It seems that the “meet the engineers” session at the Google Dance during last August’s SES San Jose has provided many useful ideas for the improvement of Webmaster Tools. New features are coming thick and fast to Google’s webmaster tools with two new additions within the last week, cross site submissions and better geographic control. First we’ll look at cross site submissions.

Do you have a multitude of sites that you administer through Google Webmaster tools? We all know it can sometimes be difficult to keep all the sitemap.xml files up-to-date and uploaded to all those seperate web-server FTP accounts, especially if you do not have any sort of automated system to do it for you.

In the past you could only store a Sitemap on its respective host, but this restriction has now been lifted. As long as you can ‘prove’ you control the host, by the verification process in Webmaster tools, you can store the Sitemap on any other host that you control. This means that you could store all the individual Sitemaps on your own server or even have URLs for multiple websites contained within one Sitemap file.
There is one caveat however, in that this will only work for Google at the moment, although they do assure us that they are talking to the other search engines that support the Sitemap Protocol.
I would imagine that the simplest implementation would take the form of a change to the Sitemap declaration within the robots.txt file. As the site ‘owner’ would legitimately have access to the robots.txt anyway, this would neatly resolve the security issue that Google was concerned about. Check out the original Google Sitemap Cross Submissions post.

You can now control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-sub-domain or a per-directory level. It’s as simple as adding a new website entry to your dashboard for the domain, sub-domain or directory that contains the international content, then using the “set geographic target” interface from the “tools” menu to specify the country.

Although this will work well for sites that determine their international pages using a separate domain or directory structure, it will not help dynamic sites that use a URL parameter for this purpose. Perhaps this is a future addition that we can look forward to. For more information read the Country Associations for your Content post from the Google Blog.