I was poking my head around Digg.com today and ran across a story saying they had added some new functionality to Google Sitemaps. Now considering I’m a Sitemaps advocate with all of my clients I had to go take a look and see what all the fuss was about. Upon verifying your site by FTPing a empty HTML file to your root directory you are able to access some statistics for your site. These include query stats, crawl stats, page analysis and index stats. Inside of these base options you can see how well your pages rank, what your top queries were and where Google ran into problems indexing your site. Right now the information is vague but anything helps when it comes to Google in my opinion. I hope to see expanded functionality and more detailed information in the future.
Oh on a side note you don’t actually need to have a sitemap up to use this feature. Just add your site and verify it within your account and you are good to go.
