Google is offering extra statistics with Sitemaps

Google is offering some exclusive statistics to webmasters that have installed Google Sitemaps. These statistics are not even available to the users of Google Analytics, since they originate from the Google search engine itself instead of from your site.

For instance, here are some statistics for The Brussels Journal, a group blog of which I am the webmaster. I used the Sitemaps module for Drupal to implement Sitemaps on the site.



Apparently the site frequently pops up in the search results when people are searching on 'bosoms', but that doesn't mean that people also click through to the site when looking at the search results. The term is number 2 in the search results, but only number 5 in the clickthrough statistics. Interesting.

You even get statistics on the pagerank of all the pages on your site:



Google Sitemaps essentially is a service that makes Google's crawling process easier, more accurate and (probably) quicker for your site. These extra statistics have nothing to do with Sitemaps, since Google has this information whether you installed Sitemaps or not. Apparently these stats are offered as an incentive to use Sitemaps.