For a while with Google’s webmaster tools they’ve reported to you which url’s they get 404 errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time to time and tracking them usually involves trying to skim through referral logs and it can get a bit messy. Here’s the official announcement.
Tag: sitemaps
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Google Sitemaps adds more tools
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.)
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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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Whoops!
I have a page that I’ve been working on that gives me direct links to the administration and stat pages for many sites including my own, but also those that I host. It also has links to various and sundry other tools (Googles adsense/adwords/analytics/sitemaps/etc.etc.etc.) as well as other links that I’ve found useful in managing/monitoring the various sites. I accidently uploaded it to the site a while ago (index.html supercedes index.php)… whoops – corrected around 10:30 – sorry about that. I forgot that at one point I had it hosted on the site in a password protected directory and recently chose to keep it on the local machine. I’m not quite sure I’m here this morning now.
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Google Site: search issues
This is interesting…. there’s been a lot of frustration among some (myself included) with the current state of Googles site indexing. For a good while I’ve been able to consistently find ANY post on my site using google if I quote a certain amount of text that I know is on the page. Currently, such quoted text searches for pages that show up as “supplemental” in a site:averyjparker.com search… turn up nothing. In theory, the supplemental results SHOULD turn up when there are no others. (If I understand correctly…) I’ve been able to duplicate this with other site’s supplemental results as well, so it doesn’t JUST affect this site. Well, there’s an update at the official sitemaps blog that tells of some interesting issues with the site: search operator. It sounds like there might be a connection….
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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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More google news sitemaps….
What are they trying to prove??? Okay, Google Analytics rolled out (slowly) earlier this week and is just now catching up on reporting data. It looked like one of the rockiest initial Google releases to date. This morning came the news of Google Base a way to submit and search, well, sets of information that you’d commonly see in a database. NOW, this afternoon I read that Google Sitemaps has added statistics and tracking information….