Evaluate Your Blog's Success By Seeing How Google Sees You

Matt Mickiewicz has unearthed a new feature at Google that tells you: the most popular queries that your blog shows up for, the top queries from which you get clickthroughs, crawl statistics, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages that generated errors or were unreachable and even the PageRank distribution within your site. You first need to upload an an empty HTML page to your blog's root directory before this works. What a great hack. Google has also posted full instructions here and details on the official Sitemaps blog.

This tool is one awesome way to evaluate if a corporate blog strategy is “working.” For example, check out some of the top clicked queries for Vespaway - a customer blog we are managing for Vespa. Look at numbers three through five. Those are prospective customers clicking in!

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Google, Hacks

Comments

[John]

See the Google Sitemaps how-to at A Consuming Experience for detailed information re: making this work.

[scott]

Thanks for identifying this. It's amazing: with so many free tools out there, the biggest dilemma can be deciding which ones to make time to use.