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.