to vote Aug. 9 on the aQuantive acquisition.