How to Use Google Webmaster Tools to Measure Indexation

didn't know this was new, it's actually a quite old SEO "tool of the trade" (yeah, not all SEOs brainwank about pagerank) the cool thing is you can use it for after the fact analysis and even tests.

as there is no negative impact if you communicate one page in one or 20 sitemaps - so you can sort, slice and dice your content into different segments and see what (kinda) correlates with indexing.

i.e.: here is a nice test i did for a customer, we sorted his landingpage index (a few hundred thousand pages) after an descending internal content metric (think weighted chars- and wordcount) https://img.skitch.com/20120123-bm3jpjdtt4xrr2t2mxqnikmu54.p... and ascending after URL length https://img.skitch.com/20120123-kqnnb15bj2puy2k276jiupxg12.p...