Google announces sitemaps, ping beacon

Google today unveiled Google Sitemaps, a way for webmasters to let Google know about the files on their site as they are published. Webmasters can create a XML file describing the files available on their site and ping Google or simply ping with the location of a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or Atom file with each update. You can sign in to your Google account to add and track sitemaps.

Update: User-Agent seems to be new: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” coming from 66.249.66.1.