Google Webmaster Tools – Data from the Horse’s Mouth
If you have a web site and have not already signed up for a Google Webmaster Account, you are missing out.
All you need is a Google Account and you are set. Just go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and log in using your existing Google account, or create an account if you don’t have one.
Once you have logged in you can add all your web sites to the Tools dashboard. You can then verify each of the sites belongs to you by uploading a special file to the root directory of each web site, or by modifying the home page to include a special META tag. Full instructions are given as soon as you add a new site.
Your Google Webmaster Account Will . . .
- Indicate the number site pages included in the Google index
- Allow you to specify a XML sitemap to help Google locate all your pages
- Allow you to remove pages any that are in the index, but shouldn’t be there
- List any pages that are specified in the site map but not found
- Tell you about any internal links on your site that couldn’t be found
- List any duplicate meta descriptions (not good as these are the first indication of a duplicate page)
- Mention any meta descriptions and title tags that are either too long or too short
- Lists any title tags it thinks are totally useless
- Tells you about content Google tried to index but couldn’t
- List the top search engine queries used to find your site in the Google SERPs AND the position you were at in Google’s SERPs for those queries, AND the ones people actually clicked
- Tell you what Googlebot sees when he looks at your site – i.e. does your site have a real theme according to Googlebot.
- Lists all the anchor text used to link to your site – i.e how others see you. Very important as this is also consequently part of how Google sees you.
- A graph of the pagerank of your site’s pages in Google
- Any subscribers to your feed via Google Reader
- A list of all pages with external linsk pointing to them, and how many links each has
- A list of all internal links (now you might wonder why this is interesting – it is because Google has mentioned it here so get internally linking)
- The date of the last time your sitemap.xml file was downloaded.
- A chance to notify Google of the existence of a sitemap.xml file. If you haven’t got a sitemap.xml, get one.
- Ability to use a number of small tools to further enhance Googlebot’s willingness to peruse your site.
- The code to add a Webmaster Tools Gadget to your home page.
And One Last Point
Finally, copiously scattered around Google Webmaster tools pages are links saying thing like “How to Use this data”. Click those links, they contain precious clues.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 10:19 pm and is filed under SEO, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
