Heh. Yep. I’ve certainly seen my share of imperfect Sitemap files. But I have talked to a lot of people who want a good metric for indexing and are willing to put in the time to make sure that their Sitemaps are accurate, in part to use this measurement.

Hopefully the bugs you mention about inaccurate counts will be resolved soon.

The other thing John Honeck mentioned is that sometimes the data is off (or just missing). I know the team is working on that, and it can be frustrating (and scary, say when you see “0″ as the number of indexed URLs).

Anyway, I’m glad to see Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools hasn’t lost it’s grip on you completely .

As for indexing different versions of URLs, I’d phrase it a little differently. If someone puts a URL in the Sitemap and Google indexes a different version of that page, then generally Google isn’t indexing the canonical version. It’s indexing the non-canonical version that it *thinks* is canonical. This is something that site owners may want to know. Ideally, all the non-canonical versions 301 redirect to the canonical, which would reduce this problem. Also, my understanding is that the URL listed in the Sitemap is a signal (of course, one of many) in determining what the canonical version is.

In any case, the ideal situation is one in which the Sitemap file contains a complete list and Google indexes those versions and not others. This count should help site owners get to that ideal.

It is, however, great at giving you information regarding your Sitemap file: If the count is much lower than what you have indexed, chances are you could improve your Sitemap file. Also, you might choose to split up the URLs on your site and create Sitemap files for logical sections of your site — in this case, you’d get feedback about how well each section is indexed, even if the URLs are not in separate folders.

John

John Mueller, I see your point, but my guess is that lots of people will use this for things other than short-lived talks with live answers. Looking at that scenario as a product manager, I’d say that a better solution would be to enable an event to set up a series that requires attendees to log in in some way (perhaps provide a conference code). After all, for events with live answers, being able to access the series at all isn’t all that helpful for those who aren’t attending, and in fact, the event organizers may not want those who aren’t attending to access any content from the event.

On the other hand, there are likely lots of other use cases were valuable content is being offered up and could be well-served by Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.

andy, agreed — internal search would be useful as well. Even with the use case described above (live events), attendees may want to search to see if their question was already asked.

One thing I’d like to see is a better way of linking to individual pages / questions though. The long anchor is confusing and not all CMS convert it into links properly (so I have to use something like the cool cli.gs service). Maybe that’s a part of the short life-span of a question queue as well?

Anyway, if you want to bring back some feedback to the people behind Google Moderator, check out their set at http://cli.gs/6UG72y .

That said, I like what Google are obviously trying to do with this tool – to make a friendlier environment for n00b queries than Groups and increase communication with their users. I hope they develop the tool and it takes off.

Just wondering…