Google Webmaster Tools were originally released as Google Sitemaps, and were the place to manage your XML sitemap. Since then, they’ve evolved to such a point that you no longer need have an XML sitemap on your site for you to take advantage of the tools available. So what does it give you?

• View any errors on your site (missing pages, pages excluded from indexing by your robots.txt, etc).
• Validate your robots.txt file (a file used to tell the spiders what not to index, as well as other special commands).
• Manage your site verification (so the webmater tools know to give you access to the data).
• View your crawl rate stats, and change the frequency that the engines spider your site (if the spiders crawl you so much that they bog your servers down, you can tell them to slow down the speed of their indexing).
• Set your canonicalization preference (do you want the site indexed with a www or not?).
• Authorize Google to label and display your images through Google Images.
• View the page rank of your pages (not the actual numbers, just high, medium, low or not ranked).
• See which page has the highest page rank (not always your home page).

• See what searches on Google one of your pages showed up for, and what position you ranked (handy for finding long tail searches that you may not have realized people were searching for - i.e. this site shows up 5th for the search term “different tigers and maps“).
• A list of the words that occur on your site (shows you what Google is seeing).
• A list of the anchor text that people are linking to your site with (handy for quickly seeing any negative or positive news about your company that you need to be aware of).
• A list of external links into your site, by each page on your site, with the ability to drill down by page, and see the actual URLs that point to each page, along with their Google Page Rank.
• A list of internal links on your site (helpful to validate that the internal site structure that you believe should work great, is actually seen to do so by the Google spider).
• Sitemaps, any XML sitemap that’s been created and validated for the site (a sitemap for your site created in a format specifically for the spiders to read and digest).

So this tool has evolved over time into a very useful tool for anyone with their own site. Simply log in and validate your site, then you can get in and play with all of the tools / data above, not bad for for a tool that you get for free…