Google Webmaster Central

Google has changed the name of it's Sitemaps Service to Webmaster Central and has added some new tools that can be quite helpful in answering that question I hear all the time, "why hasn't Google indexed all the pages of my site?" You can find Google Webmaster Central here.

There is a new Preferred Domain tool, which will allow you to choose either www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com (without the www prefix). You no longer will need a 301 redirect for Google (although you still do for other search engines), since Google will see that the two domains are actually one.

You can also now see a detailed Crawl Error report for the past two weeks and download search term query stats in CSV format. There are additional tools available at Webmaster Central that can be extremely valuable for your site indexing questions or problems.

Google has a new blog for webmaster communication here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
According to Google's Vanessa Fox, "We'll be blogging here about our webmaster tools, the Sitemaps protocol, and other topics related to crawling and indexing sites." Her post also mentions the promise of new features coming in the future, so this should be an exciting "Google-watch" time for all of us.

I'm happy to see these new features from Google. It's well worth checking out and I'm looking forward to what may be coming in the future.