Greetings All,
Do your weblog, website or blog use Google Webmaster Tools & Sitemap? Let me explain what is Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Webmaster Tools provides information about your sites. It also allows you to add new Sitemaps for easy crawling by Googlebot. It also provide your site’s statistic & error information. Sitemaps are a useful service where it helps in telling Google what pages are present on your site. It also verified you as a rightful owner of your sites.
Before you can access to this service, you need to create an account. If you have been using Google’s other service like gmail, calendar & so on, you already have a Google account. You can use this account to login into the Google Webmaster Tools.
Below you will see the what the Tools look like.. You will see the diagnostics tab with web crawl errors, robots.txt analysis, site verifications, crawl rate & many more..
Below is the web crawl errors examples.
Site Ownership Verification below..
Those mentioned above is one of a few tools Google is offering. I won’t go into details about the rest of the tools.
However, another important tool is the Sitemap. To me it is important as it is the first step in discovering & indexing your pages on your site by Google. This sitemap will help in speeding up the discovery of your pages on your site more easily by the Googlebot. Sitemap is also useful for sites using dynamic contents as it is not easily discovered by following links.
One draw back is that the sitemap need to be saved under sitemap.xml extension. Yahoo sitemap is using the txt format.. It is the only format google the xml extension.
I am using a software from Frank Sousa to generate the sitemap automatically. The software is called Secret Spider Generator. I have been using it for months now & it works fine for me as I am a lazy person to manually create the sitemap myself. The software is not free though..
There is a few alternative. A script which generate sitemap from open source. Alternative No.1 & Alternative No.2 . No.2 looks cool. A few months ago, there are no such thing as free sitemap generator. Now they are.. So now, what are you waiting for? Get a sitemap for your site..
In summary, Google Webmaster Tools particularly the sitemaps helps in speeding up the discovery of you pages on your site. The other tools like the web crawl analysis help in minimizing errors found on your site. In my opinion, the sitemap & the web crawl analysis help me in maintain less errors & speed up the process of indexing by googlebot.
Regards,
Muhammad Riduan Ramli (Uanz)
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