So the time has come to try out Google’s webmaster tools, personally at first I thought this was quite useless but then again it gives you some possibilities to alter or specify the ways the googlebot works on your site to some extend.
Another good feature is the statistic it gives you on what the googlebot encountered while crawling your site.
In this small article I’ll be giving you a quick tour of it and what it has to offer you if you haven’t tried out it yet.
To access the webmaster tools you need to go to this address webmasters tools where you set up your site
Step 1 - Setting it up
You are taken to a presentation page where you simply login to your Google account or create one if you don’t have one yet.
The next step is to register you domain name to the site that is yours, simply type it in and press OK.
Now you need to verify that the site you entered really is your and not somebody else’s.
You’ll see a big yellow box saying just that so press the link and you’ll be taken to the next step.
Here you’ll get two different ways to use so you can verify your site.
Either you add a Meta tag into your index file or create a html file with the given name which option you choose is entirely up to you but personally I preferred the html file approach.
Step 2 – The administrative functions
I’ll begin with the web crawl function which basically lists all the errors and problems that the bot encountered while crawling the site.
This is a nice feature as you get informed of possible problems you did not know existed and that can have caused the bot to not crawl the page as it should.
Now you can spot them and correct it quickly instead of having it this ways for weeks or even months not knowing something was wrong.
Analysis of the robots.txt
Here you can see if the Google bot could access or find you robots.txt something you don’t want to have missed if you let say didn’t want some files to be indexed and by not finding robots.txt the bot did anyway so check that everything is alright here.
For you that do not know what robots.txt is, well there is a link to a guide from Google if you want to read about it.
Bur basically it’s a file that the bot reads to find out what it is allowed and isn’t allowed to index, mainly admin sites etc.
But be careful to list secret or sensitive directories or pages there as someone can just visit the robots.txt and find out about them anyway. Just don’t have a direct link to them on the site and type them in yourself or have them shown only when an admin has logged in and you won’t have the bot indexing them and people not see them.
Crawl Rate
The more popular your site is the more often the bot will crawl your site and in Crawl Rate you can see just this thing, how often the spider/bot crawls your site, you also have the ability to change the speed if you like.
Here you will see the time it took, how many sites and how many kilobytes it downloaded which should give you a nice overlook at how often and long time the bot spends on your site.
Preferred Domain
This simply gives you the ability to choose if you would prefer the domain to contain www before your domain name or not.
It’s nothing you yourself can choose, most likely Google will display the queries with the domain of your choice but as it states on that site they cannot guarantee it so the best thing is to setup the .httacces file so that redirects automatically to your preferred domain and you won’t have to worry about this anymore.
Enhanced Image Search
This is mainly for the image harvesting bot of Google but this feature is cool.
If you do not know what that means then here’s some facts that should put you back on track.
Basically when you allow or set this feature to on you allow your images to be described with key words.
There is a group of volunteers that handles this description of the images which makes it a hell of a lot easier to find the images on Google’s image searches.
Let’s face it a image of a dog named 00001.jpg will not show up when you search “dog” but with this feature it will eventually get the key word “dog” in it.
I do not know how large that group of people who are doing this is or how long time it takes for them to process the image so I do not know if I would turn this on if I had a large image gallery or something similar.
URL Removals
When you change something like the structure of your site then many of the old addresses that don’t exist anymore on your site unfortunately still exist in the Google index.
This can mess up and can give you errors reported from the bot while trying to access those urls.
Let’s face it you don’t want them still alive in the Google index nor want the people getting the addresses in Google queries.
So here you can specify addresses that you know shouldn’t be indexed anymore thus eliminating that problem.
Indexing Statistics
Now I’ve moved from diagnostics to statistics which basically is a tool that shows have popular your site is in terms of pagerank.
Basically which page has the highest pagerank etc.
Query Stats
This tools is very useful if you deal with SEO or just want to know what queries were used to get to your site.
It doesn’t just show on what places your site was shown in Google for specific keywords but also which key words got the best view-to-click rate.
Well if any of the tools should be my favorite this would be it!
Page analysis
Another interesting and good tool that Google offers which basically shows you how the Google bot sees your site.
The data you see is the statistics of the most popular links to your site, also key words that are found on your site and in links to your site.
Now this is good, let say you have a site about cars and here you see that the top keywords for your site content are boats and motorcycles then you know that you have a problem.
At the top you should preferably see cars or the names of cars not boats and motorcycles right?
Well here you can see how the Google bot sees it and do something about it if you find out that the case is like my example.
Index stats
Now I have to say that this has to be the least useful as the same effect can be made by manually typing it into Google search, but well I guess that along with the other tools this becomes a nice feature as we can admit that we are lazy, pressing your mouse button is so much quicker than typing them all in.
Here you’ll see how many pages/subpages are indexed in Google, how many sites have links to your site and so on.
External Links
Let’s move on to the links section and the external links.
Here you will find stats about all the external links to your site and to which exact page or subpage they are linking to.
If you press the number next to the urls you’ll be presented with a list of the links and from what page.
Internal Links
This works basically like the previous one, the only difference is that it as you might have figured out lists the links to specific subpages that are found on your own site.
If you press the number next to the urls you will be presented with the pages where the links are found.
Step 3 – Sitemaps
Here you can add your sitemap to Google, to create a sitemap you’ll need a tool that will create and update a xml file in the correct format, Wordpress has nice plugin that does this for you which you can download and install.
However the good thing with Google is that it offers you some options to the xml version.
You can choose your feed (RSS) or a text file where each row is a url to a subpage on your site.
Just remember that the point of the sitemap is so that the bot finds all your subpages on your site so update it or create an automated process that does this for you.
The sitemap.xml should be placed in your root folder and cannot exceed 10MB if it’s too large you can compress it with GZ and place sitemap.xml.gz in the root folder.
On this page you’ll find basic statistcs about your sitemap, the good thing is it shows the errors that were encounted. In my case for example I had a broken url in my sitemap that I now have corrected thanks to these stats.
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