More google news sitemaps….
What are they trying to prove??? Okay, Google Analytics rolled out (slowly) earlier this week and is just now catching up on reporting data. It looked like one of the rockiest initial Google releases to date. This morning came the news of Google Base a way to submit and search, well, sets of information that you’d commonly see in a database. NOW, this afternoon I read that Google Sitemaps has added statistics and tracking information….
Thanks, Google, I spent the last 2 hours looking through Google analytics and now you give me yet more tracking information for sites. It doesn’t look like LOADS of information in this though. For starters, you can see the top five search queries and the top five search query clicks… subtle distinction I think…
Top search queries are the top queries to Google that return pages from your site. Top search query clicks are the top queries to Google that directed traffic to your site (based on the number of clicks to your pages in our search results).
Crawl stats give page rank info and error/successfuly crawled information. Page analysis gives a summary of content-type and page encodings seen by the googlebot. Index stats give you quick links to the site: allinurl: link: cache: info: and related: google searches that we’ve all come to know. It’s nice to have easy access to that all in one convenient place.
Before you can get at the good information, you need to verify that you have access to the site by placing a file (along the lines of GOOGLEeb4dc5c351744e0e.html ) on your server (I used the main root directory), then clicking a Verify button in the sitemaps pages. The file can be empty, so it can be as easy as touch LONGGOOGLEFILENAME.html from a command shell, or you can create it with notepad and upload, or create it with your site management software.
Ok – Google what’s coming tomorrow?