All new!

9/30/2005 11:27:00 PM

Posted by Vanessa Fox

We’ve added some new features to Google Sitemaps.

Date stamps for statistics
For information we provide once you’ve verified your site, we now let you know when we tried to crawl the URLs we tell you about.

Enhanced support for special characters in URLs
Note that the Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters, certain control codes, or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains out-of-range characters, escape them when you submit the URL. Otherwise, you'll receive an error when you try to submit it. You can find more information on escaping out-of-range characters by doing a Google search for [html escape codes]. All URLs must follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs and the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs.

Documentation updates
We’ve updated the documentation for these new features, as well as added information about the latest version of the Sitemap Generator script and about OAI-PMH submissions (both of which we talked about in earlier blog posts). We’ve also provided some information about errors you might come across when you submit a Sitemap. All we’ve made these updates in every language for which we provide documentation.

Resolved issues
And we’ve resolved two issues with this release that you brought to our attention in the Google Group.

• Some of you experienced trouble when clicking on the verify link on the My Sitemaps page. Instead of being asked to verify, the My Sitemaps page simply reloaded. We've fixed this.
• Some of you had trouble adding Sitemaps from Internet Explorer. This happened when you pressed Enter rather than clicked the Submit URL link. You saw a message that said your Sitemap was submitted, but the Sitemap wasn’t added to your My Sitemaps page. We've fixed this too.

If either happen to you, or if you experience any other trouble, please let us know by posting in the Google Group.

Several of these features were a direct result of your feedback. Once again, we appreciate your input during our beta period.