Google Sitemaps Becomes Google Webmaster Central; Preferred Domain Tool Launched

Google Sitemaps has gained a new name along with new features.
Google Webmaster
Central is the new name of the former Google Sitemaps service, which now has
evolved into a central place for Google to provide help information, statistics,
reports and tools to help webmasters.

Google Sitemaps launched last year primarily as a way for site owners to
submit lists of URLs to be crawled. Since that time, it has steadily gained
features that took it beyond being a submission tool. It has offered the ability to
view
stats on how people are finding your site,
verify robots.txt
files and much more.

I’ve actually just come from Google’s office in Kirkland, Washington, which
is home to the Google Sitemaps team. Here’s a rundown on some of the new
features offered within the
Google
Sitemaps / Webmaster Tools component of Google Webmaster Central.

• Preferred domain: Is your site available with and without a www prefix?
  Until now, the recommendation was to do a
  301 permanent redirect of one to the
  other. But some people can’t easily do this. Now sitemaps has a preferred
  domain tool that lets you pick which you prefer. Make your choice, and Google
  will list the domain you choose. Behind the scenes, Google will understand
  the two domains are one and the same for purposes of things like link calculations. Keep
  in mind that Google says it will take some time before the changes are
  visible. Also keep in mind that you’ll still need to do 301 redirection for
  other search engines. Still, I’m thrilled to see Google has move ahead with
  yet another suggestion
  I’ve wanted,
  as have many others.
• Crawl Rate: A small percentage of webmasters will see a new alpha feature under the
  Tools menu called “crawl rate.” This will allow site owners to tell Google to
  crawl them at a particular speed: Fastest, Faster, Normal, Slower, Slowest.
  Feel like Google is hammering your server and slowing it down? Choose Slower
  or Slowest. Got a super server and want to help Google? Tell it that it can
  crawl you faster or fastest. Then it will crawl you more quickly and move on
  to other sites. And, if you’ve got so many pages that Google doesn’t seem to
  be getting them all in the usual time it crawls, using a higher setting gives
  you a chance of getting more pages in. Note that Google says that many sites
  are already getting comprehensively crawled at a normal setting. “Ninety nine
  percent of website owners don’t need to change this,” said Amanda Teal, a
  software engineer on the Google Webmaster Central team. “This is for the tiny
  percentage of site owners who contact us with issues.”
• Summary Page Changes: The summary page has new icons and colors to try and highlight good things and
  bad things are going on with your site.
• Better Crawl Error Reporting: The crawl error reporting feature now shows a full rundown on all errors that have happened over the past
  two weeks, and you can filter them by date, making it easy to see what errors
  have happened since your last check.
• Manage Site Verification: This is a new tab that shows you all methods that have
  been used to verify a site you control. Huh? Let’s say you manage a site,
  but others have access to it as well. You verify the site using your own Google
  Sitemaps account, but two other people in your company who can also insert meta
  tags or place files on your server as verify the site in their own names. This
  new page helps you understand that
  these other people have also verified. There’s also a way to reverify all
  accounts associated with a site, even if you didn’t originally do the
  verification. This  is handy to wipe out verifications others may have
  done, if they are no longer associated with your company or site. For example,
  say one of those other people has left your company. Do you still want them
  having access to your stats? Probably not. The reverify feature
  lets you see exactly how they verified your site in their account. You control the site,
  so wipe out the verification file or meta tag. Then do a reverify. This will their access to stats from your site immediately,
  since the file or meta tag originally used can’t be found.
• Improved Sitemap Error Reporting: If one of your sitemaps has a
  problem, such as a missing XML tag or formatting problem, these errors are now
  better explained and reported.

There are a number of other changes and tweaks, as well. Google has a post
with more

here, and there’s further info you’ll find when exploring
Google Webmaster
Central.