Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools

Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

Getting Google’s view of your site, and diagnosing potential problems
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on Google is learning how our robots crawl and index your site.

• Crawl info: You can make sure we have access to your site, and see when Googlebot last visited. You can also view URLs that we’ve had trouble crawling and why we couldn't crawl them. This way, you can fix any problems preventing us from indexing all of your pages.
• Robots.txt file validation: See if we’re having trouble with your file, and test out changes to that file before you change it on your server.
• Website content: View top content from your site and see the words that other sites use to link to it.

Seeing how your site performs
A second step is learning what drives traffic to your site.

• Top queries: Find the top queries that drive traffic to your site and where your site is included in the top search results. This will let you learn how users are finding your site.
• Indexing information: See how your site is indexed and which of your pages are included in the index. If we find violations in your site, we’ll give you the opportunity to fix the problems and request reinclusion of your site.

Sharing info with Google about your site
Since no one knows more about your site than you do, you can also share this info with Google and improve your crawlability.

• Submit a Sitemap file: Tell us all about your pages by submitting a Sitemap file; help us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.
• Specify your preferred domain: Tell us which URL to use when indexing your site; we’ll do our best to index the version you prefer.

What is a Sitemap file and why should I have one?

In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we'll be discussing in this article.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn't impact the ranking of your pages in search results.

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can't guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. The Sitemap Protocol is a dialect of XML for summarizing Sitemap information that is relevant to web crawlers. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org.

While a standard Sitemap works for most sites, you can also create and submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content. These Sitemap formats are specific to Google and are not used by other search engines. They're a good way to give Google detailed information about specific content types. For example, publishers can use News Sitemaps to give Google information that can appear in Google News search results, such as publication date, keywords, and stock ticker symbol. Sitemap formats include:

• Video Sitemaps
• Mobile Sitemaps
• News Sitemaps
• Code Search Sitemaps
• Geo Sitemaps

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Google Sitemap Generator

sitemap

What is "XML sitemap"?

By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

What is "Change frequency"?

This value indicates how frequently the content at a particular URL is likely to change.

What is "Last Modified"?

The time the URL was last modified. This information allows crawlers to avoid recrawling documents that haven't changed.
You can let the generator set this field from your server's response headers or to specify your own date and time.

What is "Priority"?

The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site. The value for this tag is a number between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your site.
The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Sitemap generation

Here are 4 simple steps to get it done

1. Enter your full website URL and some optional parameters in the form below.

2. Press 'Start' button and wait until the site is completely crawled (the progress will be indicated)

3. You will see the generated sitemap details page, including number of pages, broken links list, XML file content and link to a compressed sitemap. Download the sitemap file using this link and put it into the "public_html/" folder of your site.

4. Go to your Google Webmaster account and add your sitemap URL.
Please check About Sitemaps for more details.

Starting URL

Please enter the full http address for your site, only the links within the starting directory will be included. For instance, "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" are not the same.

Change frequency

None Always Hourly Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Never

Last modification

None
Use server's response
Use this date/time:

Priority

Check your settings and click button below

Starting...

Maximum 500 pages will be indexed in sitemap

Need to index more? Check our Standalone version of Google sitemap generator with unlimited number of pages for crawler.

Where to get your RSS Feed Icons …

Need a standard feed icon or a feed icon PSD so you can manipulate how the icon looks?

Mozilla Foundation has made RSS feed icons available to help feed links become more recognizable and standardized. Their guidelines and FAQ provide full information on the icon and how it should be used.

Though the icons are available on the Mozilla site via the links above, the best place to get the icons is feedicons.com. At feedicons.com there is a zip file with the icons in a number of different file formats, including Photoshop and Illustrator formats.