Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

- Sitemap details and errors

- Indexing information about your site

- Query stats about your site

- Crawl stats about your site

- Page analysis of your site

- URLs from your site we were unable to crawl, and why we couldn't crawl them

- robots.txt analysis

This is great from the SEO point of view. First of all, the page analysis gives you a little hint on how the Googlebot crawled the content of your website; plus it gives you information on what keywords were associated with your website from external links (it would be great if they gave an option to see the "nofollow" links).

Second the query stats:

* Top search queries - list the top queries that return results from your site. Note that this list is unrelated to where your site is listed in the search results.

* Top search query clicks - the top search queries that directed traffic to your site. These are the top searches that caused users to click on a link to your site.

They limit those to the first 20 results, but still that is useful information. I know you get that too by analyzing the raw log file, but this is more simple.

So, what do you all think about the new features in sitemaps? Any tricks :) ?

Regards,

Claudiu Spulber

backup4all.com

<Moderator Comment>

I don't know if this is a trick per se, but one thing this sitemap tool (now called "Google Webmaster Tools") is really good for is finding timeout errors, 404 pages, etc. I recently found a bunch of print versions of pages on a client site were being indexed thanks to the sitemap tool - I added those to robots.txt to avoid duplicate content issues.

Also using the robots.txt analysis tool is great - you can add disallow sections and then validate them in real-time, testing URLs in the process to see if they are working correctly. Super handy. There are lots of other good uses too.

-Adam