Google webmasters and analytics update

Posted by multippt

Google has recently updated the backlink count over the past week, so you may see new backlinks registered in the Webmasters Tools page. While a Google update usually comes weeks after this happens, don’t be too happy yet, since Google is growing more and more unpredictable.

Google has also updated Google Analytics. You can now view the traffic charts by week or month rather than by day. This is useful if you want to compare traffic over a long period of time (or calculate how much traffic you have received in a particular month).

Another feature of note is benchmarking. If you are tired of Alexa’s inaccuracies when you compare rival sites, you could give a shot at Google Analytics. Benchmarking pits you against sites that have similar “size” (determined by traffic, with 3 classifications: small, medium, large) to your site. Generally, this statistics help determine if your site’s traffic is above average, or below average. It can also serve as a… benchmark, when setting new goals. Nonetheless, there are some glitches associated with this feature (that’s why it’s in beta), such as some charts being unable to show some info if your site lies to far above or below the benchmark.

A nice feature of benchmark is that you can narrow the sites you want to compare by category. This would help make it a fair comparison since most webmasters prefer comparing their sites to other sites that are similar in genre.

Though, this benchmarking service only gathers information from sites where owners have chosen to opt-in for the benchmarking service.

Note: Apparently, Google accidentally introduced a glitch in its chart. This glitch prevents users from seeing information on a certain day via the Flash chart. It can be temporarily fixed by clicking on the drop-down arrow, click on “Compare to Site”, and then click on “One Metric”.

Webmasters tools - crawl stats update

Posted by multippt

Google has updated the crawl stats for PageRank allocated in each site, viewable via Webmasters tools. Well, that’s about all the news, nothing much really. Though, an interesting point of note is that Google hadn’t done the January update in the way it used to. It might be a tiny update, probably separate from the major ones, but it is still an update, nonetheless one that is done incompletely.

Despite all that temporary rush about the latest PageRank 2 weeks ago, it does seem that the PageRank of most sites will not change until the next update. Though, Google seem to do hit-and-miss, as apparently it didn’t update the PageRank of a large pool of sites. Some sites like Technorati got it by the hit-and-miss bug, causing it to be not ranked at all (it should be PR7-8 depending on the Google directory).

Seems like the only place where you can get an updated score is via the Google directory, which is more transparent at showing PageRank results (i.e. no penalties included). Though, that would only work for a handful of sites that didn’t get rejected by Open directory editors (the irony?).

Cool… Google Webmasters tools makeover

Posted by multippt

Looks like Google decided to reorganise its webmasters tools page. The end result? A nicer looking assortment of tools, containing some tools that were probably overlooked by many.

Of course, its just a small change. But since Google is a big company, all small changes become noticed.