Despite the great amount of work it is to put a huge site like mine on the google map, I will do it because of these tools:
Pagerank Analysis of Your Website
This tool can be found under the new ‘crawl stats’ section in Google sitemaps. This tool gives us a snapshot of the pagerank across your website. It is seperated into four categories: high, medium, and low pagerank, as well as a category for pages that have not yet had a pagerank assigned.
This report is a nice snapshot of the pagerank distribution across your website. Although it does not tell you what the pagerank is for individual pages, it can give you some insight into how well your site is performing overall. It can also offer insight as to how quickly Google is assigning pagerank to new pages, especially if you have a website that is adding new pages rather quickly.
Query Stats
Query stats is a nice little tool that shows you which terms your site currently ranks well for in Google. Imagine that – Google is actually telling you where you are doing well in their index! They go a step further as well. Not only do they tell you which search terms currently bring up your website, but they tell you which search terms are converting to clicks on your listing.
The benefit of knowing this information is obvious. If you find that you are getting a lot of clicks on a specific search term, you can optimize your site based off of that information. By increasing the relevancy of your website to what people are clicking on to find your website, you can easily make a positive impact on your conversion rate.
Crawl Stats
Crawl stats gives us a quick glance at how successful Google has been in crawling our websites.
Think about this for a second: Google is telling us whether or not they are able to see our entire website. If there is a problem, or more importantly, if there is a recurring problem, then we know that Google may view our site as not being worthy of a top ranking.
The crawl stats is more of an overview look of how successful Google has been in crawling a website. Fortunately, they also offer a more in-depth view of site errors.
Errors on Your Website
The most powerful aspect of the new Google sitemaps features is the ability to quickly and easily identify errors on your website which may upset search engine spiders. Within the site overview for a particular site, you will find a new section called errors. This section reports any URL that Google could not spider and why they could not spider it.
The level of depth which Google reports errors in this section is extremely useful. They will let you know if the problem of spidering your website was with your robots.txt file, a DNS issue, a page could not be found issue, and other possible problems. With such specific information, it is very easy for a webmaster to quickly fix a problem which may hurt their search engine rankings elsewhere.
Given that I don’t pay much attention to SEO anymore, these tools will be an easy way for me to catch snafus that could hurt me.