To help the web property owners to better understand what interaction their website is having with the search engines, Google has developed what they call Webmaster Central. It is a collection of tools and reports that give an insight in to how the Google Bot interacts with a website. This data is often very useful for debugging problems that might be occurring with a website such as indexing issues, problems with a site map or just to tell Google what region to associate a domain with. For country specific TLD’s such as .co.uk this is pre configured. Think of Webmaster Central as a service centre for websites.
A recent indexing issue on Swansea.info after the re-launch was dramatically highlighted by webmaster central. The problem was first highlighted when the homepage was not being shown for brand related searches and the total indexed page count visible through WMC was reporting lower than normal figures. The total size of the site map is some 1740 URLs of which 1268 have been indexed by Google but at the time of the problem this was showing only 500.
A point to note here is that if a site has been running for a period of time before a site map has been added, the first few weeks after adding a site map will show how many pages are indexed. This initial period might highlight some site structure problems which are causing indexing issues such as Google Bot not being able to crawl drop down menus.
