Google renames Sitemaps to Webmaster Central

by Paul Flyer

Google recently renamed their Sitemaps website to Webmaster Central. The original sitemaps functionality still exists but they have now added a lot of functionality to it.

Here’s the key functionality:

Diagnostic
- Web Crawl - errors Google found while crawling your site
- Mobile Errors - if your site has a mobile version, errors found crawling that site are listed here
- robots.txt analysis - copy and paste your robots.txt file to find out if Google can read it
- manage site verification - ensure your site is verified with Google Webmaster Central
- preferred domain - tell Google what version of your domain is the main one
Statistics
- Query Stats - queries that most often returned pages from your site plus queries that resulted in clicks to your site (this is interesting)
- Crawl Stats - misnamed in my opinion. This page displays the ratio of Pagerank for all your indexed pages.
- Page Analysis - various stats displaying what the Googlebot sees - I’m not quite sure how to best use this this tool. More on this later.
- Index Stats - links to various Google functionality like allinurl:. Frankly, this is sorta lame. It opens up another browser window and displays the info like you would if you manually entered the command. Make the tool more robust by having this information already in the database for the webmaster to see, with stats, etc.
Sitemaps - the area where a site map is submitted to Google, more on this in a separate post.