SEO News: Updated Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools

Google have announced a nice update to Webmaster Tools this week that I’m quite pleased about, and sometimes I wonder if Google follow the bad news, good news rule as this welcomed update comes after a potentially controversial algorithm change which Joel blogged about a few days ago.

Previously the sitemaps section in Webmaster Tools simply allowed you to submit an xml sitemap, and displayed the number of pages submitted alongside the number of pages indexed. That was it basically, and the fact that this feature had little data to get you excited about could misguide someone into thinking that xml sitemaps are not too important when it comes to SEO.

I certainly witnessed the power of sitemaps last week when a designer asked me to look at a new site they had just inherited which didn’t even rank for their own brand name – which was not keywordrich.com by any means. After a quick xml sitemap submission in Webmaster Tools, the site jumped straight up to position 4 on the first page of results within 2 days.

Content-Type Data

What’s really great about the latest version is that there is a dashboard which displays the data separated into content types – web pages, images, video and news. For each content type you can see the number submitted to Google, and the number indexed by Google – and even presents this information in a colourful bar chart – data-obsessed folks love charts right?

Sitemap Errors

Another nice thing about the new feature however, is the data in the table below the graph. Webmaster Tools now show the different sitemaps that you’ve submitted, and the number of errors or warnings for each one, if there are any. It helps you to see the types of issues better apparently, although I haven’t seen this for myself yet (phew!).

Test your Sitemaps

Probably the best thing about the update is the ability to test your sitemaps before you submit them. So you can upload one and test whether it has errors or warnings and then fix them before submitting it to Google. On their blog, Google say it only takes a few seconds for the test to come back with results which sounds good, but they’ve also stated that not all errors or warnings will show up in the test, so you should probably check Webmaster Tools after you’ve actually submitted your sitemap to make sure.

Now with Google’s latest update to the sitemaps feature, I think this is the attention xml sitemaps deserve. Oh, and it’s worth noting that the video sitemaps feature in Webmaster Tools is no longer, now that this data is shown in the main sitemap section.

What feature in Webmaster Tools would you like to see updated next?