Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:41:46 by Kerry Dye
Google Trends has now added the facility to look at specific websites over time. Launched last week on the Google Webmaster Central Blog it has caused a bit of stir. Not only is this facility producing a directly competing facility to Alexa (owned by Amazon by the way), but it has some odd omissions in the list of sites it returns data for.
Wikipedia traffic – yay, Trip Advisor – sure, Yahoo.com – no problem, YouTube – er no data, Google.com – nada.
Interesting that.
Back to the product itself, as WebProNews points out, this is a Google Labs product, so there’s no indication of the accuracy of the data, which starts about a year ago. Still, we all know that Alexa’s traffic information is miles out, but it didn’t stop us and other SEOs occasionally referring to it as a benchmark, and no doubt Google Trends for Websites will be the same.
Like Alexa, only the busiest sites show any sort of full data. Alexa has recently updated how it calculates its rankings to move away from just the Alexa Toolbar use.
So how does the Google Tool collect its data? The information they give is a bit vague but as Techcrunch indicates, it may include the anonymised Google Analytics data and clickthrough data from search as well as toolbar users.
Kerry Dye
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