Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats

You want to use Google Webmaster Tools and look at statistics for your website, such as its performance with GZIP and the number of bytes downloaded per day. Look at some data in Google Webmaster Tools and interpret it. Here we look at some data from Google Webmaster tools and make observations about it.

Google Webmaster tools statistics

As a webmaster you should have an account at Google Webmaster Tools. This allows you to track your site's performance and rankings in Google easier. The image on this article show the stats of my domain dotnetperls.com in October, November, and December of 2008.

The first graph. This graph with the blue line shows the number of pages Google crawls per day. At this time my site was being crawled with between 79-507 pages per day, with an average of 230.

The second graph and arrow. This graph with green line is the most interesting as it shows how much bandwidth is used by Google each day. In the second half of November and the first quarter of December, I had disabled GZIP compression. During this time, the bandwidth was around three times higher.

The third graph. The graph with the red line shows the time spent downloading. The period GZIP was disabled had very slightly larger times.

Summary

Here we saw that for even small sites with 300 or fewer pages, all of which lightweight and static, GZIP compression saves a lot of bandwidth. Most importantly, I showed an example of how you can use Google Webmaster Tools for benchmarking your web site stats. It is useful for diagnosing problems and gauging larger performance issues.

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