I just re-visited sitemaps last night to take a look at some of the new tools they’ve rolled out. Google announced that they were adding a few features in the last couple days. Crawl statistics (and control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching and the number of URL’s read from a sitemap. Nice, I’d LOVE to see them add the pagerank (in google toolbar form) on the page that they show the report of the page with the highest pagerank for the month. By the way, the faster crawl rate is not available for all sites, only if google determines that crawl rate MAY be a factor in getting your pages indexed. The change to faster lasts for 3 months. (Faster crawl rate could put a higher load on your server.) I found that sites with less than 20 pages (give or take) didn’t have the faster crawl option, bigger sites (20+) did have the option. (Rough estimate.)
Tag: Google Sitemaps
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Yahoo Site Explorer Update
Yahoo has launched an update to their siteexplorer. Site Explorer is an interface for website operators/designers to log in to yahoo and authenticate their “ownership” over the site sot hat you can find more information over and control the ways the site is indexed. It’s fairly analogous to the Google Sitemaps feature that’s available in Google’s webmaster tools area. It’s good to see search companies letting users “peek behind the curtain” a bit, although I’m still wondering how effective these tools are.
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Google Sitemaps continue to improve
I’ve noticed that the information in Google Sitemaps continues to improve. For instance in the list of search terms and the average top position which is something that previously was quite tedious to figure out (search and then click until you find your page referenced…) It also gives content analysis of your site, and analysis of incoming links to your site (what words are there.) The average search term rank though is probably the most valuable addition I see. They’ve also….
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WordPress 2.0 plugins
One of the real hesitations I had in moving current sites to WordPress 2.0 was the thought of “what plugins will break?” From what I saw the supported plugins list was short and so was the “broken” plugins list. Which said many were likely untested. So, after I installed a new wordpress 2.0 setup… I started copying over some of my favorite plugins (from my 1.5.2 sites) to see how they did.