• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 21, 2010

Cotendo plans to accelerate search engine optimization analytics, an idea spawned by Google's decision to speed up indexing on the Web. It may seem a bit crazy, but this Israeli-based content delivery network (CDN), which focuses on accelerating Web sites and the transmission of information across the Internet, built the tool to help companies optimize sites.

The Cotendo SEO Analytics Service, released Tuesday, offers reports for search engine crawling activity, crawler comparisons, detailed hits and errors, object delivery times, error codes, and customizable alerts. Reports and alerts are delivered daily, with fine time resolution for best results.

The service offers two interfaces and collects data from Google, Bing, Yahoo and other major search engines, including those in South Korea, China and other parts of the world. The tool details data about the behavior of search engines in the CDN environment. Cotendo, a content delivery network, aims to speed up applications and Web sites like bestbuy.com, walmart.com, facebook.com and linkedin.com.

Faster sites do not simply improve the experience of people searching, but recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs, according to Omri Iluz, director of strategic partnerships at Cotendo.

The idea to build the SEO analytics package comes from project Caffeine, Google's Web indexing project completed in June that speeds "fresher results" by 50%. Iluz says the company has been working with Google on other projects and saw this as an opportunity. "If Google is going to rank sites based on how well they perform, we can help," he says. "We can see our clients' traffic and wanted to build it into an analytics package that allows them to see it through a visual dashboard."

Iluz says through a portal the dashboard allows marketers to see the data as a Web engine crawler would. It's one of about seven services Cotendo offers. It just means looking at a different tab in the platform's portal.

Cotendo supports nodes placed across the Internet that act as accelerators or repeaters speeding the transmission of information. The company can run business logic, or code, on the edge of the network. Advertisers that want to target ads or redirect a user's request to another device, such as PC to mobile phone, can do so through the technology, which optimizes and speeds the delivery.

Iluz says Google engineers have been working on protocols and services that few people know about. For the past 18 months, Iluz says Cotendo has been attending the same workshops as Google engineers, which have been working to improve the http and DMX protocols. Google also has been working to accelerate the Web through the SPDY protocol. The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol for the Web aimed at reducing latency.

Advertisers and marketers might think the technology a bit techie, but adding a session layer on top of SSL that allows for multiple concurrent, interleaved streams on one TCP connection could eventually provide new options for building a variety of engaging rich media ads.