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SEOMeter is a new analytics tool that tracks how often Google is crawling your website, and they win my gratitude as being the first to order a paid review. SEOMeter displays graphs of your blog/site and the related crawl cycles (CC), which are how often Google visits your blog for new content. If you have a crawl cycle of 1.0, then Google visits your blog once per day. With this in mind, the lower your CC the more trusted Google finds your blog. If that introduction was over your head, you can check out their FAQ page which might explain it better than I can.

When SEOMeter started at the end of last month, they were a paid analytics service. Much like my launch of rssHugger, they have changed their business model and are now completely free to join. SEOMeter has its own company blog that is seldom updated, but it shows that the company has been periodically adding new features to upgrade their service.

On the site, they feature a directory-like listing for the top 20 most crawled sites of each category. Categories include internet marketing, colleges and universities, search engines, and small business.

I am a big fan of anything that tracks statistics because it allows me to see my blog’s growth. Now that SEOMeter is free to join, I have joined and will be using it myself. I wish I would have joined a month ago to see an accurate growth after switching to the faster google crawl option in my webmaster tools.

The flaws/cons
Is the system foolproof and 100% accurate? It shows that ReadWriteWeb is visited more often than Engadget, while Engadget is a lot more popular. Also, after a blog reaches a certain point (becomes really popular), the graphing loses value as every single blogs graph would eventually plateau at the same point, below is a simple example. Please know that I edited the picture so it would fit inside a blog post, but the graph dots themselves are represented accurately.

Would I recommend it?
Well, now that it is completely free you have nothing to lose. Go sign up and see if Google visits your blog more often than mine!

Let me start off saying that if you do not use Google Webmaster Tools, you should start trying it out. It is a great tool that shows you near-instant updates of backlinks to your posts, how often Google views your blog, as well as any errors that the Google bot finds.

Utilizing the tools will help you keep your blog search engine friendly and clean. Now for the point of this article, Google normally has a “normal” and a “slower” option for how often it will crawl your page. If you write at least a few times a week you should keep this at “normal,” but if you have a slow webhost or another reason that you do not want Google visiting a lot you can set it to slow.

Just in the last few days, Google has deemed my blog worthy of a “Faster” crawl rate. I enabled the option yesterday and Google viewed my blog 270 times when the daily average is 70. With this new faster crawling, my blog posts are getting spidered, indexed, and cached in a matter of hours… sometimes even within minutes.

If you have been blogging for awhile, I recommend checking out the crawl rate in your webmaster tools to see if you can enable the option. Since Google barely uses any bandwidth at all, I highly recommend using the Faster rate if your hosting can support it. In my opinion, the more times Google browses my blog the better!

Do any of you have a faster crawl rate option?