Google Analytics Comprehensive log analysis at google, from Urchin code.

Information of interest to webmasters posted on the official google blog website

Matt Cutts blog, and just the Google/SEO section, it’s pretty much a tool, senior engineer at google in charge of filtering web spam. Lots of good tricks here, but you must be a patient reader, he’ll post, then a jillion people comment saying “Hey Matt, my website ratings bombed after we moved our server, what gives!?”, he gets overloaded with questions, so I firefox search scan the page for only his answers if I don’t have an extra hour!

Google Trends just showed up on my radar, surprised it’s not in the “My Account” area, I found it on the official google blog.

Another new tool that works much like Google Trends, only more straightforward, “See what the world is searching for”:
Google Insights

Google acquired Urchin a great website tracking tool, which embeds code on your website’s server, then google analyses it on their end. You use your google account to check your website traffic (you have to create a login if you don’t already have one)

The results are very detailed and once you set this up you will be able to receive charts and graphs of traffic patterns including some really helpful detailed information beside “Page Views” and “Unique Views” such as “Keywords“, and “Top Traffic Sources“.

So, login to google, then go to “My Account”, then (click) “Analytics” (it’s currently their top link on the right side for “My Products”), then “Add Website Profile” then past your URL in (copy it from your URL bar so you don’t have any problems with syntax or typos) and (click) “Continue”, then copy the Tracking Code (the new tracking code ga.js had a syntax error missing a “>” that the google engineers missed which made faulty code in the era of My-Jul 2008, but works now), then when you click “Finish” you’ll get a list of your websites that google is currently tracking using the Urchin engine.

Your new addition will be there, but it will read “Tracking Unknown” under the column “Status”, you can then click “Check Status” where you can force feed it your website index page (the first one to load and the page that should have your google tracking code in it)

Next you’ll need to download your index.php or index.html, or index.htm or index.etc and add the javascript tracking code that you copied in to your clipboard to your webpage (you haven’t replaced your clipboard contents by copying something else since the google tracking code, new or Legacy, have you?). It should be right in front of your </body> tag so that most of your page can load before the user’s browser must get the rest of the page from analytics.google.com! If you run WordPress or another dynamic page creation engine or blog generator, then you must put it into a template that loads into the page, like footer.php.

When your tracking code is in place do the “Check Status” then “Finish” (button) routine and google will instantly re read your website index page and look for the tracking code it issued to your website domain.

From now on, then you can login in to analytics.google.com and you will get the detailed website traffic reports on that website and have them downloadable as a beautifully formatted pdf so you can email them to your customers.

Go start collecting!

Special search words to prefix your google search with:

These are various tips for a complex search in google.

~ (tilde) for finding “similar to” searches.

ex: ~glossary returns listings for Dictionary, Encyclopedia, Thesaurus, etc.
ex. ~glossary motor returns glossaries, dictionaries and definitions of motors, as opposed to searching for just plain motors, which may return a hit like “motor show on youtube”. You can use two-words, either word, both words, hyphenated or not. (the tilde on the glossary was a trick! It actually does triple duty by returning more than just glossary results)

Convert from one unit to another unit:

ex: 47 pounds to kilograms
ex: 29% of 3214.56
Time in the world, to find:
ex: time
ex: time in cape town

Here’s a real doosy, I was listening to Leo Laporte and he needed to do a not so straightforward conversion during his radio show. He was tipped by Randall Schwartz to use google for the conversion. Here it is:

convert .1dollars per 140 bytes to dollars per megabyte

Define is a spell checking dictionary:

define:matter (space not necessary just like site:)
define:motor returns a dictionary like listing of all known definitions of the word motor, a very different result from the usual google results page!
Don’t use a space before or after the colon, it will change your search to a standard one!

To use a quick batch of Thesaurus searches using the google command line (or is that thesauri?

ex: thesaurus: plethora

Searching for specific files on the internet using google:

Google search for Mp3 “Richard Thompson” on people’s servers:
-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Richard Thompson”

With some very slight modifications the same search string can easily be used to search for ebooks in DOC and PDF format, searching google for doc files and pdf files:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(pdf|doc) “george orwell 1984″

Or perhaps you are searching for video files:

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(mpg|wmv) “towelie”

Google advanced search operators:

“.” a dot between words says “connected” two.words is like “two words”
ex: pair.shoes returns google results with”One pair shoes green”type hits where all the results on the first page literally contain “pair shoes”, and a search of pair shoes results contain almost all “pair of shoes” in the results. My results show that this search is the same as quoting even on complex search queries, this may not always be the case though.

Searching for just page titles:

Google’s allintitle: operator limits your search to only words that appear in the titles of web pages, an effective way to narrow your results to pages which primarily concern your keyword.

ex: allintitle:used.books for sale discount will return only web pages with used books for sale in their page title (at the top of your browser window title just in front of ” – Mozilla Firefox” or ” – Internet Explorer”. You will also get results like “Find Used Books items for sale on Ebay”, interesting to note that “Used Books” must be exactly in that order, but the rest of the search query allows the title to have the words anywhere in it! So you can get a hit like this “Best Sellers, Discount Books, Cheap Textbooks, Used Books for Sale:” where Discount is actually in front of “Used Books”.

Note to fellow web developers: Try not to forget to edit your page titles! Google search for allintitle:”untitled document” returns a 27,800,000 results and growing (8-10-2008). Incidently allintitle:”Untitled Document” returns 27,600,000 results, 200,000 less than the lower case version. Somebody care to explain this one? Matt?