Along with the
cool new robots.txt checker, Google Sitemaps has also
released stats showing the most common words used on
pages within your web site and the most common words anchor text pointing at
your site.
The common words in site content stats will be good fodder for those who
believe Google somehow tries to figure out a word "theme" for your entire site.
Google’s never claimed to do this before — and seeing sites like
Amazon or Wikipedia rank for anything when they are about nothing in particular
should demonstrate that you don’t need to target all your pages around a
particular term or theme.
Still, if Google’s generating stats like this for a site, it’ll probably tip
some people back to worry more about this. I wouldn’t – but do as you deem best.
The anchor text analysis is far more intriguing. Again,
Google has generally said that each page is measured by the links pointing at
that particular page. So if someone points at a deep page in your site, that
helps that particular deep page, not the site as a whole. And if someone points at your
home page, that helps the home page, not the entire site (Yahoo, in contrast,
has said it does some sitewide link crediting).
Now Google’s reporting anchor text terms for an entire
site — which suggests that any link to any page in your site might have an impact on other pages. Or not!
Questions, questions. I’ll drop a word over to Google
blogmeister Matt Cutts to see about getting some answers. I’ll postscript here,
but I’d also say to watch his blog
as well.
Finally, while these stats are promised, I don’t see
them live for all of my sites my sitemaps yet. If you don’t as well, there’s probably a
delay in getting them rolled out and live.