Google are reorganizing & renaming their tools & resources for webmasters. Today's final post by Vanessa Fox on the Google Sitemaps blog explains: "To better reflect our goal to provide tools and information to keep you, the webmasters, informed and help you increase your crawl coverage and visibility on Google, we're renaming Google Sitemaps to Google webmaster tools... You can find handy links to all the tools... from our newly launched Google webmaster central." (Webmaster tools and information, collected in one place called Webmaster Central...?!)

Google's Webmaster Central is a "one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites". The Status Wizard tells you if pages from your site are included in Google's index and the last time Googlebot successfully crawled your home page. Google's Webmaster Tools is the new home for Sitemaps: allows you to provide Google with information about your website's pages (especially useful if Googlebot isn't finding all your pages from following links). You can also find out about any errors Googlebot has encountered, discover the top search enquires that return your site in the results (very helpful for optimizing your site's code and content), report spam sites in Google's results and resubmit your site for inclusion in the Google index if it has been banned in the past but now conforms to Google's guidelines. Submit your content to Google provides links to Add your URL (for new sites that Googlebot hasn't discovered yet), Google Base (which allows you to submit information about a wide range of content - see About Google Base for details), & Google Book Search (where you can submit book content with links to related websites). There's also the new Google Webmaster Central Blog with the latest news on how Google crawls and indexes, the official Google Group for Webmasters and the Google Webmaster Help Center

LINK TO THIS POST: Google launches Webmaster Central 0 Comments * BOOKMARK THIS POST