Google publishes traffic data

Johannes Beus
Recently Google revised their original Google Trends version and added a numbered scale to the quantity of search requests. Now they have added another interesting modification: Google Trends for websites estimates the websites attendance. The calculation, or rather estimation, of attendance for websites that formerly gave no access to attendance data is something that is currently being worked on by companies such as Alexa, Compete, ComScore and Nielsen. The reliability of the free data which, for example, Alexa provides has been reason for discussion in the past and has led me to write a post about it, too.

It is still rather complicated to evaluate the quality of Google's data. They get around a comparison with the established competition by showing the numbers of visitors per day for Google Trends, whereas others provide visitors per month. This is especially apparent with sites that are regularly checked (Webmail, News, etc.) as there can be some noticeable discrepancies between the two methods. Google is very tight lipped about the source of their information but I get the feeling that they are currently not using Google-Toolbar data – for this Google makes too much of a mistake in some cases.

I tried to create a ranking for German websites based on Google's just released traffic-estimations. Included are sites whose content or users are mainly German-speaking. For Yahoo.com and Wikipedia.org I had to make an exception and kept them on the list. The problem is that Google only permits analysis for domain levels, which leads those two sites to have full-blown international values.

German Top100
#DomainGoogle UV/Tag
1yahoo.com70.928.600
2wikipedia.org22.398.500
3ebay.de5.319.600
4web.de4.293.000
5gmx.net3.359.800
6studivz.net1.959.800
7schuelervz.net1.913.200
8wer-kennt-wen.de1.633.200
9amazon.de1.493.200
10t-online.de1.353.200
11-100
This lineup contains very few surprises even though I marvel at some of the rankings but this only gives Google room for improvement. I am curious if Google can get top dog Alexa in distress.

Johannes Beus

 Johannes Beus, Founder and CEO of SISTRIX, has been interested in the optimisation of websites for searchengines since 2001. In 2003 he started to regularly publish summaries of his evaluations and share his thoughts on the SEO-sector on one of the oldest German SEO-blogs.
Johannes Beus - on Sun (06/22/2008) at 17:00 PM

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