Archive for October, 2006

Google Reaches Out to Webmasters with New Tools

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

About a month ago, Google introduced their Webmaster Central, a set of features designed to help webmasters learn how to ensure their content is indexed by Google. In this post I’ll explore Google’s Webmaster Central features, including the new Webmaster Tools (formerly Google Sitemaps).

Web site managers are of course interested in ensuring that their site is positioned well in the major search engines. It makes good sense to use any tools available to help achieve this goal. Last month, I discussed the Yahoo! Site Explorer tools that help webmasters obtain information about how their site is indexed in Yahoo!. Recently, Google has made a similar set of tools available to webmasters to assist them in getting their content indexed by Google. The first thing to make note of when visiting Google’s Webmaster Central is the information available from three valuable sources.

  • A Webmaster Blog has been launched, which contains official news and tips related to indexing and crawling web site content. It’s a good idea for webmasters to review the content of the blog on a regular basis for useful information. For example, a recent post by Matt Cutts provides tips on how to verify that a web spider labelled as Googlebot is authentic.
     
  • In addition to the Webmaster Blog, a Google Webmaster Help news group has been created. This is essentially a community of webmasters who post on issues related to Google, and sometimes converse with helpful Google employees. You’ll find a good deal of information there and if you sign up to be a member of the group, you can then post questions to be answered by members of the community.
     
  • A third information resource is the updated Webmaster Help Center which contains the answers to many frequently asked questions. It’s probably best to look for answers to questions at the Help Center first, then the Webmaster Blog, and finally the Webmaster Google Group.

 

In the past, I have written about the Google Sitemaps program. Google Sitemaps has now been renamed to Google Webmaster Tools, and contains the same features as the Sitemaps program, as well as some new additions. The Webmaster Tools are quite useful, and provide an informative snapshot into the way Google views a web site. In order to make the best use of these tools, you’ll first need to create a Google account (it’s free) and then verify that you are the site owner. One easy way to verify your site is to simply upload a file with a given file name to your site’s root directory.

Once you have verified the site, you’ll have access to detailed information about it, organized into three categories: Diagnostic, Statistics, and Sitemaps.
 


     

  • Under the Diagnostic category, you’ll find a summary which lets you know if you have pages indexed by Google, and what date the Googlebot last visited the site. There is also a list of URLs that the Googlebot had difficulty crawling, an analysis of your robots.txt file, and an area to specify your preferred domain.
     
  • The Statistics area provides interesting information about searches done on Google related to your site. The top search queries for which Google returned pages from your site are displayed, and these can be filtered by location as well as search type (images, mobile devices, or web search). The top search query clicks are also shown, which are the top queries that actually directed traffic to your web site. Additional information available includes the page rank distribution for your pages, common words Google found in your site content, and common words in external links to your site.
     
  • The Sitemaps area allows you to specify a sitemap page to explicitly let Google know the URLs on your site you wish to have indexed. There are several different formats that you can use, but the easiest one to create is probably a simple text file containing a list of URLs.
     

 

Conclusion
The new Google Webmaster tools provide an excellent glimpse into how Google views a web site. If you manage a web site, I highly recommend that you verify your site with Google and take a look at the information available. The tools are free and easy to use, so there is really no reason not to use them on a periodic basis to ensure that Google is indexing your site content without any difficulty.

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