Google looks like it has updated it webmaster sitemaps tool and added a few new features.

I notice you can now set a preference to have your site show up with or without the www in front of your domain. They may save a lot of problems with duplicate content where webmasters haven’t setup redirects and have identical pages for both www and without.

I also noticed a crawl rate link which is maybe something for the future as it goes to a 404 page not found.

On the main diagnostics page for your site it also alerts you to any problem areas you may have whereas before you had to dig a little deeper before you found those.

All in all some nice little changes and worth a look.

It’s always satisfying to get search engine hits for any site but especially for a new one. Over the last couple of days I’ve noticed that Google has been sending me visitors for a variety of search terms relating to unlocking the Sony Ericsson Edge card in my Sony VGA UX180P.

I’m actually quite surprised about this as looking at the results although I am in the top 10 there are better and more informative sites there.

Still, its nice to be indexed and even nicer to get hits even if I’m not making any money from this site.

If you want your website to rank within the search engines one of the most important things to do is get links to your site. Without these then search engines will either not find you or think your site isn’t important enough to rank for anything worthwhile.

Once your site gets better known if its good enough it will attract links from other sites without you even asking but when your starting out it doesn’t matter how good it is if no-one can find it in the first place.

A good way to start gaining these all important links is to submit your site to as many relevant directories as possible. This needn’t cost you anything other than your time as there are literally 100′s of free web directories available and one site which lists quite a few is DirectoryList.org. There you will find plenty of directories to get you started.

If you don’t have enough time on your hands to do it then again there are plenty of places where you can find people you can pay to do it for you. One such site is RCPlinks.com which offers an affordable directory submission service.

I did a search on Google today for funny ringtones. Out of the top 10 results 1 was a page not found and the cached version was a page of keyword spam, 5 redirected to what looked like pay per click pages, and 1 had no content. which leaves just 3 results for genuine pages. The next 10 results there were 7 redirects to what looked like pay per click pages.

That means for this search term out of the Top 20 results 70% is spam.

Now I’m not knocking Google as I think generally they do a pretty good job. I just wish they could detect redirects better so we can have better search results.

As first point of contact for my site XML-Sitemaps.com I quite often get emails from people saying “Your generator won’t find all my pages”. Because our generator works in the same manner as a search engine robot this is something that all webmasters should be concerned about.

We will always check out these concerns but haven’t as yet found any site that misses a page when there is a link to it somewhere.

The most common reason for this problem is JavaScript menus. They might look nice and fancy on the page but robots are generally blind to the links to your other pages. If they can’t find them then it goes without saying that you’re going to have a tough job getting them indexed.

Another cause is misuse of the robots.txt file. It is surprising how many people block access to search engines without realising it. Google has within their webmaster console in the Google Sitemaps program a robots checker. It allows you to put any of your pages in and it will tell you if it is being blocked.

The Google sitemaps webmaster console will also notify you of other problem areas with your site including pages not found, urls timed out, urls restricted by robots.txt, etc.

They also give you stats showing you the top search queries that are made where your site appears and also which of these bring you the most traffic.

If you have a website and you haven’t already signed up for a Google Sitemaps account then it’s definitely worthwhile and if you need a Google Sitemap then don’t forget you can get one at XML-Sitemaps.com.