Google webmaster tools
Google Webmaster Tools is a a Google service that allows you to analyze several features of a web site, e.g.
- who is linking to your pages
- which keywords are used to find your pages and how well these pages show up in a google search
- What pages link to your side
- Crawl statistics
An alternative to google webmaster is Google analytics.
If you have a fairly organized web (like this Wiki we hope), these tools are mostly useful to figure what people are interested in and then improve these contents for example. If a website is huge and disorganized like our main site, you could use the tool to improve the whole website in several ways. E.g. for tecfa.unige.ch the top search queries we got on march 2009 were: tigre, image, attention, blanche neige, spider bites, unige and saw. All irrelevant :)
Statistics
The most useful feature are the top search queries and its traffic column. It will show the top 20 google queries that made people land on your website and it will show the typical position in displayed results. You can see in the following screen dump which edutech wiki pages come on top. Most queries are relevant, i.e. people should find what they are looking for. Finally, pages that turn out to me most popular, are not necessarily the ones I am most proud of :).
The column to the left (impressions shows shows the top 20 queries in which edutech wiki appeared. The first item is totally useless (i.e. a wiki template I now removed since it wasn't used).
The tool only shows the top 20 searches queries, which is a pity.
You also can consult crawl statistics, e.g. your overall page rank. Most pages in edutechwiki get a low one, which is not a surprise. Edutech is not that popular.
What Googlebot sees is another interesting feature. E.g. it will show words and phrases with different variations lumped together and that show up in external links.
Finally, subscriber stats will show the number of users who have subscribed to RSS feeds.
Pages with external links
This table provides a list of pages on edutechwiki that have links pointing to them from other sites. These backwards links are often hugely overestimated, since some people add a stable link in their blogs, i.e. the link will show up in each blog page. E.g. on march 2005 the main page is linked about 2500 times but dozens of times by the same service.
You also can analyze internal links. That may be a very useful feature for other websites, but that's something a wiki can do by itself.
Downloads
One can download data files for both statistics and external links in csv format to do some further analysis. One interesting feature is that you will get statics from from some different google national sites (e.g. google.com, google, ch
Some data in the file are really weird. I do get the statistics for a website like edutechwiki.unige.ch/en but also for 3-4 irrelevant ones like edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/4c
Content Analysis
In the Diagnostics section you will find the Content Analysis tool. It will show pages with duplicated title tags seen from the server root. E.g. for "Document Object Model - EduTech Wiki we have:
- /en/DOM
- /en/Document_Object_Model
- /fr/Document_Object_Model
Nothing to worry about. There is one redirection and both an English and French version :) Most duplicates shown fall in these two categories.
Using the service
Using Google webmaster tools is fairly easy, if you have a Google account and control over your website.
- Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with a Google Account.
- Add your site then "verify"
- Add either a meta tag to all pages or (better) add an HTML file to the root directory. The file is empty, but it's name is provided by Google.
In addition to using webmasters tools website, you also can look at at some data from iGoogle by installing a few widgets. You find them in the Tools section. However, you will get less information.
Links
- At Google
- Other
- Website Traffic Analysis Tool - Google Webmaster Tools (A short review of its features).
- Google Webmaster Tools - Key Website Analysis and Essentials (an other short feature review).