Get notified about changes in popularity of pages on your blog/site.

This Quick-Tip describes the alerts that Webmaster Tools are now offering for changes in search popularity of particular pages.

Google Webmaster Tools have added to their alerts features.

Basically, this means that they try to notice the changes "that could be most interesting for you", and send the website owner a message when they spot something.

You can view these messages in the Webmaster tools site, or by signing up inside Wesmaster Tools to have alerts forwarded to your email.

The newest(*) alert they added is for Search Queries. ref: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ie/2012/08/search-queries-alerts-in-webmaster-tools.html

This features shows "impressions and clicks for your top pages over time."

They say

"For most sites, these numbers follow regular patterns, so when sudden spikes or drops occur, it can make sense to look into what caused them. Some changes are due to differing demand for your content, other times they may be due to technical issues that need to be resolved, such as broken redirects. For example, a steady stream of clicks which suddenly drops to zero is probably worth investigating."

They're still working on what levels of change to report: it should be interesting to see how they cope with the wide variety of seasonal patterns. For example, I have one site that has weekly content: each week's post builds interest in the preceeding three weeks, then has strong traffic until a certain day and then drops to pretty close to zero. It will get popular again, but not until almost three years have passed - simply due to the niche that this blog is in. Now, I don't want to be alerted to this, because it's pattern I know very well! But I wouldl be interested if they could tell me that the expected "strong growth in the last week" isn't happening.

(*) I originally wrote this in late August, but somehow forgot to publish it. Found it again just now, and decided to share it, even though it's not as fresh as it was then. Hopfully it will still help someone.

Comments

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. Turnips (Brassica rapa) from Wikimedia commons Originally posted to Flickr by thebittenword.com. Licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory . They may even tell you to use an FTP tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking...

How to find the URL for a picture in Google Photos

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums. You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps. This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link. This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function. Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture. (Ref: How to make and manage shareab...

How to rename picture files in Picasa-desktop

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog. Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer. And it is still available for you to use, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive. For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because: The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does. It lets you control the size of the uploaded file It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages. Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with the Windows file s...

"HOW" - "HOW TO" - "HOW DO"

Search This Blog