Just in from Bigmouthmedia comes a report that Google Sitemaps, recently re-branded as Google Webmaster Central,  has implemented a fantastic new feature, letting you decide just how often Google crawls your site!

5 Values are available, ranging from Fastest to Slowest. It needs to be kept in mind that the faster values use the most bandwidth so don’t miscalculate when choosing.

However this innovation is still in the trial stages still, so don’t be surprised if you can’t locate it on your Google Sitemaps account just yet.

Spokesperson for Google Sitemaps explains:

“We are testing an alpha version of our new tool with a small percentage of webmasters who use Sitemaps. You should leave this control at the Normal setting unless you are having trouble with the speed at which Googlebot is crawling your server.

Simply select the rate at which you would like the Googlebot to crawl your server and click save. During this stage of testing, we will evaluate requests to determine the best way of using this data and providing this tool to everyone.”

The purpose behind Google Sitemaps is to provide a control panel for webmasters, offering statistics on searches, revealing crawling errors and allowing the submission of sitemaps which enable Google to locate their pages faster.