Google Sitemaps` Big May Update - New Sitemaps Layout and Info
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When inside the details for one of your sites, you'll see a huge layout change here. The whole tab and table setup is renovated to be more navigable.
So what is all this new stuff here? Most of it is pretty familiar. Let's take a look.
The layout obviously flopped things around a bit. There is a Diagnostic tab up front, full of our very basic stats, significant errors, and also including the nice robots.txt validator. The Statistics tab and Sitemaps tab are basically the same, but the navigation has a sidebar now instead of two headers.
The Indexing summary tells us if our site is in the Google index and when your last crawl was. Whether or not the site is in the index is easy to find out (query site:www.seochat.com/), but this makes it immediately obvious. It's nice to know when Googlebot last stopped by to update the index, but I would be equally interested in when it is coming back. Providing an estimated time until the next crawl could give webmasters a sign of their significance in the engine's algorithm.
Potential indexing problems tells us that SEO Chat is only partially indexed. I was at first a little confused as to what this meant. I clicked on the little question mark to the right, and Google told me:
The Google index contains two types of pages: fully indexed and partially indexed pages. A site that's listed by its URL and appears without a cached copy and a detailed title is partially indexed. When a site is partially indexed, it's because our robots were unable to completely review its content during a recent crawl.
It goes on to say that the site can try more optimization to be far more easily crawled, but it's really a limitation of Googlebot at the moment. SEO Chat could remove some titles, html, and script, but it's probably not worth the effort since the site is really pretty thoroughly indexed already.
Other things can turn up in the indexing problems, such as if your home page is currently inaccessible.
You can also see right on this first page that Google has encountered at least 10 HTTP errors, thanks to the error notifier. Considering that SEO Chat recently changed its URL generating script, this is lower than I expected.
Finally, Google gives us a few links to the new help center. This section is improved since last time I looked at Google Sitemaps.
Next: Prepare to Be Helped >>
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