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Google Trends for Websites: Where is Blogspot?
By Matt Keough | June 20, 2008
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land posted about a new development at Google Trends. It has now become a super revved up competitive intelligence tool as well as a keyword trending tool. A search by a domain name will now bring up information about traffic to the site, about sites also visited by those visitors and terms also searched.
I took this tip and played with several domains. Only two domains I searched for had no results. One was a super small potato site I own. The other search was blogspot.com - the host for tons and tons of free blogs, and owned by Google.
I thought perhaps the nature of this domain was the issue. It has lots of subdomains, wide variety of content, etc. So I checked out wordpress.org.
Lots of interesting information about Wordpress. So it isn’t the nature of the domain which causes blogspot to not appear. I looked to Google for Help.
10. Are all websites included?
No. Not all websites are included in Trends for Websites. The following types of websites may not appear in the tool:
Websites with low traffic volume below our threshold
Websites that don’t wish to be indexed by Google and have indicated their preference through a robots.txt exclusion file
Websites that don’t adhere to our Quality Guidelines
Other websites for miscellaneous reasons
Unless there is a problem with a Google property following the Quality Guidelines, it must be due to miscellaneous reason. Could that reason be that Google doesn’t want to share competitive information about its own properties? Just a question.
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June 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
No Google-owned properties can be searched for, as per this article on TechCrunch:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/21/google-trends-for-websites-rocks-unless-you-want-data-on-google/
Some say it’s a flaw in the way the data is collected - people who have Google Toolbar are much more likely to use Google as a search engine, for example.
Others suspect it’s more malicious, with Google protecting their own data while exposing everybody else’s.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I think Google does what it wants unless it’s brand is jeopardized. Until there is an outcry, Google won’t care.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Blowski - Thanks for commenting! I have a hard time thinking it was anything but deliberate.
Mike - There is an outcry in the places you would expect it. http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/googles-two-tiered-world/
June 24th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Matt, your post is fascinating, as are the ideas presented in the follow-up responses. I’d have to say that it’s only natural that Google would behave in this way. Obviously it keeps track of its own data, and needs proprietary info to remain a dominant market commodity. And to complement the Google-skeptic (or is is Google-realist?) posts, I’ve read plenty of industry-expert commentary that demonstrates just how strategic Google can be in its exposure of web content and its own self-protection. Nice find!
June 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
What an interesting thing to stumble across. I agree that this must be something that was done deliberately.