Google Enhances Webmaster Tools

Vanessa Fox unveiled new features included with Google's Webmaster Tools in an entry this week on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Google Webmaster Central Blog, four new features can now be found in Webmaster Tools: Googlebot activity reports Check out these cool Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. After you've opted in, you can opt out at any time. Number of URLs submitted Recently at SES San Jose, a webmaster asked me if we could show the number of URLs we find in a Sitemap. He said that he generates his Sitemaps automatically and he'd like confirmation that the number he thinks he generated is the same number we received. We thought this was a great idea. Simply access the Sitemaps tab to see the number of URLs we found in each Sitemap you've submitted. Who doesn't love charts and graphs? As someone who spends most of his day reading technology news, I have a special affection for any tool that provides relevant information in a simple, graphical format for my consumption. Presentation aside, the toolset additions offer webmasters more insight into Googlebot's crawl functionality. Specifically, the ability to manipulate crawl speeds to allow Googlebot to index as many pages as possible could potentially have impact on a site's search ranking. The enhanced image search and URL sitemap functions provide an added bit of fluff for webmasters to tinker with, but are still very nice tools to be sure. If anyone at Google is reading this, I have but one suggestion for the future: Keep giving us more charts and graphs. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Joe is a staff writer for latest ebusiness news.