Google Webmaster Tools XML Feeds

Google Webmaster Tools, formerly known as Google Sitemaps, allows webmasters to create XML feeds of their website layout. This XML feed is submitted directly to Google, and is an efficient way to help Google spider and index websites that might be hard to navigate.

Google Webmaster Tools can be used to inform the search engine spider of the addition of new web pages or updates on a website. The spider accordingly crawls the site and updates its index to reflect the latest changes on the site on its search results.

Who should use Google Webmaster Tools?

All webmasters who would like to improve their ranking on Google and reflect the latest version of their site on the search engine results pages should use Google Webmaster Tools.

Since May 2006 the tool includes a range of additional features such as crawl stats, query stats and page analysis, which make it very useful for search engine optimisation. Features of the utility inclue:

• Web Crawl: Identifies HTTP errors, broken links, unreachable URLs and restricted URLs
• Mobile Web: Identifies CHTML, WML and XHTML crawl errors that might affect how your website is crawled and viewed by Google Mobile
• Indexing Tools: Includes robots.txt analysis and preferred domain setting for sites with multiple domains
• Query Stats: Lists the top search queries and top search queries that are clicked to access your website
• Page Analysis: Provides a review of the keyword content of your site and links to your site as seen by the Google spider.

How much does it cost?

The XML Sitemap feed service is absolutely free for anyone to submit an XML sitemap to Google. All a webmaster needs is a Google Account and a validated XML feed of their sitemap.

Google Webmaster Tools

AccuraCast can also build and maintain XML sitemaps for your website. Call us on 0800 019 6813 for more information and to set up your site's XML feed on Google.