Google Sitemaps` Big May Update - Prepare to Be Helped
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As you may have already noticed on the few screens I showed, there is a link for everything. Practically every piece of indexing information, error message, and statistic has a link with it. Oftentimes this link will send you to a relevant page in Webmaster Help Center. Staying ahead of questions will make Sitemaps better for the less savvy site owner or SEO.
Besides all the handy topical links, Sitemaps also has a whole help directory that you can find here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters.
The help center is now more detailed. It has not just the help you might need in Google Sitemaps, but also answers to general webmaster questions, third party scripts that go with Sitemaps (such as a plug-in for vBulletin among many other things), and information on Googlebot.
Along with the new support, they also provide a new way to verify sites. You can still place the randomly generated HTML file in you site's root directory like before, but now they also permit using a special meta tag for verification. You can find more information here.
I definitely like the new layout and better help support. In an internet that is increasingly dependent upon Google rank, it makes a webmaster's job a little easier. There are a few things that would still be nice to see down the line for sitemaps.
With the indexing stats, it would be very nice to see a site's crawling frequency. Watching the date that Google last crawled the site can give us a clue over time, but I'd much rather see an estimated time for he the next Googlebot crawl and a crawl priority. That would provide more of an idea of how much fresh content Google is identifying, and webmasters can watch Google's crawling preferences changing.
Having more query stats would also be generous of Google. Like I mentioned a month ago, I can see what terms people use to find SEO Chat, but I can't tell what pages are the most successful. Having a way to indicate searchers' clickthrough ratio of the top search queries the site appears for would have search advertisers singing praise of Google. That would make all our jobs easier; it would encourage people to make helpful SERPs rather than high-ranking ones. It would also let us compare the clickthrough for organic listings and PPC ones. Valuable comparisons between organic and PPC, of course, may also be a reason why Google would not be excited about this feature.
Overall, though, Google has made their service a helpful tool for any site manager. Like I said at the end of the last article on Sitemaps, if you don't already use it, you should.
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