Google has added some new webmaster tools to its sitemaps console. The first gives you information on Googlebot’s activity on your site. It lists number of pages crawled per day, number of kilobytes downloaded each day and the average time spent downloading a page. Click the thumbnail to see a larger view. You can see that this site has few pages but it is growing a little each day.

Control Crawl RateThe next new feature allows you to take control of how often Googlebot crawls your site. Googlebot places some load on your server and you can set the crawl rate to “slower” to reduce this load or if your pages change less often and don’t need crawling as frequently. If Google think your site can handle the bandwidth and Googlebot has the ability to crawl your site faster then the “faster” option becomes available. This increases how often the bot visits your site.

There are also a couple of additional features. The first is the ability to opt in to Google Image Labeler. This allows people to label the images on your website. The final addition is a URL count in the sitemaps tab. This tells you how many of your sitemap URLs Googlebot is crawling.