Two weeks ago, Google Analytics added a new feature that lets you compare your site’s traffic with average data for other similar sites. To make this feature possible, you need to enable data sharing with the benchmarking service. “Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form.” There’s also an option to enable data sharing with other Google services that will allow a better integration between Analytics, AdWords and other services.

Well, this past weekend I decided to have a look what the hype is about and enabled Benchmarking for this blog.

When data sharing is enable you can instantaneous go look at the comparison between your blog and a certain category.

By default it selects the category “All sites of similar size”, but you are able to select a category/sub categories of which you want your site to be measured against.

When you’ve selected your category you are now able to view a comparison to all sites within that category.  At the moment I think it is abit hazy to what sites are really in these categories etc.

When the graphs show, it will show two lines, one which is the data for your site/blog and the other is for the category you’ve selected, the average.

As you can see the trends along the lines are almost the same, but obviously my site’s trafic is way lower that the other in “my category”.

Obviosly you can view different kind of statistics as you normally can, different views from different angles of your site traffic data.

I would actually have liked if the other sites were identifiable so to compare yourself truly to another site, but obviously that will have other major impacts.

general impression …. looks good ‘n fancy, and one can see the power for this but for me personally at the moment gives me no real value as ‘just a blog’ poster.

written by Arné

… not exactly, you’ll still be crawled, but for in-depth indexing, maybe not so much.

Check out the newest post from Google Blogoscoped,“Googlebot Submitting Forms to Find More Pages” and the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post as well.

Google notes that they only do this form submission for “GET” forms. A form using GET results in a parametrized URL like example.com/show?foo=bar. The guidelines for webmasters are that a GET request should never actually change data on the server, like trigger a user registraton or something; for such things, webmasters should use POST, which the Googlebot will not submit. Google also note that they “omit any forms that have a password input or that use terms commonly associated with personal information such as logins, userids, contacts, etc.” Plus, Google say that pages they find will not reduce the PageRank of other pages on the site.

written by Arné