Revamping the Webmaster Tools Help Center

Monday, June 18, 2007 at 1:16 PM

Posted by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team

A while ago, I posted in the Webmaster user group, looking for feedback on our Help Center and how we can improve the assistance we provide to our webmasters. And wow, did we get a a lot of feedback - both in the group and in the blogosphere. I'm amazed at the webmaster community and your willingness to share your thoughts with us: thank you!

Here's a selection of what we're hearing:

You want Help to be more discoverable

• It's not as easy as it should be to find the information you're looking for. You'd like Google to do a better job of surfacing the answers to the most common questions. The browse structure doesn't make it easy for users to find help, and sometimes search depends on users knowing exactly the right term to search for.
• You like the idea of context-sensitive help - on-the-spot assistance (often shown in a tooltip that appears when you hover over an item) that doesn't require you to click to a different Help page.
• Right now, it's not clear when new Help information - or new features - are added, and you'd like Google to look at calling these out.

You want Help to be more useful

• You'd like Google to look at adding videos and graphics
• You'd like us to providing the kind of information that's relevant to the average webmaster, who may not have a deep knowledge of SEO techniques. You're looking for good and understandable answers to common questions.
• You'd like us to expand the actual content, and do a much better job in explaining potential reasons why sites may have dropped the rankings.

What's next?

Well, over the next several weeks, we'll be working on lots of changes to the Help Center, both in its content and its organization. We'll be looking at all the feedback we've gotten, and we're taking it very seriously: believe me, I have a long task list for this area. But it can always grow: if you have some great thoughts or ideas, jump into the discussion, or just leave a comment right here.

What's new with Sitemaps.org?

Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at 5:00 AM

What has the Sitemaps team been up to since we announced sitemaps.org? We've been busy trying to get Sitemaps adopted by everyone and to make the submission process as easy and automated as possible. To that end, we have three new announcements to share with you.

First, we're making the sitemaps.org site available in 18 languages! We know that our users are located all around the world and we want to make it easy for you to learn about Sitemaps, no matter what language you speak. Here is a link to the Sitemap protocol in Japanese and the FAQ in German.

Second, it's now easier for you to tell us where your Sitemaps live. We wondered if we could make it so easy that you wouldn't even have to tell us and every other search engine that supports Sitemaps. But how? Well, every website can have a robots.txt file in a standard location, so we decided to let you tell us about your Sitemap in the robots.txt file. All you have to do is add a line like

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

to your robots.txt file. Just make sure you include the full URL, including the http://. That's it. Of course, we still think it's useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues and you can get additional statistics about your site

Last but not least, Ask.com is now also supporting the Sitemap protocol. And with the ability to discover your Sitemaps from your robots.txt file, Ask.com and any other search engine that supports this change to robots.txt will be able to find your Sitemap file.

Introducing Sitemaps for Google News

Monday, November 20, 2006 at 9:10 AM

Good news for webmasters of English-language news sites: If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now create News Sitemaps that tell us exactly which articles to crawl for inclusion in Google News. In addition, you can access crawl errors, which tell you if there were any problems crawling the articles in your News Sitemaps, or, for that matter, any articles on your site that Google News reaches through its normal crawl.

Freshness is important for news, so we recrawl all News Sitemaps frequently. The News Sitemaps XML definition lets you specify a publication date and time for each article to help us process fresh articles in timely fashion. You can also specify keywords for each article to inform the placement of the articles into sections on Google News.

If your English-language news site is currently included in Google News, the news features are automatically enabled in webmaster tools; just add the site to your account. Here's how the new summary page will look:

The presence of the News crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. A few things to note:

• You will only have the news features enabled if your site is currently included in Google News. If it's not, you can request inclusion.

• In most cases, you should add the site for the hostname under which you publish your articles. For example, if you publish your articles at URLs such as http://www.example.com/business/article123.html, you should add the site http://www.example.com/. Exception: If your site is within a hosting site, you should add the site for your homepage, e.g., http://members.tripod.com/mynewssite/. If you publish articles under multiple hostnames, you should add a site for each of them.

• You must verify your site to enable the news features.

We'll be working to make the news features available to publishers in more languages as soon as possible.

