Carsten Cumbrowski, a Search Engine Journal columnist, has developed a tool which some webmasters may find useful. It converts the .CSV files which can be downloaded from Google Webmaster Central into cleaner customized files which can be used with other tools and software.


I met Carsten at Search Engine Strategies San Jose and learned that he and Bill “Bragadocchio” Slawski were working together to rewrite the Wikipedia entry on Search Engine Optimization.


Bill, Carsten, Dave Zuls and I shared an excellent lunch at La Taqueria in San Jose (which I highly recommend) and have been in touch since.


Carsten explained his File Converter Tool today on his SEJ post New Google Webmaster Tools and Tools for those new Tools, but I thought it fitting to make a post which focuses primarily on the tool he developed and how some webmasters should find it useful. Enjoy


Google Webmaster Tools - Query and Link Stats File Converter<a href="http://" target="_blank"></a>

Some folks might want to use the file for something else, such as import it into a software application for statistical purposes. This application might or might not support clean CSV format. It is not unusual for some applications not to support the text-qualifier properly for example. Other applications might require feeds that use a different delimiter for columns (fields) and rows (records). The Query and Link Stats File Converter Tool could do that for you.


The tools supports various delimiters and text qualifiers. Here are the details (if you think that I missed one, let me know)


Supported Row Delimiters (Records) Linefeed/lf (unix/default) char(10)
* Carriage Return & Linefeed/crlf
(dos/windows) char(13) & char(10)
* Carriage Return/cr (char(13)
* Tab (char(9)
* Semicolon (
* Comma (,)
* Vertical Bar/Pipe (|)
* Tilde (~)


Supported Column Delimiters (Fields) Comma (CSV/default) (,)
* Tab char(9)
* Semicolon (
* Vertical Bar/Pipe (|)
* Tilde (~)


Supported Text Quallifiers Double Quote (default) (”)
* N/A (None)
* ..any single ASCII character

View the full article at SearchEngineJournal