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

• Largest site of the 5 running perl based forum. 30 000+ unique a month.
• 1175-1034-885

Web Site #2

• Small site running perl based forum. 300 unique a month, most to Wordpress blog.
• 1205-863-710

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

• Small web site with Wordpress blog, about 750 uniques a month.
• Shared hosting, it fluctuates alot, however, the Y-values are pretty small so overall this web host performs the best.

Web Site #4

• Forum, blog, and picture gallery, all PHP driven. About 600 uniques a month.
• Huge spikes suggesting time outs and inabilities to load pages. This shared host probably has the most outages when I'm not around, Google confirms the loading issues.

Web Site #5

• Tiny web site with static pages, about 100 uniques a month.
• It may look like this is fluctuating like mad but really it isn't. The y-axis is very small and we can conclude this web host actually has the best load times. The fact of the matter is it's a private box running very few uniques a month on a very few small static html pages. Not a big load, not a practical situation.

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!