All new!

September 30, 2005

We’ve added some new features to Google Sitemaps.

Date stamps for statistics

For information we provide once you’ve
verified your site,
we now let you know when we tried to crawl the URLs we tell you about.

Enhanced support for special characters in URLs

Note that the Sitemap URL must be
encoded for readability by
the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can’t
contain upper ASCII characters, certain control codes, or special characters such as * and {}.
If your Sitemap URL contains out-of-range characters, escape them when you submit the URL.
Otherwise, you’ll receive an error when you try to submit it. You can find more information on
escaping out-of-range characters by doing a Google search for
html escape codes.
All URLs must follow the
RFC-3986
standard for URIs and the
RFC-3987
standard for IRIs.

Documentation updates

We’ve updated the documentation for these new features, as well as added information about the
latest version of the
Sitemap Generator
script and about
OAI-PMH submissions (both of which
we talked about in earlier blog posts). We’ve also provided some information about
errors you might come across
when you submit a Sitemap. All we’ve made these updates in
every language for which we
provide documentation.

Resolved issues

And we’ve resolved two issues with this release that you brought to our attention in the
Google Group.

• Some of you experienced trouble when clicking on the verify link on the My Sitemaps page.
  Instead of being asked to verify, the My Sitemaps page simply reloaded. We’ve fixed this.
• Some of you had trouble adding Sitemaps from Internet Explorer. This happened when you pressed
  Enter rather than clicked the Submit URL link. You saw a message that said your
  Sitemap was submitted, but the Sitemap wasn’t added to your My Sitemaps page. We’ve fixed this
  too.

If either happen to you, or if you experience any other trouble, please let us know by posting in
the
Google Group.

Several of these features were a direct result of your feedback. Once again, we appreciate your
input during our beta period.

Posted by Vanessa Fox