What’s old is new with the tools Google makes available to webmasters, with their latest update that brings more historical data to the service.
History, for webmasters, used to be whatever happened with the top search queries for a site within the last seven-day period. Granted, that may sound like an eternity to the modern Internet crowd, but for webmasters it may as well be a sneeze in the dark.
Google Webmaster Central has a tissue and a flashlight for them. On the official Webmaster Central blog, they announced six months of historical data will be available:
Now you can jump between 9 query stats snapshots ranging from now to 6 months ago. Note that the time interval for each of these snapshots is different. For the 7 day, 2 week, and 3 week snapshots, we report the top queries for the previous week. For the 1 to 6 month snapshots, we report statistics for the previous month. And still others of you who log in may notice that you don’t have query stats data going back to 6 months ago. We hope to improve that experience in the future. 🙂
Google also made a “download data” feature available, for the spreadsheet-obsessed data fiends out there. All the stats for Top Search Queries may be downloaded in a convenient CSV format.
Another feature shows top queries by percentage, something Google used to only show ranked by query results and clicks. That was partially helpful, but this change should make it easier to see which queries really carried visitors to a site.
Interesting commentary from former Webmaster Central goddess Vanessa Fox will be a welcome read for webmasters. Vanessa noted the addition of information about sitelinks, those extra results appearing below some search results.
