Until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sold on the fact that sitemaps were beneficial.  I was under the impression that it was sort of a moot point: neither good nor bad.  After seeing a post on the SEOmoz blog asking if sitemaps affect crawlers, I was sold.

I installed the WordPress plugin for XML Sitemaps on this blog on Thursday, January 29.  These are the crawl stats from my Webmaster Tools account from that day:

Checking again today, one week later, I’ve been waiting out the crawlers on purpose – making no posts until yesterday, and this is what my stats look like now.

Notice the jump.  Yesterday’s post is included in this crawl – as the site was cached yesterday.  I’ve noticed that the blog will usually be cached a day or two after a post, so could it be crawled so soon because of the sitemap? Perhaps, and it’s definitely something to keep an eye on!

Nicki Hicks
Flirting with SE bots with Sitemaps

I’m a huge advocate for measuring success and using geeky measurement tools to do it.  As a compliment to Google Analytics, there is Webmaster Tools.  While there is some overlap between the two, together, they give you a pretty good picture of how your site is doing.  And while some think Google knows too much about our websites (yes, they see same data as you do), the trade off is that it’s free.

1. Installation is easy. Choose to either plop a meta-tag into your code or upload an HTML file.
2. Quickly check for web crawl errors. Have any 404 errors?  Any nofollows or robots.txt you didn’t know about?
3. Can your site be accessed via smart phone? No need to check manually…Webmaster Tools will tell you!
4. Specific help for SEO. In the Diagnostics > Content Analysis section, check out any meta-description, title tag, or non-indexable content issues your site may have.
5. Top Search Queries. More of a fun fact than anything.  What top 20 keywords do you rank for?  What percentage of people that search for that term click on your site?  More importantly, ask yourself…are these the terms you optimized your site for?
6. “What Googlebot sees.” Very powerful information.  You can see exactly what anchor text people are using when linking to your site.
7. Pages with external links. Which are your most linked-to (read:popular) pages?  Webmaster Tools will show you most, if not all, of your incoming links.  Plus, you can view your backlinks in graph form with Glync.
8. Remove a URL. This tool can be incredibly useful if you have duplicate content or have removed a page for some reason.  This tool goes hand-in-hand with the web crawl errors page: after you find an error, you can then remove the page from Google’s index (it usually takes only a few days to complete the process).
9. Various other perks of having Webmaster Tools: crawl stats (how often Google crawls your site), subscriber stats (if you have a blog or email newsletter: how many subscribers do you have?), view your sitemap(s), generate and view your robots.txt file, enhance your 404 error pages (if you don’t already have a template matching your own design), and many more!

Nicki Hicks
If I add any more tools to my toolbox, where the heck am I gonna put my hammer?

Last week, Virante released glync, a free downloadable compliment to the external links portion of Google’s Webmaster Tools.  While even without glync, you can see your backlinks, glync will give you a visual representation of the number of incoming links you have over time.  Plus, with the pro version (estimated at about $5 per month), you can see the PageRank of each page linking to you.

Here are the number of incoming links for this blog for the past five days.

Just below, you’ll see your pages with the number of external links pointing to them.  Again, you can upgrade glync and see the PR of each page on the left.

Clicking the number of links will direct you to a list of of the pages that link to you.

Glync definitely enhances your Webmaster Tools experience.  But the question is: will Google actually tell you how many backlinks you actually have?  According to Webmaster Tools, I have 1,054.  Using the link:mysite.com command on Google, I only have 7; and using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, I have 1,017.  So does that make Webmaster Tools’ number the right one?

NIcki Hicks
Glync-er