Google Website Trends

Posted by Martin Jamieson | June 22, 2008 .

Google have just released website trends - similar to their keyword trends product.

Google Website Trends, like Alexa tracks traffic trends for specific websites and allows you to compare one site against another. It breaks this traffic down by country (so you can see geographically where most of the traffic comes from), and also lists several other sites those users have visited and other search terms they have entered.

From a keyword analysis point of view, it’s another tool we can use to help build our keyword strategy - if you identify the top websites in your niche, running a website trends analysis will let you see their major geographical markets, other sites their visitors use (which you can then look at further), and related search data. It probably won’t be a major part of your analysis toolkit, but it can definitely help to fill in some gaps.

I do have a few problems with it though… curiously, Google have made a few choices that seem a little odd. Unlike their keyword trend data where they cryptically include a ’search volume index’ that allows data to be compared without giving away any actual search data (which they could obviously report accurately if they wanted to), with website trends they attempt to rank sites via ‘daily unique visitors’ - a very specific indicator for which they have incomplete data and must guess. Considering that Google make most of their money via advertising, reporting (inaccurately) on other websites traffic figures could potentially constitute a conflict of interest. Fortunately they seem to over-estimate if anything (from the few larger sites I’ve checked that report some basic traffic data), but a drastic under-estimation could potentially damage a competitors ability to attract advertisers.

The other issue is that the only way sites can exclude themselves from the trends data is to use their robots.txt file to completely exclude their site from all Google indexing (meaning they won’t appear in the Google search results)… this doesn’t apply to Google itself though as the majority of its web properties are excluded from the trends data (no google.com, youtube.com etc.).

Overall it’s something interesting to add to your toolkit, more from a competitor analysis view than a keyword point of view, but you may still pick up on a couple of ideas that you can research further in other tools.