New console for Google Sitemaps
In my book, I advocate that a sitemap is one of the “must-have” pages for a website. Search engines love sitemaps, because they're full of tasty links. They're good for human visitors, too, because it helps them find the parts of the site that they're interested in. (Google has two sitemaps for its own site, did you know that? See the book for the details…)
A few months ago, Google announced its Sitemaps service for webmasters (that's you!) to formalize the concept of a sitemap into something that a search engine crawler (like Google's) could really exploit. Google sitemaps lets you control (well, suggest) how often Google should crawl the different pages on your site. It's a great way to make sure your site is listed properly in Google's index.
Now, Google employee Matt Cutts has just announced that a management console is available for use with Google Sitemaps. The console — which can be used by anyone who signs up for a free Google account — lets you view all kinds of statistics about your site based on information Google tracks, including:
- the top five Google search queries
- how well your pages get crawled and how high they rank
- what kind of content gets crawled
- what pages link to you, which pages are in the index
You can actually get this information without too much fuss, all you do is verify that you own the site by putting an empty file (Google tells you what to name it) in your website's root folder and telling Google to go fetch it. If you actually have a proper Google Sitemaps file on your site, the console will tell you if Google is reading it correctly or if it needs to be fixed.
Very handy tool to add to your toolchest. Check it out!
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!