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Google Webmaster Tools just launched Sitemap warnings. This is pretty cool because it breaks down problems with your Sitemap into two parts: warnings and errors. Before, every problem was classified as an error. Now, the only problems that are listed as errors are those that make it so your Sitemap can't be accepted and parsed. For instance, an invalid file format (such as an HTML File) would be an error.

A warning is something like an invalid date on an entry within the Sitemap file. For something like that, the Sitemap would still be accepted, just the date value wouldn't be used.

In addition, it looks like they've launched some new alerts for the warnings section. They'll crawl a sampling of the URLs listed in the Sitemap and see if there are any problems with them. If there are, those will be reported. This may seem on first glance to be the same as the Crawl Errors report, but it's actually different. The crawl errors are errors Googlebot had accessing pages during the regular crawl process that is part of indexing. These new crawling problems are reported before the regular crawling and indexing process.

You can use this to fix problems before Googlebot comes around trying to index the pages (which could help prevent a slowdown of the indexing process) and also can use it as a sanity check to make sure the process you use to create the Sitemap isn't creating a bunch of bogus URLs.

Good job webmaster central team!
7 Comments     

Comments

from Sebastian 356 days ago #
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Indeed, that's pretty cool. Must be a good feeling to see your baby evolve :)

from dannysullivan 355 days ago #
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Vanessa, hope you won't be upset, but I changed the headline a bit to try and bring in some more sphinns -- this really should go to the home page. Wait a minute! This might be time to test out the ability for Sphinn editors to decide to make something hot....

from dannysullivan 355 days ago #
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Yep, that did the trick :)

from AndrewGirdwood 355 days ago #
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Yeah. http://sphinn.com/live shows you making the comment and then the post going hot. The power of an editor! :)

from vanessafox 355 days ago #
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Why you always gotta be changing my headlines?

Oh, wait. Because you make them better, dammit. Perhaps you should give headline writing class. You know you'd have at least me and the Google blog authors in attendance. :)

from pkudel4 353 days ago #
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Nice headline is always nice ;)

from htwy 353 days ago #
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are you available in real life to modify the words that come out of my mouth for maximum impact? :)


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