The Google Webmaster team announced three main things at their blog over the past day or so. The first we covered, was the new Google help discussions area. The second was adding a new settings link in webmaster tools to consolidate some features. The third item is enhancements to controlling your crawl rate.

Let me take you through the last two in more detail.

Google has moved four features to this new settings area. The features include setting your geographic target, controlling your preferred domain, opting in to enhanced image search and setting your crawl rate control. The crawl rate control will be discussed below, cause that feature was slightly changed. Here is a picture of the new settings page:

Google enhanced the crawl rate controls to let you either choose to let Google determine the best control rate or let advanced users pick their own crawl rates. Do note, like I said at the Search Engine Roundtable, some webmasters are reporting that they are unable to change their control rates. Here is a picture of the new AJAX slider you can use to change your crawl rate at a more granular level:

Related Topics: Google: Webmaster Central | How To: SEO | Top News

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz