A whole new look and a lot more

April 26, 2006

If you log in to
Sitemaps
today, you’ll notice some changes. We’ve revamped the interface based on your feedback to make
your account easier to use. There’s more below on the facelift, but first, here are details about
the new features we’ve added.

Since the Google Sitemaps program is built on the idea of two-way communication between Google
and webmasters we hope this update gives you as much information as possible to help you debug
your site and help ensure it is crawled and indexed as effectively as possible.

New verification method

Many features of Sitemaps are available only to site owners. Some of you aren’t able to use our
existing verification method, so
we asked for your feedback
on an alternate method of
verification that uses a meta tag
on the root page of your site. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so we’ve added this
method as an option.

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.

Indexing snapshot

The new Summary page provides a quick snapshot about the state of your site, including:

• 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

Notification of violations of the webmaster guidelines

We may use the summary page to tell you if a site has violated the
webmaster guidelines so you can correct the problems and
request reinclusion.

Reinclusion request form

The reinclusion request form is available once you sign in to Sitemaps. Simply sign in, click the
link, and fill out the form. This form is also available from the Summary page for sites that show
violations. Remember, if your site hasn’t violated the webmaster guidelines, there’s no need to
submit a reinclusion request.

Spam report

The spam report form is available once you sign in to Sitemaps. This form is already available
outside of Sitemaps, but we wanted to make it available inside as well for two reasons: so that
all tools you need for the Google index are available in one place, and because reports that come
from within Sitemaps are from users who are signed in, so your report may receive more in-depth
consideration.

New webmaster help center

We’ve launched a new
help center for webmasters
as a central place 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.

Throughout your Sitemaps account, you’ll notice a [?] link in places where additional information
is available. Simply click the link to access the help center.

More about our new look

We want Google Sitemaps to be easy to use for everyone. You may notice that a few things have
moved around. For instance:

Adding a Sitemap

To add a Sitemap, first add the site. Then,
click the Add a Sitemap link beside the site on the My Sites page. To add more Sitemaps for that
site, just access the Sitemaps tab for the site and click Add a Sitemap there.

Navigating the tabs

You’ll notice that the tabs have changed a bit. When you access a site, you’ll see the Summary
page of the Diagnostic tab. All the information that used to be under the
Errors tab
and the
robots.txt tab
is available from the Diagnostic tab as well. The Statistics tab contains all the pages that were
under the Stats tab and the Sitemaps tab has remained the same. You won’t see a Verify tab, but
the Verify link is available from the My Sites page and the Diagnostic and Statistics tabs.

Posted by Vanessa Fox