On June 2008 Google cheerfully announced a new feature of Google Trends:
“Today, we add a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.”
Oi. Hitwise will go out of business – just exaggerating here, don’t take me seriously, but still, this tool gives one traffic information, search volume information and keyword information all in one go. It’s not numerical, just index-based, but one can infer the main keywords that drive traffic to a given site and get a pretty accurate picture of the search competitive landscape in a given industry (assuming the Google data represents some 80% of all search data and as such is statistically significant)
As such, I will go and disable the “Share my Google Analytics data with Google products only” option in my Analytics account, which I suggest you do as well if you don’t care for your traffic and ranking data to be accessible by the entire world.
Also, as a point of interest, try comparing google.com.au with yahoo.com.au and msn.com.au and pay attention: “google.com.au has no available data“! And the same seems to be the case for google.com as well. Ahem…
A couple more interesting comparisons:
- realestate.com.au vs. domain.com.au vs. myhome.com.au – no news here, REA still dominates the market, despite the recent technology flop.
- optus.com.au vs. telstra.com.au vs. three.com.au vs. vodafone.com.au – the iPhone seems to have had some influence on the traffic for Optus and Vodafone, interestingly enough Telstra seems to have benefitted too, despite not offering the iPhone!
That’s it folks, the newest tool from Google – a two-edged sword for most of us, but I have to admit: it is rather fascinating and will make me waste quite a bit of time playing Sherlock Holmes.
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Sun, Jul 6, 2008
SEO