Using Google Sitemaps: some free statistics

Google Sitemaps contains some free statistics tools for the website owner. Here’s how to start using them.

* You need a Google account. The same as your Gmail account. Don’t have one of those? Just ask me in the comments here, and I’ll “invite” you to this service.)
* Go the aforementioned page, and “Add” your website.
* The instructions will tell you in a 1-2-3 step way that you need to create an empty text file, with a name like `google123456789.html` (With UNIX commandline access you could say `touch google123456789.html` to create that file.) The filename is generated at random, and identifies a website as yours.
* Upload the file to the root path of your website.
* Then hit the Verify button.

OK, so you’re now the identifed owner of your website. Yout can see the _Top search queries_ that hit your site in Google’s index. And another list, _Top search query clicks_, tells you which of the search terms that actually got clicked on.

In the _Errors_ tab you can find out which of your URLs are unreachable by the GoogleBot, or which URLs are excluded by `robots.txt` rules.

All this is related to Google’s beta-stage concept of the [Google Sitemap](https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html), a protocol which you can use to tell Google what pages are new, and need to be re-crawled.

(Statistics are dangerous, though. Addictive, kids.)

Published by olleolleolle

Olle is a programmer, enjoying sunny Malmö in Sweden.

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