We have often written about the major search engines and how they need to improve. We have also discussed about how important it is for the webmasters to know which rules and guidelines they should follow. The majority of webmasters aren't trying to fool the search engines; they just want to have their Web sites indexed and findable. How they can do that without being mod rewrite experts or preventing their Web sites from falling into duplicate penalty traps or sandboxes is perhaps their biggest challenge and even bigger than the designing and making of their Web sites.

Lately there have been many positive signs coming from some of the major search engines and the latest is more webmaster tools from Google. Google Sitemaps is turning into a great help for webmasters. According to the blog the WWW problem is now over, which must be a relief to many webmasters. Webmasters can give instructions via their Google Sitemaps account on which method they prefer, with the WWW or without the WWW in front of their domain name. The Google Sitemaps interface is simple, easy to understand and webmasters can quickly see crawl errors, data and analysis. Any webmaster that hasn’t yet signed up for a Google Sitemaps account should really do so and learn how to use it.

We have also noticed improvements in Google’s search results. According to our own experience the tools and codes webmasters have at their disposal to give instructions to Googlebot on which Web pages to crawl and which to skip are working better than before. It looks like the freshness in search results is improving, at least for the Web sites we monitor on a daily basis, although we would like to see the “sort results by date" tab appear one day.

We have said before that the best way to combat search engine spam and improve Web users search experience is to educate webmasters and make the guidelines on how to get a Web site successfully crawled and indexed more transparent. We hope other major search engines will follow in Google’s footsteps and improve their support for the honest and hard working webmasters.  The changes and improvements have already begun and we, the webmasters, should use the tools and information, already available to us, positively and constructively.