Google announced that it is including some new information in the Webmaster Tools sitemaps feature. This includes details based on content-type, like stats from Web, Videos, Images and News featured more prominently. “This lets you see how many items of …

Google now lets you submit various content types in one sitemap. For example, if you want to submit videos, images, mobile URLs, etc. in the same sitemap, you can do so.

Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps.

Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under the "Too many Sitemaps" error:

Google wants webmasters who offer video content to be able to get their videos displayed in search results more easily. The company has announced that that it now supports Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa, which are both markup formats that allow webmasters to specify information that is important to video indexing.

Google has acknowledged some issues that Google News publishers have encountered with Webmaster Tools. The company posted to the Google News blog to let publishers know what the issues were and that they are working on fixing them.

Google has been working on updates to how it uses sitemaps. Considering research highlighted in this study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.

Last week, Google announced the end of some of its services, and among them was the ability for users to upload videos to Google Video. They said they would be refocusing their attention on building a more comprehensive video search engine, and why not? They’ve already got YouTube.

Google has introduced a new Sitemap Generator for webmasters to help them create better sitemap files. Google had previously introduced one back in 2005, and watched many other people make their own, but this one is different they say.

Submitting sitemaps to Google has been simplified, the company announced this morning. Webmasters will no longer have to specify which type of sitemap they are submitting. Google will determine the filetype for them.

Google still prefers webmasters use Google Webmaster Tools for submission, though, but they also accept files listed in the robots.txt file, or submitted via the HTTP ping method.

Google has come up with another nice webmaster tool.

According to Google Webmaster Central Blog, after numerous requests from Webmasters to integrate Webmaster Tools for third-parties, Google has finally released Webmaster Tools API, a tool that integrates API (Application Programming Interface) into Webmaster Tools.

According to Search Engine Watch, Google has changed the way it defines ‘Doorway Pages’.

The Google News Team has an interesting blog post about the "truths and myths" of how Google includes and ranks articles.

Some of the facts that stand out include "Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH. While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself."

One sitemap may now support multiple sites on different hosts thanks to a new addition to the Sitemaps protocol.