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August 30, 2005

Google Sitemaps Update

Posted by sesparza

No, not that update.

The coolest thing Google has done with Sitemaps recently isn't the announcement on the Google Blog about Mobile Sitemaps. In fact, there doesn't seem to have been an announcement about this at all. We noticed today when we were updating our Google Sitemap that next to the domain name there was a link which read [verify]. Upon clicking on this, Google returned a message to create an empty file using the name they give, ie. GOOGLE11e5844324b7354e.html and upload it to the server. Doing so would verify for Google that we were indeed the owners of the domain in question.

Once we did this the link changed from [verify] to [stats]. Clicking this returns this message:

URLs found during our regular crawl process We have been crawling your site as part of our regular crawl process. This includes following links from your pages and the pages of other sites. Below we have listed URLs that we were unable to reach during this crawl process, with links that explain why we could not reach them.

More info can be found here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/faq.html#verify

Google warns that the list that follows isn't exhaustive and only includes the URLs crawled thus far but it's still an excellent upgrade for seeing exactly where Google's spiders are having trouble with your site.

A further FAQ is here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/stats.html#verifysite

Posted at August 30, 2005 3:18 PM
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