Mobile pages and new statistics

August 30, 2005

We just launched two new features.

Mobile Sitemaps

You can already use
Google Mobile Web Search
on your mobile phone to search through sites that have been specifically designed for mobile
phones, PDAs, and other handheld devices. We add new sites to our mobile web index regularly.

You can help users find your mobile webpages by letting us know about those pages.
Google Mobile Sitemaps
lets you submit Sitemaps for URLs that serve mobile content. You create and submit a mobile
Sitemap much in the same way you do other Sitemaps: with the
Sitemap Generator, the
Sitemap protocol,
or via a
syndication feed or text file.

The biggest difference with a mobile Sitemap is that you have to submit a separate one for each
markup language. Right now we support:

• XHTML mobile profile (WAP 2.0)
• WML (WAP 1.2)
• cHTML (iMode)

When you
submit your mobile Sitemap,
let us know which markup language the URLs in the Sitemap serve.

New Site Statistics

Now you can see information for the URLs in your site that we’ve had trouble accessing—both
for URLs from your Sitemap and those we’ve discovered during a regular crawl. We won’t show you
these additional statistics until you
verify your site,
which is a very simple process. Click the verify link next to the site on your My Sitemap
page, create an empty file using the name we specify, and upload it to the folder where your
Sitemap is located. We’ll check to see that the file is there, which tells us that you have
permission to upload files to that site, and then we’ll show you the information.

Posted by Vanessa Fox