Cross-submissions via robots.txt on Sitemaps.org

Posted by Prashanth Koppula, Product Manager

Last spring, the Sitemaps protocol was expanded to include the autodiscovery of Sitemaps using robots.txt to let us and other search engines supporting the protocol know about your Sitemaps. We subsequently also announced support for Sitemap cross-submissions using Google Webmaster Tools, making it possible to submit Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host. So it was only time before we took the next logical step of marrying the two and allowing Sitemap cross-submissions using robots.txt. And today we're doing just that.

We're making it easier for webmasters to place Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single host and then letting us know by including the location of these Sitemaps in the appropriate robots.txt.

How would this work? Say for example you want to submit a Sitemap for each of the two hosts you own, www.example.com and host2.google.com. For simplicity's sake, you may want to host the Sitemaps on one of the hosts, www.example.com. For example, if you have a Content Management System (CMS), it might be easier for you to change your robots.txt files than to change content in a directory.

You can now exercise the cross-submission support via robots.txt (by letting us know the location of the Sitemaps):

a) The robots.txt for www.example.com would include: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-www-example.xml

b) And similarly, the robots.txt for host2.google.com would include: Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap-host2-google.xml

By indicating in each individual host's robots.txt file where that host's Sitemap lives you are in essence proving that you own the host for which you are specifying the Sitemap. And by choosing to host all of the Sitemaps on a single host, it becomes simpler to manage your Sitemaps.

We are making this announcement today on Sitemaps.org as a joint effort. To see what our colleagues have to say, you can also check out the blog posts published by Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Growing the Webmaster Help Groups Team

Written by Kas, Search Quality Team

One of the ways in which we continuously work to improve our service for users everywhere is to localize and adjust our tools for different regions. In November, we had a chance to introduce our international Webmaster Help Group Team and its guides from Dublin. Today I'm very happy to announce that we've launched three more Google monitored groups in Hebrew, Turkish and Hungarian.

Keeping with tradition, the new guides want to introduce themselves, so please meet our new Webmaster Help Group guides :-)


Turkish Webmaster Help Group
Merhaba! I am Bahar and I am very happy about our brand new Turkish Webmaster Help Group. I will be helping out on any topics related to this new group. Having an engineering background, I've worked in different parts of the IT field as a C and C++ developer and now I work for Google in Dublin. It was quite a big change for me to move here, leaving sunny Istanbul behind. But it was very easy to get used to this new life since I have met really friendly people here who are very enthusiastic about the job they have been doing. You're going to meet a couple of them as well when you keep reading further. Please do not hesitate to have a look at the group and drop your posts either to introduce yourselves or to discuss Webmaster related issues with me and hopefully soon many other helpful, open-minded members!

Hungarian Webmaster Help GroupSziasztok, my name is Tibor, and I am very excited about the launch of the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group. I grew up in the heart of Hungary, in the prosperous and pleasant city of Székesfehérvár, right between Lake Balaton and Budapest. I have an engineering and management background, seasoned with marketing and design experience, and have worked in various assignments, including dozens of web related projects (the first in '94). Today I am a happy owner of a small blog, but have some ambitious plans to start some bigger projects too, to get first hand experience of the constantly growing arsenal of Google's Webmaster Tools! I work primarily on search, dealing with Turkish and Lithuanian languages besides Hungarian. I also oversee trends in a dozen other languages scattered across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Just like my colleague János, I also enjoy old-school times with StarCraft, and my "weaknesses" also include Guitar Hero and the Nintendo Wii. As Webmaster Tools is now available in Hungarian, I look forward to hearing from you in the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group and to engage myself in vibrant discussions :-)
- Tibor
Hungarian Webmaster Help GroupSziasztok! My name is János and I'm in charge of the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group, too. I studied linguistics and worked in the IT industry before I ended up with Google in Ireland. Currently my primary work focus is search in several languages. In the past I've been lucky to support a wide range of different markets including Russian, Turkish, Polish and many more. Well, I like learning languages, as you might guess. I'm running my own website where I develop content, sometimes I need to troubleshoot it as well - no crawling/indexing issues yet though - I'm a happy Webmaster Tools user ;-) When I don't work, I'm usually at home surfing the Internet or leading my zealous Protoss forces against other races in the StarCraft universe. Please drop by the Hungarian Help Group and introduce yourself, too! My guide colleague Tibor and I are eagerly waiting to help you with webmaster issues.
- János

Improvements to iGoogle Gadgets for Webmaster Tools

by John Blackburn and Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools team

We launched Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets last month with excitement—and curiosity. Would you find them useful? We thought you might appreciate the ability to create better "dashboards" for your sites, but there's no better way to tell for sure other than to get it out so you can use it.

After our initial release, we saw clear interest in the gadgets, and plenty of suggestions for improvement. So we've spent the past several weeks working on various areas. The biggest improvements are probably for those of you with more than one site: when you add a new tab of gadgets, your gadgets will now default to the site you were viewing when you added them to your iGoogle page. Additionally, gadgets now retain settings as a group, so if you change the site for any gadget in a group, the next time you refresh that page, all the gadgets will show data for that site. And gadgets now resize dynamically, so they take up less room.

Other cosmetic and usability improvements will benefit everyone. We shortened the tab's title to "Webmaster Tools" to save space on your iGoogle page, and added a Google logo/watermark to each gadget to help distinguish them as a group. We think the gadgets look a lot better, with alternating background colors for table rows to make them easier to differentiate, and improved layout in general. The Top Search Queries gadget now shows each query's position, too.



Some of you did tell us you want a 4-column layout, but we feel that the information we display—including some fairly wide URLS—is better suited to 3 columns. If you do want 4 columns, remember that you can choose "edit this tab" yourself to select an alternate layout.

We really appreciate your feedback on these early gadgets, and hope these improvements make them even more useful.

As always, please let us know what you think.