Web Coder Plus

A lot of web masters really hated Google last month as the Jagger update hacked and slashed its way through the SERPs, but it seems that November is Google’s equivalent of Christmas, and there are some big presents under the tree.

Google Analytics

Released on Monday, this beast had web masters scrambling to sign up, so much so that it was brought to its knees. A few days later, and Analytics is starting to work a bit more smoothly, though updates to data are still only happening once or twice a day for me. If you run a small web site (say about 100 visitors a day or less), then I doubt this is going to be a hell of a lot of use to you. Install it anyway, but keep a slightly more “close to the data” stats program as your major source information. Of course once you pass a certain threshold, those smaller stats programs cease to be that useful, and Google Analytics will really kick in. Spend a bit of time learning filters, and which reports you particularly want to see.

Also, many of Analytics features are directed at e-commerce sites, so if you have a little blog that isn’t selling anything, a lot of features just won’t really be set up to help you, though I’m sure we will find a way to use them anyway.

Google Base

Google Base appears to be the underwear and socks of this batch of gifts. So far reaction has been muted, or even positively hostile. Though, like the socks and underwear, you’ll probably end up getting a lot of use out of this whether you know it or not. A more comprehensive take on Google Base can be found on Burnham’s Beat.

Google Sitemaps

And the present behind the tree, that I almost didn’t see? The new and updated Sitemaps.

I’ve been using Google Sitemaps since August; and until now it really was just a page where I could enter in my sitemap addresses and look at some basic error reporting. Not any more!

Stats now include query stats that show the top queries where your site appears, and the top queries that resulted in the user licking through to you. While you’ll the what search terms the user clicks from your stats programs (at this point the freshly opened Google Analytics no doubt), finding out the top terms your site shows up in regardless of whether the user clicks or not is something new. Page analysis provides a look at how the googlebot sees your site, and crawl stats provide a better view of just what pages have been crawled. The sitemaps blog has more info.

All in all, it looks like November has been a web masters dream as far as tools go.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.