I came across a post yesterday on the Google Webmaster Central blog that mentioned some improvements Google had just made to its Sitemap system.
For all you Webmasters out there, the new Sitemap page layout is much cleaner, and now you can test a sitemap before you submit it… Result! Google will send out a Googlebot for a live fetch of the Sitemap (this takes a few seconds) and then generate a Sitemap report, this incorporates a new way of displaying errors which better expose what types of problems a Sitemap has.
Hats off to big G for the update, this new test feature will help webmasters and SEO people identify indexing issues sooner rather than later, thus helping a site (and all its pages) rank higher in Google’s organic search results.