Expert Internet Marketer

After a lot of guessing and debating, Google has launched its own version of traffic analysis in the line of alexa, compete, quantcast et al. Google calls it “Google Trends for Websites”. There’s a high speculation from where the data comes – Google toolbar or Google Analytics or both.

Google trends tool provides you search volume index, unique daily visitors across the geographies and years. This means you can now see a traffic pattern of a website in 2006, 2007 and compare with 2008.

The rocking features of the trends tools are “Also visited” and . Now you can find out how many people searched for facebook and how many people went

A disclaimer note from Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

“Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information.”

There has been a mixed feelings among the internet marketing professionals over the accuracy and privacy of the valuable traffic information.

Do check the comments at Webmasterworld or the Mattcuts blog

What are you waiting for – It’s free to try out -> http://trends.google.com/websites

Google has come up with helpful points on how to tackle internal and 3rd party duplicate content issues. Since a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent, Google has strong technology in place to trace back the source of the original content. The correct identification of the original content source saves webmaster’s the trouble of having negative effects for their site.

Google sees the content source in two ways as below:

• Internal - Content pages that has same or almost indentical content that appears within the same website.
• External - Content that appears in the 3rd party websites either with permission or without.

Whenever you engage in content syndication services such as articles, press releases, and so on., ensure that the syndication partners link back to the original website.

There has been incidents where the scraped content ranks higher than the original content. In those case, Google recommends following advice:

• Check if your content is still accessible to our crawlers. You might unintentionally have blocked access to parts of your content in your robots.txt file.
• You can look in your Sitemap file to see if you made changes for the particular content which has been scraped.
• Include the preferred version of your URLs in your Sitemap file.
• Check if your site is in line with our webmaster guidelines.

A detailed post is available at Google Webmaster Central