I don’t look at Google Sitemaps that often, I have an account that has sitemaps and we’ve tried to get 11 million urls indexed - right now we’re at about 3 million.  I spoke to Vanessa Fox a couple of months ago at Webmasterworld and suggested ideas of how I’d like Google Sitemaps improved. Vanessa is the lead Google Engineer for Sitemaps and she listened to what I, and others, had to say.

One new feature was in the Google Operating System Blog and allows the site administrator (who has access to Google Sitemaps) to control the speed of Google’s crawl of the site.   This can be very useful, esp with sites that are full of multimedia (aren’t all servers full of multimedia these days?) and / or large sites that have many users.   Crawls can actually slow down a site because the webserver needs to serve the search engine crawler pages from the site - thereby taking bandwidth away from your "human" users.  It’s always a balancing act - and now Google allows some webmasters control over this with a selection of 5 rates that Google can crawl a site that has sitemaps on it.

"Bigmouthmedia reports that Google Sitemaps has a new feature that allows you to choose how often Googlebot crawls your site. You can select from 5 values, from slowest to fastest, but you must know that a faster crawl uses more bandwidth. For the moment, this feature is still experimental, so you may not find it in your Google Sitemaps account.

"We are testing an alpha version of our new tool with a small percentage of webmasters who use Sitemaps. You should leave this control at the Normal setting unless you are having trouble with the speed at which Googlebot is crawling your server.

Simply select the rate at which you would like the Googlebot to crawl your server and click save. During this stage of testing, we will evaluate requests to determine the best way of using this data and providing this tool to everyone."

Google Sitemaps, recently rebranded as Google Webmaster Central, is a control panel for webmasters, where they can find statistics about searches, crawling errors and submit sitemaps so that Google finds their pages faster."

But there are other things that have been added, things I asked Vanessa for, and I’m happy Google responded. 

See this link at the bottom (Download all query stats for this site) - I was one of the people who asked for this (I’m sure others asked for it as well).   I was able to download several MB of query data that told me the page, the queries, the number of queries for each page, and the type of search the traffic came from.

This can be very useful when you add it to your site analytics.

You can also select top searches by type and location - very nice!

I’m of the opinion, more and more, that every site should have a Google Sitemaps account, if for nothing else - because the majority of web search traffic is usually from Google and anything that helps make your site easier to crawl, provides more information for Google to crawl the site - will help with traffic and site optimization.