I can’t express how happy I am to see a real live API available for Google Webmaster Tools. The announcement came late Friday, telling webmasters and developers that they can now use an API to access and communicate data back and forth to Google for the Webmaster Tools portion of the site.

The tool supports some but not all of Webmaster Tools features. It gives you two overall capabilities, one with managing site and the other with managing Sitemaps. You can do the following:

Managing SitesRetrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster ToolsAdd your sites to Webmaster ToolsVerify your sites in Webmaster ToolsRemove your sites from Webmaster Tools
Working with SitemapsRetrieve a list of your submitted SitemapsAdd Sitemaps to Webmaster ToolsRemove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools

As you can see, it doesn’t allow you to manage everything with your sites. The key missing component to most SEOs is the linkage data. You can’t build a tool to analyze your links. You also can’t access diagnostic data or statistics data. Not yet. I am sure it will all come down the road. This first step shows that Google obviously is working towards the API, they built out some core features now and I suspect that if these core features are used, the other features will continue to be built out.

For more information about the new API, check out http://code.google.com/apis/webmastertools/docs/developers_guide.html.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.