I used the Google site maps a long time ago but never really saw any advantages in using it, in fact I became paranoid when a site in the account suddenly dropped in the serps.  I then kind of lost interest in it, because I wasn’t receiving the ground shattering info that I thought I would at the time.

As I’ve been doing quite a bit of SEO work lately, I decided to revisit Site Maps to see if I could get anything else out of it.

On returning to Site Maps, I was surprised but happy to see that Google Site Maps has evolved into what has now become Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools allows web designers to know some more intimate details between their sites and Google’s index. When I first started looking around with a “poor old page rank depleted site” selected, I could see that my site wasn’t banned for any reason, it was well indexed and my robot.txt wasn’t doing any dumb blocking. As the site still ranks ok, I’ve been less paranoid and thanks to this knowlege I’ll just be patient in regards to Google’s public page rank and backlinks results.

Google’s Webmaster Tools also lets you add an XML site map, which for some sites that are hard to crawl, maybe a quicker way to full indexing of your site. A great way to create these site maps is with AuditMyPc’s site map tool. After you have your site map set up, you’ll be able to see in the “Site Maps” section, how may URL’s you have in your site map and more importantly, how many pages Google has indexed to date.

I’ll go into more details soon about these tools but if you haven’t already, they are well worth a look.

It’s 2008 and after almost 10 years of sitting and staring at these 2 monitors, I think its about time I started a blog. I’ve been here in Ibiza trying to re-discover myself and along the way, have discovered much more. This blog is really for myself but hopefully will serve some other purpose in the future.

The great thing about blogging is that there are no rules – you can write what you want to write about when you have time, and be who you are online.

My interests at the moment are flying all over the place but mainly on the 2008 US Elections, which for me, could make or break the situation we are in at the moment, um “end of the world” wise.

But most importantly I want this blog to be a small point of contact for my family in New Zealand who know that I’m not the best communicator. I, Cristina and Lluc miss you all.

After tossing about 50 balls at our son, Lluc, he did finally manage to hit one. No pressure on him but we’re hoping for some kind of tennis star. If not, a poet of some sort would also be ok but podium dancing won’t be an option, sorry Lluc.