*whistling* “anything you can do I can do [not so much] better…”

Yahoo! released it’s own version of Google’s sitemaps service last year, which is just a simplified way of submitting your site to the seach engines. NetRegistry has a quick rundown of how Yahoo!’s works and how to set it up. SearchEngineWatch has an interview with Shiva Shivakumar from Google about their service

However, while Yahoo!’s service is just about submitting your pages to the search engine, Google’s gives you access to basic analysis of your site once you’ve setup the sitemap.  It’s nothing fancy, it’s certainly not a replacement for Google Analytics by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s cool none the less.  Probably the most useful information is the Crawl Stats and Site Errors section, which shows you the imformation about the Googlebot’s attempts to index your site.  You can see URLs that the bot couldn’t reach.  Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you how it got those dead links, so you have to dig around in your site to find where they’re linked from, but at least it gives you a starting point.

For WordPress users there’s a really nice plugin to automatically create the Google sitemaps files.

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