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New features in Google Sitemaps
Google Sitemaps is another way for webmasters to inform
and direct Google's crawlers. Google Sitemaps does not help
you to improve your rankings on Google. It is just another
way to invite Google's spider.
You can find further information about the basic features
of this service in the Google
Sitemaps article we published in June.
What's new in Google Sitemaps?
Last week, Google added new features to its Sitemaps service.
After verifying that you are really the webmaster of a
site, you can access some statistics about
the information Google has about your site.
Among other things, you can find out if Google's spider
has problems with HTTP errors, redirection errors or DNS
errors when trying to index your site. This kind of information
can help you to spot possible reasons when Google doesn't
index your site.
A security hole allowed people to access statistics
of other sites
Unfortunately, Google overlooked a security hole when
releasing the new features. For example, the moderator
of the SEW webmaster forum checked the stats
of the White House. Others could access the statistics of
AOL.com, eBay.com and a variety of other sites.
While this information is not very private, it shows that
the information Google has about you is not necessarily
secure. Another security hole in Google's new Google Base
service allowed hackers to access emails in Gmail (see
news below). Both security holes have been fixed in the
meantime.
The new tools in Google Sitemaps can help you to find out
why your web site does not get spidered by Google.
In contrast to Google
Analytics, we recommend this service because you don't
have to reveal additional information about your site and
your revenue when using Google Sitemaps.
Before submitting your web pages to Google via Google Sitemaps
(or Google's normal submission feature) you have to optimize your
web pages for Google. If your web pages aren't optimized,
your web site might not be listed for your best search terms.
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