Google Webmaster tools

Vanessa Fox has published the last post from Inside Google Sitemaps...

We're surrounded by moving boxes and construction dust. To better reflect our goal to provide tools and information to keep you, the webmasters, informed and help you increase your crawl coverage and visibility on Google, we're renaming Google Sitemaps to Google webmaster tools. The Sitemaps protocol remains unchanged and Sitemaps submission mechanisms and reporting is still available from the Sitemaps tab. We're also renaming our blog and Google Group to be more broadly focused on webmaster topics.

You can find handy links to all the tools, the new blog, Google Group, help center and more from our newly launched Google webmaster central. Join us at the blog's new location at googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com where you'll learn about all the exciting things we're planning. Oh, and please don't forget to update your bookmarks and feed!

So, what's new ?

• new name
• new design
• new RSS feed that you have to add to your RSS reader
• ... and that's all.

Other features are expected, but for the moment there's nothing new. And http://www.google.com/webmasters/ works only in English at this time. I have discovered a kind of "AOL issue" with a tool from Sitemaps called "site status wizard" : an example with this blog. But there's nothing really disturbing.

EDIT : Sorry, I was too fast, or Sitemaps Webmaster tools team was too slow. There are new features in this update : "preferred domain", downloading query stats, seeing revamped crawl errors, "manage site verification" and more.