From what I’ve been reading over the last week or two it would appear that following  the puchase of IndexTools by Yahoo! IndexTools is going to be made free! Soon you should be able to get an enterprise analytics package for your website and for at the best price you’ll get online – absolutely nothing :p

Is IndexTools better than Google Analytics?

You bet. I’m a strong believer in Omniture (it’s fab & when you plugin in some modules it rocks your online marketing world – if you havent seen Test& Target you’re in for a treat). Over at Search Engine Watch they described the free IndexTools like getting 80% of Omniture but free. To me is this is true the difference we could all be seeing from our free analytics package could be vast.

When can you sign up for your Free IndexTools?

Ah the difficult question – and the truth is I have no idea. All the ‘buzz‘ seems to be about it happening. At present I can find no information on timescales.

If you know any more about release dates for the free IndexTools or have some comments to make let us know in the comments below. I am sure we’ll be talking more the free analytics war that’s building in the nesr future.

After trying to get into the Microsoft webmaster tools, again, and clearing all my cookies and clearing my cache I was getting really frustrated with it. The I had a brain wave what if I use Internet Explorer to try and get in. No way that Microsoft would make a website that webmasters who didn’t use a crappy browser would not be able to access! Yeah right – first time in IE and all of a sudden I can add sites like Xmas came early. Un-fookin-believable. To get into Microsoft Webmaster Tools you need to use IE.

Am well annoyed by this. I hate IE – I can’t use i. I like all my little toolbars, I like changing to a black and red looking browser on occassion, and sometime I even like my browser to look like its Internet Explorer. But I do not like being forced to use Internet Explorer.

Am sure Bill @ Spiderwriting will love this! Let the Microsoft webmaster tool bashing commence. There are times when Googles dominance seems like a good thing – not often but just occasionally maybe that do not bad stuff really does exist!

Oh and as an aside every XML file they want you to put up has the same name – nice! So I’m now going to adapt one of my spiders to check competitors sites and start seeing what level of usage these Microsoft webmaster tools are getting – guess the usage figures could be low.

I just saw today that Microsft have launched their equivalent of Google Webmaster Tools at http://webmaster.live.com/. I was really interested to have a look at this.