On to Part 4 of this series about Google Sitemaps. Today I want to explore with you a little bit about what you can learn from the information provided by Google Sitemaps. Honestly, a lot of the stuff in this program is nice to know, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time with it. So we’re going to focus on the things that I feel are probably most important, as well as a few things that people are always asking me about.
So, go log into your Google Sitemaps account. Hopefully by this time your site has been verified. Unless your site is verified you won’t be able to see the additional information that we’ll be looking at today. So get that done first, then come back to this step.
When you first log in, you’ll be on the Dashboard. Click on the site that you’ve verified. By the way, you can have multiple sites in the same account.
We’ll go over the information in this post based on the tabs in Google Sitemaps. So here’s the first one:

Diagnostic
The first page you’ll see after clicking on your site name is the Summary. We can grab a few interesting bits of information from this. For example, it will tell you the last time that the Googlebot visited your page. Sometimes it’s nice to know how often your site is being re-indexed. There is a definite correlation between Page Rank and how often your site is crawled. So if you want to see this date become more frequent, you have to get your Page Rank up. It also helps if your site is always adding new content. A search engine has little reason to come back and keep crawling a static website.
Also on this page you’ll see information about Web crawl errors. This is one part that people ask me about all of the time. From time to time you’ll see pages showing up in the “Not Found” category. You can click on this link and see what pages weren’t found. The funny thing is that whenever I go to this page I’ll see pages they are listing that I know for a fact do not exist in my site. So, I’ve either incorrectly entered a URL somewhere on my site, or they have a glitch in their crawl. In my experience, it’s usually nothing to worry about and is a glitch with the crawler.
The rest of the information in this section I really don’t look at very often. It’s interesting and all, but let’s move on to some stuff that is a little more informative and helpful.

Statistics
The statistics section has several different sub-sections that give us some good information about our site and its performance on Google. At this point though I do need to mention something: it seems that Google doesn’t always keep this information up to date. Use it as an indicator to get an idea, but you probably shouldn’t swear by it 100%.
Anyway, the different sub-sections are Crawl Stats, Query Stats, Page Analysis, and Index Stats. Let’s go through these and talk about how they can be helpful.
Crawl Stats - No big thing here, it tells you the general PR of your pages.
Query Stats - This is the most useful sub-section. Query Stats will give you a 7 day average of some of your top phrases that are bringing your site up in the queries, plus the 7 day average ranking. It will also give you a second table that shows you the top query clicks over the last 7 days as well. If you’re really curious, you can also break this information down by different locations as well.
Page Analysis - This one is also no biggie, but it does show you what phrases Googlebot is finding as links out there. It also shows you what phrases Googlebot is picking up on your pages as well. You can reference this to your keyword density to make sure you’re using your phrases enough so that they’re getting picked up.
Index Stats - This gives you a list of things you can actually check on the Google search engine anyway. Its good to know the syntax for these.

Links
Now we’re getting to the good stuff, and in my opinion the biggest reason to even use Google Sitemaps in the first place! This is where you can see what links Google has picked up. If you remember what we did on Yahoo! a few posts ago, this is Google’s version. Here’s a link to that post just in case: How to Check Backlinks on Yahoo!
The cool thing about this part of Google Sitemaps is you can see where the links are coming from for individual pages, not just the whole site in general. Its important that you have links going to more than just the home page so that we’re developing link popularity for the whole site, not just the home page all of the time. In part 5 of this series I’ll show you how we can get even more out of the information in this section.
We’re not going to worry about the last tab, Sitemaps, because we already hit on this one in the previous post. This is where you submit and re-submit your sitemap.
Ok, so that does it for part 4 of this series. In part 5 I’ll show you a fun way that you can hack into this program and get even more information out of it. Until then, have fun!
This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information