Category: Internet

Yahoo has recently revamped its site explorer. You will know what that is, if you own a website and use Yahoo to get stats like – number of incoming links, pages indexed by Yahoo, incoming links on particular urls or subdomains within your website and cached snapshots of your indexed pages. The new interface you’re taken to, when you type “link:www.yoursitename.com” is the Yahoo Explorer.

Yahoo’s new site explorer has the following new features: None. It’s just a design change as far as my exploration goes.

Simliarities Google webmaster central and Yahoo site explorer

Just like Google Webmaster central, Yahoo Explorer provides more detailed/advanced information about your site after you authenticate. You’re required to either upload a file with a particular filename and a unique key (downloadable in your Yahoo site explorer login) or add some Yahoo meta tags, similar to Google WMC.

Boo Yahoo!

Your sites don’t get authentcated instantly on Yahoo Site Explorer, unlike Google Webmaster central, where all you do is upload a file and you have all the info you’ll ever require.

Before Google Webmaster Central

Before Google Webmaster Central came in, Yahoo! rocked. It gave you highly accrurate info about the number of incoming links to a site – any site, whether you owned it or not, which Google preferred to keep secret. After Google webmaster central, I realised that Google always had that info, only it was meant only for the website owner. Yahoo’s site explorer still is and will continue to be the destination for SEO specialists worldwide looking for detailed site linking information.

Advantage Yahoo

Although both have pretty much standard features. The biggest Yahoo advantage is that it’s open for all. You can go and see any site’s indexed pages and incoming links. Very useful for Search engine marketing/ Internet marketing companies and SEO professionals.

Advantage Google Webmaster Central

1. Diagnostics: Detailed info about web crawl – HTTP errors, not found, URLs not followed, restricted by robots.txt, URLs timed out, unreachable URLs.

2. Content Analysis: Very important for your Google rankings – Duplicate meta descriptions, long meta descriptions, short meta descriptions, missing title tags, duplicate title tags, long title tags, short title tags, non-informative title tags (new) and non indexable content issues.

3. Search statistics: Top search queries (both impressions and clicks) (highly inaccurate in my case), what Googlebot sees – external link anchor text (very important again for your SEO), crawl stats (when was the site last crawled, no of pages crawled, PageRank of pages crawled etc), subscriber stats (how many people have subscribed to your site’s feeds).

4. Other tools: Some advanced options like setting your web site’s geographic target (for regional sites), set preferred domain (how do you want your site to display on Google – with www or without), analyse and generate robots.txt (for selective indexing of your pages), set crawl rate (for big sites that incur bandwidth expenses when spiders crawl their sites), enhance 404 pages (Google offers custom 404 – page not found pages so your users see the 404 page with relevant links in stead of an error page), enhanced image search (for sites that want to be listed on Google image search) and finally URL removal (if you want some URLs not to be indexed by Google).

In brief, if you’re a webmaster and your site’s not authenticated on Google webmaster central, you’re probably losing out. Google’s webmaster central has all the tools you require to diagnose and get your site polished and up those search rankings.

Yahoo will continue to sustain because of its “open to all” poilcy.

Came across the Google website trends and couldn’t believe my eyes. Yes guys, it’s all in the open now and there no hiding from it and the good old Alexa “highly manipulable and inaccurate” ranking days are over. Or are they?

Alexa, although pretty accurate for very high traffic sites, often showed weird patterns for smaller sites. I personally have access to about 25 sites’ data and from various stat/analytical software I use (ya ok, its Google Analytics). I always knew which site was getting higher uniques, pageviews, contrary to Alexa, which almost always showed incorrect rankings. i guess it must’ve been me, hanging around my favourite “self owned” sites, thus improving their Alexa rankings.

Have been running the same tests with Google Trends for websites and Voila! they’re accurate. It’s just something you expect of Google – precision.

Never really got around to the third tier – sites like Compete.com and Quantcast.com. Now i know I wasn’t the only one who stuck to Alexa! Here’s proof.

I now know where to go for accurate site traffic analysis. It’s like an addictive game where you just can’t stop yourself from comparing sites of different genres, geographic locations, subjects etc. And once you’ve decided to stop, you remember another one and bingo! Google Trends is open on your Firefox again (yeah, I love open source and am sick of the bulky IE).

Advantage Alexa

Having said that, you still can’t get away from Alexa. If you’re used to checking the Alexa ranking of every site you visit (and then semi consciously upgrading or degrading that site in your mind respectively), I bet no matter how inaccurate or manipulable, Alexa will continue to rule people’s toolbars. In my case, it’s Sparky that sits on the lower right hand corner and right now, it’s showing me no ranking for my Blog.