Joint support for the Sitemap Protocol

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 9:03 PM

We're thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As part of this development, we're moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org.

If you've already submitted a Sitemap to Google using the previous namespace and version number, we'll continue to accept it. If you haven't submitted a Sitemap before, check out the documentation on www.sitemaps.org for information on creating one. You can submit your Sitemap file to Google using Google webmaster tools. See the documentation that Yahoo! and Microsoft provide for information about submitting to them.

If any website owners, tool writers, or webserver developers haven't gotten around to implementing Sitemaps yet, thinking this was just a crazy Google experiment, we hope this joint announcement shows that the industry is heading in this direction. The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites. In our view, the experiment is still underway.

New third-party Sitemaps tools

Friday, November 10, 2006 at 10:08 AM

Hello, webmasters, I'm Maile, and I recently joined the team here at Google webmaster central. And I already have good news to report: we've updated our third-party program and websites information. These third-party tools provide lots of options for easily generate a Sitemap -- from plugins for content management systems to online generators.

Many thanks to this community for continuing to innovate and improve the Sitemap tools. Since most of my work focuses on the Sitemaps protocol, I hope to meet you on our Sitemaps protocol discussion group.

Multiple Sitemaps in the same directory

Monday, October 09, 2006 at 4:54 PM

We've gotten a few questions about whether you can put multiple Sitemaps in the same directory. Yes, you can!

You might want to have multiple Sitemap files in a single directory for a number of reasons. For instance, if you have an auction site, you might want to have a daily Sitemap with new auction offers and a weekly Sitemap with less time-sensitive URLs. Or you could generate a new Sitemap every day with new offers, so that the list of Sitemaps grows over time. Either of these solutions works just fine.

Or, here's another sample scenario: Suppose you're a provider that supports multiple web shops, and they share a similar URL structure differentiated by a parameter. For example:

http://example.com/stores/home?id=1
http://example.com/stores/home?id=2
http://example.com/stores/home?id=3

Since they're all in the same directory, it's fine by our rules to put the URLs for all of the stores into a single Sitemap, under http://example.com/ or http://example.com/stores/. However, some webmasters may prefer to have separate Sitemaps for each store, such as:

http://example.com/stores/store1_sitemap.xml
http://example.com/stores/store2_sitemap.xml
http://example.com/stores/store3_sitemap.xml

As long as all URLs listed in the Sitemap are at the same location as the Sitemap or in a sub directory (in the above example http://example.com/stores/ or perhaps http://example.com/stores/catalog) it's fine for multiple Sitemaps to live in the same directory (as many as you want!). The important thing is that Sitemaps not contain URLs from parent directories or completely different directories -- if that happens, we can't be sure that the submitter controls the URL's directory, so we can't trust the metadata.

The above Sitemaps could also be collected into a single Sitemap index file and easily be submitted via Google webmaster tools. For example, you could create http://example.com/stores/sitemap_index.xml as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
  <sitemap>
     <loc>http://example.com/stores/store1_sitemap.xml</loc>
     <lastmod>2006-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
  <sitemap>
     <loc>http://example.com/stores/store2_sitemap.xml</loc>
     <lastmod>2006-10-01</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
<sitemap>
     <loc>http://example.com/stores/store3_sitemap.xml</loc>
     <lastmod>2006-10-05</lastmod>
  </sitemap>
 </sitemapindex>

Then simply add the index file to your account, and you'll be able to see any errors for each of the child Sitemaps.

If each store includes more than 50,000 URLs (the maximum number for a single Sitemap), you would need to have multiple Sitemaps for each store. In that case, you may want to create a Sitemap index file for each store that lists the Sitemaps for that store. For instance:

http://example.com/stores/store1_sitemapindex.xml
http://example.com/stores/store2_sitemapindex.xml
http://example.com/stores/store3_sitemapindex.xml

Since Sitemap index files can't contain other index files, you would need to submit each Sitemap index file to your account separately.

Whether you list all URLs in a single Sitemap or in multiple Sitemaps (in the same directory of different directories) is simply based on what's easiest for you to maintain. We treat the URLs equally for each of these methods of organization.