Google Sitemaps now Google Webmaster Central

Until now, I haven’t found much use for the Google Sitemaps program. Register your site. Lame. Notify Google of your sitemap. You can do this outside of the program - it’ll even get crawled automatically if you leave it in the root under the name sitemap.xml. And there’s a couple other things that always seemed like they were more about collecting information on webmasters than providing help for webmasters.

But I do like the new and improved Google Webmaster Tools; news here and here.

I like it not only because there’s a neat 301 canonical URL fix in there, but also because it seems Google is moving in the right direction.

Some features:

• Set a Google crawl-rate for your site
• Notification of site crawling issues
• Mini-site analysis reports
• Improved sitemap error reporting
• File a reinclusion request

Good job, Google. Keep it up. A few more carrots in there and it’ll be hard to justify not using the program.