I was hoping to get more info from the site status wizard they have. Pretty generic and useless info.
Seems like everything at google is plugging Sitemaps in some way or another, and this is no exception. Sitemaps will probably forever be their "webmaster" console, but it needs more features, badly. I'm not sure what -- but it just does. This is pretty much just a link farm to sites that most of us already knew, how depressiong
Sorry, I'm back now. I think that this "sitemaps stuff" is brand new, isn't it? SITEMAPS - For each website that you register, you get the following - SITE OVERVIEW TOOLS - - Download data for all sites - Report spam in our index - Submit a reinclusion request DIAGNOSTIC - SUMMARY Crawl Errors - Web crawl - Mobile Web More TOOLS - - robots.txt analysis - Manage site verification - Preferred domain (www or non-www) STATISTICS - - Query stats - Crawl stats - Page analysis - Index stats You now get this and more, WITHOUT having to submit a Google special sitemap. You just have to sign up for "sitemaps". I'm just asking if anyone has anything to say about it. Especially, the Google XML site maps issue, much discussed on forums. It looks like they are pushing them hard. A powerful, ongoing discussion is currently occurring down the road at xyz forum. People don't like the concept of creating a site map especially for Google, in a special format. Plus, there are so many horror stories about how someone tried the Google site map, and disappeared from the face of the earth. I know that I am gunshy. Just wondered how folks felt over here, without putting words in their mouths. "Not much to talk about?" I should have said more, and been more specific. Sorry for the louzy title. I'm not a fan of the special sitemap idea, but the rest of the new stats, new error reporting and stuff is Great! This is "the horse's mouth", folks. For free.
Webmaster Central seems to be evolving very rapidly. Yesterday I saw several changes throughout the day. There are many features I'd like to see added, but I like what I see so far. The thing that is bugging me is that this seems like this is becoming a very powerful set of SEO tools, which really freaks me out. Do I really trust Google's intentions or don't I? One feature that is desperately needed is the ability to tell Google to remove and ignore any page from a site that is not on the sitemap. This would be really helpful for getting rid of obsolete pages or pages that one doesn't want indexed. For a big site it is impossible to create a robots.txt file that excludes all bad URLs especially when one doesn't know what they are.
I agree. That's the only totally new thing I've noticed. It should do nicely if it works. I just hope that PR will be then automatically passed to only the version you prefer.