February 6, 2006

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.