The guys over at SEO Meter did a good job by creating a new SEO tool to measure Google bot crawl rate for our sites. Hop over now, add your blog to their directory and let them do the work of tracking your blog’s Google bot crawl rate.
Benefits of Knowing Our Blogs’ Google Bot Crawl Rate
Google bot crawl rate on your blog determines how fast your contents are indexed by Google and how high the trust that Google has for your blog. Getting our new blog posts indexed fast means that our blog will be faster than others to break a news on the search engines, even though we might be slower compared to others in posting the news.
Knowing the Google bot crawl rate can be said as a vital part of search engine optimization. All this while, we can only check the time that Google takes to index our new blog posts by guessing without having a known appropriate tool to assist us.
SEO Meter - Useful Blogging Tool and Resource
Unique and Simple SEO Tool
This tool is rather unique to me as I have never came across tool of such kind until I StumbledUpon it. Simplicity of the tool is what I like about SEO Meter. The graph that shows your blog’s Google bot crawl rate will be available to you after you have added your site.
The graph, if not the statistical data shown below the graph, is easy to be interpreted by everyone. Basically, it shows how often in average (days) that your blog is being crawled by Google bot. For example, the screenshot above shows that Wayne Liew Dot Com is being crawled by Google once every three days and the line is going downhill, which is a good thing!
Free
By reading SEO Meter Blog, I find that this tool was once a paid service but now, it has became a free tool unless you want to monitor the crawl rate of your internal pages. Anyway, I find the free service is enough for bloggers even though you might be desperate for search engine traffic as Google bot crawl rates is just a minor aspect of search engine optimization.
Ranking System for Comparison
They offer a ranking page which ranks sites with the highest crawl rates according to a large list of categories. This is extremely helpful when you are eager to know how fast your competitors can get a message out to search engine users compared to you. If your rate is high, you should break a news by just covering the surface but if your rate is low, you should opt for a thorough coverage on a news to make your article stand out even though it will take a longer time to appear on search engines.
Useful Tips On Usage and Crawl Rate Improvement
As a unique service, you might find customers frustrated with no knowledge on how they can use and interpret your tool. SEO Meter has came up with a great FAQ page to guide their users of what their site offers. A blog has also proved to be vital in setting up a platform for interaction between their users and them, the service providers.
Their blog offers a good piece of article on how you can raise the rate of search engine bot crawl rate of your site which I would like to recommend to all of you even though you might not want to give their service a try.
Improvement Expected From SEO Meter
Abolish Site Adding Requirements
SEO Meter will immediately be compared to Alexa traffic ranking site by users after their visits because they look so alike:
- Alexa offers demographic ranking
- Alexa offers AJAX graph comparison
One thing that sets Alexa apart from SEO Meter is that Alexa does not require their users to add their sites before having the privilege to view and compare their stats and rankings with other sites.
I don’t know how can this be done but this will surely be a great improvement for SEO Meter.
Provide More SEO Tools
Google is the only large search engine that disclose their bot’s crawl rate to the public and this is why SEO Meter only shows Google bot crawl rate. Depending on only one module is not advisable since changes such as Google policy change on their disclosure of their crawl rate can be fatal for SEO Meter.
The name, SEO Meter, is a great name for tools that are related to search engine optimization. Having a large database of SEO tools can offer more options for users and tools like Google Page Rank checker and Backlinks Checker as they proved to be some evergreen SEO tools even though there are a lot of them on the Internet.
Your Experience With SEO Meter
You will have to submit your site to SEO Meter before you can see the Google bot crawl rate of your blog. However, you can hop over to see how some of your favorite blogs and sites fare in terms of Google bot crawl rate.
For those who gave SEO Meter a try before this post is up, what do you think about SEO Meter? In what way do you think that they are able to improve the site and offer more to their users?
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February 15th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Good service but something I wouldn’t have used if it wasn’t free. It seems to be just crawling the cached page of submitted domain on regular intervals and storing the date/time mentioned on it.
The crawl rate doesn’t reflect the actual speed with which your content appear. For example take your blog. this post is already visible on Google search results and result is showing “1 hour ago” besides the result. Try searching for the title and you will see the content of this post on the result for home page (though there is no link to cache page, which means it has not been indexed) while cache of the home page (when searched for wayneliew.com) shows “14 Feb 2008 09:12:57 GMT”
Thus while Google took pain to keep itself updated of your site (by means of RSS or anything) the sitemeter will not show so.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
While reading, I was about writing a comment asking for details I didn’t understand.
But then you linked to the FAQ and I got it covered.
I’m slowly getting fed up with statistics; however this can be helpful.
February 16th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I doubt if I’ll sign-up. I already waste too much time on stats…
February 17th, 2008 at 1:04 am
Didn’t you just call out John Cow for doing a trivial blogosphere post? This is worse.
February 17th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
@ Jalaj
I am still a bit blur on that but I think I get what you mean as not even one day after I wrote this post, it appears as the first result for “seo meter review”.
Will read more about Google indexing and bot crawling soon.
@ robojiannis
Having a FAQ page for any web services can proved to be handy nowadays, especially if you are targeting a lot of users.
@ Ruchir
This doesn’t need much of your time but prioritizing your activities that give you the most productivity is what you should be aiming for.
@ Oof
Hi,
Read my comment on John’s blog again. I didn’t point anything bad to John anyway…
March 6th, 2008 at 2:51 am
This is interesting. I am kinda a stats guy so I pounce on every neat stat that I can get for my site. Plus I really like the uniqueness of this tool. I will try it soon.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Too much stats is like not enough stats. With so many plugin and tools available, I don’t have any time left for productive task! I see details of the last google bot crawl in the webmaster tools of google to which I log in to each day, wonder if they report the exact crawl cycle. Ok maybe I’ll try it then
March 10th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
@ Fahad
Hope that it will help in showing some aspects of your blog which you need improvements.
SEO Meter is somehow a tool which most will skip over. However, I recommend this tool for all the new bloggers having a new blog which might still in Google Sandbox.
@ Jon
Exactly, there are already too much stats for us to monitor. However, I would not advise bloggers to check them everyday. Allocate, say, one hour, every week to check on the stats, not every other day.