Google announced on Friday on the Web Master Central Blog that Google Trends had been updated to give information about actual popularity of websites based on their daily unique visitors.
If you have a popular enough website included in the results from Google Trends and you'd prefer it wasn't, you're out of luck. There is no way to remove your site. Google has not included their own properties - which on first sight may appear hypocritical but a reasonable explanation is offered for this omission.
Google Trends Combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The new feature pits Google against a number of well-established players in the traffic data space, including comscore, Compete, Alexa, Quantcast and a host of others.
Features of Google Trends:
- Daily traffic numbers of users sent via Google search (log in to see details)
- Related sites that were either searched for or visited in the same session.
- The ability to compare up to five sites at a given time with bar graphs and charts for each.
- Popularity by different regions.
- Estimates of the amount of unique visitors that the site has received over time with charts and graphs.
It's important to note that Google Trends for Websites doesn't give you Google's raw data -- it uses a majority of it's search data, data from Google Analytics, and some data from market research firms, and other sources. In order to get the full effect of "Google Trend For Websites" you must be logged into a Google account to see all of the data.
Micro Persuasion’s Steve Rubel has made it even easier to use Google Trends with the release of a bookmarklet that you can use to get there. Just drag the link from his blog entry to your browser toolbar, and a single click will show you the trends information for the site that you’re on.
There's commentary on Google Trends from Fred Wilson at his A VC blog.
In addition to the launch og Google Trends for Websites Venture Beat notes the release of an API for Webmaster Tools. According to Web Master Central The supported features in the first version of the Webmaster Tools API are the following:
Managing Sites
Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools
Add your sites to Webmaster Tools
Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools
Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools
Working with Sitemaps
Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps
Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools
Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools
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