Google Moves in on Alexa and Compete

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.

Related Posts

1. Why Alexa Data is not an accurate source of information about your website
2. Alexa is not an entirely pointless waste of space
3. Google Trends Embeddable Gadget Launches – With Some Bugs
4. Search Engine Optimisation – Duplicate titles and Meta Descriptions
5. Google shows the importance of SEO for Travel Sites
6. Relativity and Google Trends
7. Measuring the Success of an SEO Campaign: Traffic from Search Engines
8. Google may be crawling Flash websites- but it’s not good for your SEO Yet!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 11:41 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.