Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It's no wonder: the secret is out - as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn't guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better. Together with the Webmaster Tools design update ,

While working on our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we sometimes run into situations where important content is not publicly available. In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called "First Click Free." First Click Free has two main goals: To include highly relevant content in Google's search index.

Running a website can be complicatedâ€"so we've provided Google Webmaster Tools to help webmasters to recognize potential issues before they become real problems. Some of the issues that you can spot there are relatively small )such as having duplicate titles and descriptions (, other issues can be bigger )such as your website not being reachable(. While Google Webmaster Tools can't tell you exactly what you need to change,

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich Last Thursday, many of you just couldn't get enough of us and joined our second live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune." It was an action-packed session with live presentations, questions and answers and chatting about cats and other important topics. Over the course of an hour and a half, we made four presentations, received over 600 questions and passed around close to 500 chat messages.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski and the European Guides Team, Dublin A year ago Google Guides from the Search Quality Team started monitoring Google Webmaster Help Groups in European languages. It has been an interesting time and a great, rewarding experience for all those involved :o(. We have enjoyed building and growing our communities with webmasters across Europe and we hope you have as well. The feedback we have been receiving since the beginning has been encouraging,

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich Setting up and running a website is getting easier and easier, and it's wonderful to see so many new webmasters sharing their voices with the world! For you as a webmaster it's pretty easy going... until you run into an issue that you just can't seem to solve on your own. Maybe some technical issues were flagged in your Webmaster Tools account; maybe you're just trying to get your robots.

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich The latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer )beta( just added a neat feature to help users arrive at your website, or at least see your content, even when things go awry. It's frustrating for your users to mistype your URL and receive a generic "404 - Not Found" or try to access a part of your site that might be down. Regardless of your site being useful and information-rich , when these issues arise,

Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich In writing and maintaining accurate meta tags )e.g., descriptive titles and robots information(, you help Google to more accurately crawl, index and return your site in search results. Meta tags provide information to all sorts of clients, such as browsers and search engines. Just keep in mind that each client will likely only interpret the meta tags that it uses,