Google Sitemaps add new features

Last year Google launched its Sitemaps program, which allows webmasters to submit details of all their website’s pages in xml or text format, so that they can be considered for inclusion in Google’s index. In the past few days, Google has announced additional new features for this program.

Google Sitemaps tends to be of most benefit to large, database driven websites, although it also provides a range of information and statistics that can be useful for any site. We have provided an overview here of the most useful information this program provides:

1. An overview of how Google sees the website, including the last date Google successfully crawled the site’s homepage, plus a summary of errors and potential indexing problems.
2. A list of the phrases which a website appears for most frequently in the search results are provided, as well as the phrases which generate the most clicks through to a website.
3. Details of any errors that Google is encountering are displayed, plus information on how Google is interpreting any ‘robots’ information on your website.
4. In the last few days Google has also added a feature to notify site owners if their site is being penalised for breaking their guidelines. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team provides an overview of this feature on his blog. This indicates that sitemap accounts are fast becoming Google’s mechanism for communicating with webmasters more openly – something it has never done before.

Across the other leading search engines, Yahoo now accepts either text or xml sitemap submissions (Yahoo login required), but does not yet provide statistics, whilst there is no similar offering from MSN or ASK.

In summary, Google Sitemaps are becoming an increasingly useful tool for analysing how Google views a website and to help it get indexed successfully. If you do not already have a Google Sitemap file set up for your website, please contact us as we would be happy to create one for you.

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