Toolbox: Monitoring

Some of you will have already noticed that lately, I have converted and expanded many of the data and analytical means that I use regularly myself. During the betatest a few weeks ago, I received help- and useful feedback and I believe that now is a good time to present these tools to the general public. The tools can be broken down into four modules and I will write something about one of them each day for the next four days.

The monitoring-module is basically exactly what the name suggests: it monitors certain user-specified values, records them regularly and permits for an evaluation at a later point in time. In the screenshot to the right we can see an example in form of the search “keyword datenbank (database)” for this website through Google Germany. The ranking is being recorded for approximately one year which has led to about 8.000 recorded values. The data is shown as a diagram and can then be downloaded as an Excel- or CSV-file for further analysis. Aside from a sites position for a searchquery, there is also the possibility to save the number of hits for a URL as well as its PageRank. The number of hits can become interesting if you want to find out how the number of indexed sites of a domain or a directory are developing. In the screenshot to the left we have the number of hits for the query “site:sistrix.com”. When I moved the site from sistrix.com to sistrix.de in the beginning of June, the number of indexed pages regressed strongly; now, with the start of English translation of my postings, its going back up. These values can be neatly arranged into projects within a directory-structure and have the ability to be regularly send to you as freely configurable reports by e-mail.

Unlike comparable software, the whole process here does not require you to install software locally. This is convenient for two reasons: first you do not need to have a PC running all the time to continuously collect data and second, the problem that searchengines do not like to see automated queries, which leads them to make life difficult for the querying IP-addresses, is no longer your problem by mine.