Google Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools

Google Site Maps and Webmaster Tools

Google sitemaps is just one of the webmaster tools available at Google webmaster tools and sitemaps.

If you logon (you will need a Google account (free)) the first thing you see is the webmaster dashboard were you can add your site.

When you add your site you will need to upload a file to your site so that Google can verify that the site belongs to you. Once done you have access to some very useful site information collected by Google.

Here you can see the Dashboard. You should note that I have several sites and that not all of them have a Google Sitemap.

A Google Sitemaps is a specially formatted list of web pages on your website in XML format. Google then uses this list (Sitemap) to index your website.

The sitemap is placed on your website and submitted to Google. Google then use the sitemap to crawl your website.

The sitemap contains information about the pages like their relative priority and frequency of change which Google use to schedule the crawling of your website.

A Google sitemap is not mandatory and whether the presence of a Google sitemap affects the standard way Google crawls websites is unknown. However it is a good way of getting your site into the Google index and as such I would create one for new sites.

The steps to participating in Google Sitemaps are:

Creating a Sitemap in a supported format.
Submitting that Sitemap to Google. (requires Google account-free).
Updating your Sitemap when your site changes.

To generate the Sitemaps I recommend you use one of the many free tools. Google maintains a list here. The one I use is the Tarrant.it Sitemap Generator which is an online tool for creating Google sitemaps and also conventional sitemaps.

If you click the site you want to manage it will show you a site overview page with the main navigation on the left.

Notice that I've got some lost pages (not found). This is because I recently moved a site and haven't got the redirects completely right. If you click the not found link it shows you all the problem pages.

You will also notice that I'm using the robots.txt file to restrict access to certain parts of the site. This is normal you just need to take a closer look by clicking the link to make sure the restrictions are where you want them to be.

Other than that everything is normal.

One of the most useful reports is the statistics which shows you information about how your site ranks for certain keywords and which keywords are getting the most clicks.

The links page is another useful report which shows you a summary of the sites linking to you and if you click the links it will list all pages that are linking to a particular page on your site.

Sitemaps shows you when the file was last read and how many urls have been submitted and allows you to add additional sitemaps.

Tools has a number of tools like robots.txt tool and set preferred domain.

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