Google adds new features to Sitemaps

Google recently launched new features to their webmasters' sitemaps product. For the uninitiated, Sitemaps allows webmasters to submit a sitemap to Google in order to improve how Google crawls your site. In return, Google provides a wealth of information, including any problems it has crawling your site, what keyword phrases your site ranks well for, anchor text of links to your site, and much more.
Today I noticed some new functions:

- A link tab has been added where you can see both external and internal links to your site. One of the frustrations with Google has been that the link command (link:yourdomain.com) shows only a small sampling of the links Google knows about. For example, link:etargeting.blogspot.com shows only one link. For years, webmasters have had to use either Yahoo or MSN to get a better estimate of inbound links. Well, sitemaps now solves that. While the link command in the search box shows only 1 link, sitemaps shows over 60. Now that's useful information!
It also shows internal links. This is useful to understand distribution of pagerank in your site. For example, the page with the highest links on one of my other sites is the privacy policy (because it's in the footer on each page). Not really what I want to be emphasizing. Although Google may be smart enough to "discount" these types of links, I don't want to take chances. I'll be putting a "no follow" on that link from now on.

- More information about how Google crawls your site, such as how many pages it requests a day (including a nice graph of the past 90 days). You can get this from your server logs as well, but this presents it very nicely. Not life-changing data, but it's interesting.

BTW, if you have a blog, you can add it to the sitemaps program as well. You'll have to edit your template to put a verification code in the header, and you can add your xml feed (e.g. atom.xml) as your sitemap.

Tags: Google Sitemaps, SEO

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