Monday, June 2, 2008

Google Updates Sitemaps

Google Updates Sitemaps

The webmaster-friendly project started by Google over the summer has its own blog and some new features available for its users.
Google Sitemaps makes a tool available that lets site publishers create a map Google's spiders can use to more effectively index its content. On the official Google Blog, Grace Kwak posted about some new features in the Sitemaps service.

In our latest release, we provide even more interesting statistics that webmasters can use to improve the way their pages work with web crawlers, which will ultimately benefit their visitors.
I think the most fun are the new "query stats" -- they show top Google search queries that return pages from a site, as well as the top search queries that led users to click on a site. We've also enhanced the crawl errors we show, like specific HTTP errors Google runs into when crawling a page.

Google posted some more details about the new stats available on the Sitemaps blog:

With query stats, we show you the top Google search queries that return pages to your site as well as the top queries that caused users to click on your site in the search results.

With crawl stats, you can see how we view crawled pages. You can see a distribution of the pages successfully crawled and the pages with errors as well as a distribution of PageRank for the pages in your site.

Page analysis shows you what we detect about the content and encoding of your pages.

Index stats provide an easy way for you to use our advanced search operators to return results about how we see the indexed pages of your site.

Mobile stats
You can now verify your mobile sites and see stats for them.

More detailed errors
Now you'll have more details about problems we had crawling your site. We report on 40 different types of errors in 5 categories.

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