Have you installed your free Google Web Analytics package yet?.
Now this is a curious business model. Buy one of the best web anlytics software suites in the world. Repackage it and release it for free on your own servers.
I checked the terms of service. They don’t seem to suggest that Google is free to use their data for their own analysis but I haven’t looked carefully enough – I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.
I am very happy about this as I had been very unhappy with my stats package from my existing host and the otherwise excellent statcounter (paid version) doesn’t give good historical analysis (the last week or ten days are very well covered on the other hand).
As it is javascript-based, I suspect Google web analysis won’t help with spiders either.
For server side stats, we are recommending AWstats. Much more complete than Webalizer in terms of referral and far ahead of Analog, the principal free competition. Client side stats aren’t worth considering as downloading server logs is just not efficient.
As the departed Rudl used to say – automate everything you can!
Yup they are free to use your data and it is obvious that they will use it as a factor in the ranking process:
Thanks Razvan for clarifying that. This is really worth noting, as the information that Google can get about your site by having the stats internally is far richer than anything they could get any other way.
Potentially Google could really hammer spammy sites this way, or conversely, strongly reward very sticky sites.
Be careful. Do look a gift horse in the mouth. Look before you leap.
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