Search Engine Journal posed the question “Should You Use Google Webmaster Tools?” and got some pretty good reponses. I think when talking about this, you need to consider the three big ones: Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live.com Webmaster Central.
Some of the questions posted by SEJ (paraphrased):
- Is listing your sitemap in your robots.txt enough?
- If you own multiple sites, should you set up separate Google accounts?
- Do these services give too much insight to the companies providing them?
- Or are they the best things ever?
Overall, the responses were very positive. A few people were neutral, but almost no one was negative.
Taking Google as an example, I look at it like this: They already know everything about my sites. I use AdSense and I use Analytics, so every detail is at their disposal. I figure it can’t hurt to make sure they have an up-to-date sitemap for each of my sites, which can only help to get content in their index more quickly.
As a general rule, I create a sitemap and add it to all three services for every new site I create.
What do you think?
[…] Google XML Sitemaps — Creates a sitemap of your posts and pages, which can then be uploaded to the various webmaster tools. […]