Yesterday Google Sitemaps announced a big round of improvements and tweaks which were based on user input.  Congrats to the Google Sitemaps team on a job well done.  Here are the highlights.

New verification method - Google now will allow you to verify ownership of a site by adding a meta tag to your homepage.   SITE OWNERS TAKE NOTICE.  Most sites don’t need to worry.  But this could open up certain sites to be verified by non-owners.  If someone verifies they own your site they can see alot of interesting data from Google about you.  Here is an example of what to look for.  meta content=”4rfv5tgb6yhn7ujm8ikm” name=”verify”

New layout - The old design was not bad it just needed a few tweaks and that is what happened.  They have a nice cleaner layout which helps people who are in a rush and not paying attention (like me).

Spam Violation Notice - If you have verified ownership via Google Sitemaps, Google may display an alert if you violate some of their guidelines.  I expect Google to be careful revealing information hear because they don’t want spammers to use this tool to determine the spam filters.

Spam Reporting - Collaborators rejoice, you can now use Sitemaps to submit a spam report which will get more attention than the normal report.  Why?  Because you need to be logged into Sitemaps.  So if you are lying they know who you are.  If you are thinking of submitting a spam report on your competition think twice.  Does you site have any violations that need to be cleaned up?  Do you really want the Google spam police looking at your industry?  Generally I find it is better to reverse engineer what your competition is doing and just do it better than they are.

If you have any questions or comments the Google Sitemaps team is very open and very active in participating at http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps.

Technorati Tags: google sitemaps, spam report