I've got to hand it to Google, they sure have put out a lot of free tools this year. Their latest offering let's you see whether they've visted one of your sites or not, which pages they've indexed, plus more. The beauty of the Sitemap tools is that you don't even need to have a sitemap on your site. You can simply register your blog and website URLs and the Sitemap Account panel let's you see a variety of Googlebot crawl info.

What Google Sitemaps does is generate a unique filename for your account. You then need to create a file (empty or otherwise) with that filename and upload it to each of your webservers that you want to track (in the root directory). Once you've done that, you click "verify". Google's spider checks for just the filename, not the contents, to verify that you are the owner of the specified domain.

Once verified, you can see a great deal of Googlebot crawl statistics for your website, including page rankings, any errors encountered (i.e., missing files or incorrect links), and which pages have been indexed. If you are managing a professional blog or website, this tool is more than worth the while to get acquainted with. I'll try to offer insights into the tool in future posts.

Links: Google Sitemaps Account Beta.

(c) Copyright: 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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