Greywolf has made his usual cynical/pragmatic take on the recent Google Analytics announcement (check the update when you log into your Analytics account.) Basically Google is saying you can share your data with other Google tools. That's great! you can benefit from their infinite willingness to help you!
*We've updated this post with the latest tools and plugins for your enjoyment and benefit.*
Wordpress is probably the easiest and most malleable blog tool on the web that functions on Apache. Although it doesn't permit complete customization, it does provide a solid blogging tool with many additions to keep you're information and SEO needs satisfied.
We don't use many plugins, but over the past 12 months Distinct SEO has learned a few things through trials and tribulations. Here is a list of some of the plugins we use ideal for building a community and optimizing wordpress blogs.
For as long as I've been involved in SEO, the major search engines have opted for varying degrees of disclosure when it came to displaying the number of incoming links to a particular domain. By typing in link:yourwebsite.com in the search field you were able to display this value.
The value to an SEO to view accurate reflections of inbound links (IBL) has a few uses. For one, you can tell who links to you and whether or not you need to alter promotion/linking strategies. For the longest time Yahoo typically revealed the most comprehensive list of IBL, whereas Google did not. Google was the most ambiguous when it came to displaying inbound link values, that was until today.
All Google Webmaster Tools holders can now view IBL values, apparently real IBL values, known to Google. Of course, we don't know for absolute certainty whether or not this is truly the COMPLETE revelation of your IBL number, but it is definitely a step above what was available before. Webmasters have complained long enough and Google delivered, which was nice of them. (Official post here: Google Blogspot)
So what is the verdict thus far? Well looking at the tools it's either semi-useful, or completely comprehensive. The links feature enables you to know how many links EACH page has pointing to it. Of course, this list of links includes various syndication pages and social bookmarking feeds, but nonetheless, it's comprehensive in that manner. Of course, the value of these links is not measured or displayed so you can't tell if it's doing you any real good.
Of course, one of the reasons link: commands never displayed full results was to protect webmasters from competition. This is still the case since you can only view the results within the Webmasters console. Nonetheless, all in all, this is another solid tool provided by Google. Nobody has offered this type of information in an easy format (namely the number of links to each specific page.) Kudos Google.
Check out this post to get the context for this review. I compared the crawl rate speeds as shown through the Google Webmasters Tools between 5 web sites. It was your job to determine which web sites were on different hosts and which two were with the same host. Here are the results.
Web Site #1
Web Site #2
If you guess web site #1 and #2 were on the same server (the slow one...) then you're right! Congrats! If you note, these two have some of the highest on average crawl loading times....Pretty bad hey? Well not so fast.
Despite the fact the crawl rates were on average the slowest, the fluctuation between highs and lows were controlled. Packet loss was the lowest on these servers meaning less information was lost in transit to users. It also meant there weren't major outages our slowdowns.
You'll be surprised to know that according to Google page loading time doesn't play a huge factor in SEO. Matt Cutts stated that it doesn't matter how long the page takes to load, so long as it loads. I guess the slow server isn't so bad after all. But then again, think about it, do I want a potential customer to sit around for 5 seconds waiting for a page to load? No, not many will, they'll go find a better web site elsewhere. I'll be switching the host for these two in the new year.
Some additional comments: Web Site #3
Web Site #4
Web Site #5
All in all I like the new tool. Crawl rates are important to gauge effectiveness of page loading and whether or not your page edits (maybe moving from tables to CSS) are effective in speeding up crawl rates. It's not a SUPER tool necessary for SEO, however, I thought I'd just talk about some of the free tools out there for web analysis. Enjoy!
So get this, for a while now (1.5 years) I've noted that one of the my bigger sites is exceptionally slow compared to the competition. I've done some ping test and submitted them to my host. They're response was my site was doing fine, responded fine, responded fast even, and that I shouldn't worry. I of course knew otherwise, the web site loaded slower than the competition, albeit I had different programs running (a heavy perl based forum), but still I wasn't pleased.
I knew my packet loss was really low, so that was good, but I still wasn't happy with the speed. What I needed was some third-party to independently corroborate my hunch feelings. Well I know there are other tools out there, benchmark tests between servers and such, but when Google released their crawl rate speeds and averages I was happy to compare some results.
Admittedly, the web sites I'm about to compare are not equal, so this may skew results, however, these are on average results provided by Google Webmaster Tools so I should be able to see some differences/similarities. So let's play a little game, I'm going to list features of each web site with corresponding screenshot of the Google Webmaster Tools crawl rate graph. You're job is to determine which server it's from.
I'm going to show you five different graphs. 2 are on the same server while the other 3 are on different severs with completely different companies (so 4 different hosts all together.) All crawl time numbers I give you are in milliseconds and will follow these categories: Max crawl time --- average crawl time --- minimum crawl time.
Web Site #1
Web Site #2
Web Site #3
Web Site #4
Web Site #5
So can we make any inference based on crawl rate and host speeds/service? Let's see how you do, pick which web sites are on different hosts and which two are with the same host. The results will be posted in a few days. Good luck!
If you don't have a Google Webmasters account be sure to visit their page and join. If you have a Gmail or Adwords account then you can use the same login information.
