Google announced in the Google Sitemaps blog an improved interface, more tools for webmasters and a notification area explaining to site owners of potential problems with their website that could draw penalties.

The new interface and reporting is an improvement. The new “indexing snapshot” provides:

• If site is in the index
• When Googlebot last accessed the home page
• If some pages of the site are partially indexed
• If the home page is currently inaccessible
• If Googlebot has encountered a large number of errors when trying to crawl the site

There is also a new webmaster help center. It includes a central place for webmasters to get more information about Googles guidelines, details on Googlebot, ranking, indexing and about sitemaps.

Interestingly Google has added a section that notifies webmasters if their site is in a violation of Google guidelines that may result in penalties. While I hope to never find any messages there, I applaud Google trying to improve its relationship with the webmaster community more. I think that the latest improvements will generate goodwill.