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Oct 8, 2008 at 5:55pm Eastern by Matt McGee    Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Yahoo has announced that they’ll begin to roll out Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) on a limited basis beginning this week. According to Jitendra Kavathekar, Yahoo’s Web Analytics VP, the service has already been made available to select Yahoo advertisers and third-party application developers. The next “big deployment,” Kavathekar says, will be for Yahoo’s 13,000 e-commerce customers hosting under the Yahoo Small Business service. Beyond that, Yahoo Web Analytics will continue to roll out for the rest of this year and into 2009. Yahoo’s analytics service is a result of the company’s purchase of IndexTools earlier this year. Shortly after the purchase, Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen announced the company’s plans to make Yahoo Web Analytics free. In its FAQ about the new analytics service, Yahoo suggests three reasons why its product is better than the competition: Real-time Data: “While some analytics products provide data 24-48 hours after collection, Yahoo! Web Analytics reflects data within minutes of collection.” Raw Data: “While some products store aggregated data, which restricts the usefulness of the data to pre-created or canned reports, Yahoo! Web Analytics stores data in non-aggregated raw form.” Ease-of-Use and Flexibility Yahoo offers a sign-up form for future updates on the Yahoo Web Analytics (beta) home page. Update: Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen explains more and shares screenshots in a new post on VisualRevenue.

Oct 9, 2008 at 3:00pm Eastern by Matt McGee    Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search Like other search engines, Google already distinguishes between various types of content. You can search specifically for images, videos, books, blog posts, and so forth. Google has separate search engines for each. But two recent changes suggest that Google is improving its ability to classify different types of content that’s gathered from ordinary web pages. Search Engine Roundtable points to a discussion on WebmasterWorld about the addition of dates at the beginning of some search results — something Michael Gray spotted in mid-September. From my personal experience, this seems to be happening mostly on content that Google can identify as blog posts and news articles — but not exclusively on those types of content. And speaking of identifying types of content, Google Operating System points out that Google is starting to show special forum-related information in search results when it can identify that the result comes from a message board. Author Alex Chitu suggests this could mean new advanced search options in the future: This new feature shows that Google is able to automatically classify web pages and to extract relevant information. Once Google starts to show data for other kinds of web pages, we can expect to see an option to restrict the search results to a certain category (forums, reviews, blogs, news articles). The screenshot above has examples of both cases, the top showing dates in the snippets, and the bottom showing forum information.

Oct 17, 2008 at 5:41am Eastern by Barry Schwartz    Google AdWords Finally Breaking Out Search Traffic From Partners The Google AdWords blog announced they have added a method to the AdWords console to break out search traffic between Google and search partners. Beforehand, you were only able to see a breakout between your content campaigns and search campaigns. Now, you can breakout your AdWords results based on your content campaigns, Google search campaigns and search partner campaigns. How do you do this? Log into your AdWords console, navigate to a campaign and click on the “Statistics” drop down. Then select “Split: Google search/search partners/content network.” You will then get three rows of summary data by Google, Search Partner and Content network. This level of detail can be found in the ad group or campaign levels. Google said this level of detail is coming to the Report Center soon. Advertisers have been asking for this for a long time! For more information, see this help page.

How do you measure the bounce rate? Using an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Woopra allows you to check the bounce rate. Any bounce rate below 50% is OK but most bounce rates are far higher. 80% is really bad but very common. Social media like Digg and Reddit even have 90 - 95% bounce rates. In case you have 80% of visitors bouncing you lose 80 users of of 100! Imagine a shop where 80 out of 100 people just open the door and leave instantly.

2 opposing opinions on Graybar PR expressed: TBPR (and consequently Graybar PR) is just broken (as well as Google back link operator). OR: Both Toolbar PR and Back link operator are not broken but “de-SEO-usefulised“. Google uses them for disinformation. Graybar PR plays the role of a warning: the message might be that the page has been algorithmically flagged as looking like the kind of page that might be selling links. If this is the message, it would be directed both to the potential link buyer (to fuzz up what the TBPR of the page is) and to the potential link seller (as a note that Google is watching this page). Graybar PR might also mean the page was dropped out of index (or just not indexed yet) or penalized for infringing the guidelines. Graybar PR facts: FACT: gray PR is not the same as PR 0 (zero); FACT: graybar PR can mean the site is new and has not yet been into PR update; FACT: gray PR doesn’t directly mean the site is penalized or is deindexed; FACT: gray PR can be a signal of improper behavior (more checks are needed to make sure your OK / not OK); FACT: Toolbar PR can change and even become gray with no impact on performance; FACT: if gray PR did not effect other aspects of your site web life (rankings, number of indexed pages, etc), that might be a glitch inherent in the bar (wait a bit and see; or try to open the page in other browsers). Another possible signal of a glitch is that TBPR goes gray without waiting for the next PR update.

October 20, 2008 Google Webmaster Tools is Incorrectly Displaying Keyword Positions A WebmasterWorld member reports that he was dependent on the Top Search Queries report in Google Webmaster Tools and has found it to be providing incorrect data. After all, using another rank checker proved to see no results and there were no visitors to that page. This is likely to be a bug, according to Tedster: Webmaster Tools reports of all kinds are known to contain wrong information at times. This kind of wrong information would be particularly distrubing, but in any big system errors do creep in. The evidence of your own server logs is more dependable. He adds that it's possible that the ranking is achievable: [M]aybe the WMT report is pulling the position information before some filter is applied to come up with the final rankings. Even though that would certainly be buggy behavior, it might accidentally be showing you that your url COULD rank that well, if only you weren't tripping some kind of filter. Still, though, the tool in Google's backend is misleading. Would you consider this a bug? On a related note, The Official Google Webmaster Central Blog says that this could be an issue with the kind of data that WMT sees. They suggest that you add the www and non-www versions of the same site to Webmaster Central, do a site: search to look for any anomalies, set your preferred domain, and set a site-wide 301 redirect to www or the non-www. Of course, this is probably not applicable to the reporting issue in WebmasterWorld, though it may be related to other issues within Google Webmaster Tools. Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.