by Admin
by Jody Nimetz
by Jody Nimetz
http://www.enquiro.com
I've been a fan of Google Sitemaps since their initial release last year. For myself, I felt that the true benefit of Google Sitemaps would be to provide insight as to various potential indexing issues with my client's sites. However in the 'early days' of Google Sitemaps, there was no real data to help me determine if there were indexing issues with the sites that I submitted.
In early May I was pleased to see the improvements that were made to Google Sitemaps. They made it easier to submit, they provided more statistics and they even implemented a Summary Page to let Webmasters know if their site is being penalized through what they call the Notification of violations of the Webmaster guidelines. This week, Google Engineer, Vanessa Fox announced some new features with the latest release of Google Sitemaps.
The thing that I like about this release is that Google appears to be really listening to feedback from you and I. Many of us are thirsty for more knowledge about why our sites may be having indexing problems with Google, why certain pages may be indexed while others are not. Well slowly but surely, Google is starting to give us more information as to what we can do to ensure a successful crawl and indexing of our sites.
New Features of Google Sitemaps
One of the new features that I thought was great from Google Sitemaps, was the ability for Google to report all the URLs (from your sitemap submission) that they have had trouble crawling. This increased crawl error report can help us focus on areas of our sites that are not being crawled due to technical errors. This is a pretty cool feature.
I personally like stats and feel that you can never have enough statistical data to utilize. I could study stats and trends all day, so I was pleased to see that with the new release of Google Sitemaps, they have improved what they call query stats. Query stats show you the top 20 search queries that brought up your site in the Google search results. These stats are now also available for sites located in a subfolder. The only thing that I would like to see is having this expanded to the Top 50 search queries.
Google has added a robots.txt analysis tool that allows you to ensure that the robots.txt file on the site blocks and allows only what you intend to block. Again, very cool.
Other new features include:
If you haven't used Google Sitemaps yet, you really should check it out. In a time when Google-bashing seems to be more and more common, I think a 'thumbs up' should be given to Google for listening to their users and improving their service offering.
Jody Nimetz
Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing
Tags: Google
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