Google Sitemaps Gets New Look & New Features

April 27th, 2006 | RSS Feed

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Vanessa Fox of Google Engineering reported that Google Sitemaps has got a new look and a host of new features basing on webmaster's feedback. The change comes backed by the Google assurance of enabling webmasters to debug their site for effective crawling and indexing.

The best part of the changes is the new verification method for the ownership of a site. Previously many features of the Sitemaps were available only to the members. So this new method comes as an alternative. This method uses a meta tag on the root page of your site. Vanessa said that-

To verify ownership of your site using this method, simply click the Verify link for your site, choose Add a META tag as the verification option, and then copy the tag provided to the <<head> section of your home page. Once you've done that, select the checkbox and click Verify. We'll post something soon with more details about this.

There is also a new Summary page that provides provides multiple info as

If site is in the index
When Googlebot last accessed the home page
If some pages of the site are partially indexed
If the home page is currently inaccessible
If Googlebot has encountered a large number of errors when trying to crawl the site

To heighten webmaster friendliness, Google plans to notify webmasters when their site violates webmaster guidelines and accept requests for reinclusion.

There is also a new Webmaster Help Center. This will function as the central point for comprehensive information. It includes the webmaster guidelines and details on Googlebot, crawling, indexing, and ranking–plus information about using Sitemaps. It includes all of the information that was previously located at www.google.com/webmasters, as well as much of the information that was located in the Sitemaps documentation. Over time, we'll be adding more information to the help center to answer any questions you might have.

This is just a part of the details. For more details visit official Sitemap blog.

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