Google Web Master Tools is a widely used web interface provided by Google at zero cost. It is used by webmasters to check the index rate and optimizing visibility of their websites. Let's take a look of every tool in GWT.
Webmaster Tools Home:
When you first login in to the webmaster tools, you can see a dashboard with list of all websites which you have in your account, and few links to view all messages, preferences, 'Author Stats' (Labs), and a few miscellaneous links under 'Other Resources'.
All Messages:
Google rarely communicate about your site with Webmasters through messages. But in 2012 some probably wish that they communicated a little low with the amount of "love notes" many SEOs have received. You can see the message here if:
- Google may think that your account might have been hacked
- Google noticed unnatural links pointing to your site
- Google thinks that few links which are pointing to your site may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Under the "Preferences" tab, you can also set e-mail confirmation messages to: 'only important' or 'all messages'.
Labs - Author Stats:
Since authorship is not particular to a single domain, Google access authorship for individual stats as well as all sites you write. But (go Google+!) should have a valid author profile to check the stats. The stats are more interesting and also good for verifying which URL’s are targeting your ugly mug positions in the SERPs.
Other Resources - Rich Snippets/Structured Data:
If you have not used the rich snippets testing tool, which is now known as "structured data", bookmark it now. With rich snippets testing tool you can test URL’s of your website to check if your author profile is linked correctly.
You can also use the rich snippets testing tool to check if you've setup or verified your:
- Author Page
- Name
- Google+ Page as a Publisher
- Any structured data found (reviews, products, song titles, etc) in the type of microdata, microformats, or RDFa
Specific Site Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools:
If you have selected a site after logging, you can see the search tool with details. The site specific dashboard has a nice widget showing:
- Crawl Errors
- URL Errors
- Site Errors
- Health status of DNS, Server Connectivity & Robots.txt
- Overview of Queries
- Sitemaps
Five major sections can be seen once you have selected any site, those sections are: 'Configuration', 'Health', 'Traffic', 'Optimization', and 'Labs'. You can find the most insightful data available in the 'Heath' and 'Traffic' sections, and check what you can get inside Google Analytics.
The 'Configuration' Section:
Settings:
In the settings you can target your website to a certain country, select a particular domain (www or non-www), you can limit the crawl rate of Googlebot if you choose it.
Sitelinks:
Sitelinks are automatically chosen by Google to display the brand related queries below your main URL. If you do not want to show a particular URL under Sitelinks, then you can demote that URL and those demote URL’s will not be shown by Google in the Sitelinks.
URL Parameters
URL parameter is used if your site is having problem with duplicate content or because of variables/parameters in your URL’s, then you can restrict Google from crawling them with this URL parameter tool. Unless you're sure about what you're restricting, don't play with the settings here!
Change of Address
If you want to change your webpage name path, you need to do a 301 redirect, and then make sure Google knows about the new URL first.
Users:
There are three types of users, site owner, full user and restricted user.
Site Owner: He will have complete control over the site. He can view all the site data, and perform all site actions.
Full User: Full users can view full data, and take most actions on the site, but they cannot add or remove owners or users.
Restricted User: Restricted users can only view data, and able to take some actions. Restricted users are good for clients if you want to give them the most view-only access.
Associates:
If someone who is able to act on behalf of your site, then those member can be added as your associates, For example: this setting is a way for members of YouTube's Partner Program (probably not you) who have linked their YouTube Channel with your Webmaster Tools account.
Add an Associate:
- To add an associate, you must be a site owner.
- On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
- Under Configuration, click Associates.
- Click Add a new associate.
- In the text box, type the email address of the associate you want to add.
- Select the type of association you want.
- Click Add.
The 'Health' Section
Crawl Errors:
Crawl Errors provides the required details about your site URL’s that Google is unable to crawl successfully or that returns an HTTP error code. Crawl error lists two type of errors: site error and url error.
Site errors that prevent Googlebot while attempting to connect to your site.
URL errors: Blocking Googlebot from accessing you website specific URL.
Crawl Stats:
The Crawl Stats give suggestions on Googlebot's activity of your website for the last 90 days. These crawl stats implement all content types that we download in the account which are written in CSS, JavaScript, Flash, PDF files, and images. Crawl stats also include AdSense fetches, overview of all Google Services to organize people into groups for sharing across various Google Products like Google Images, Google News, and Google Scholar, etc.
Blocked URL’s Fetch as Googlebot & Submit To Index
Fetch as Googlebot lets you see a page as what Google's spider "sees" on the URL you submit. This tool is used for finding hacked sites as well as looking your site the way Google does. It's a good place to start an SEO audit.
In this year we had a new feature called "Submit to Index". Have you ever changed the title tag and wished Google would update its index faster to get those changes live? 'Submit to Index' can do that. Submitting a page to update in real time in Google indexing can be updated 50 times per month. Very useful for testing on-page changes.
Index Status:
Under health section you make sure to hit 'Advanced' button, where you can see all the interesting index stats about your site which Google shows. Everyday keep an eye on 'Not Selected' number as that button indicates that Google is not crawling your content favorably or you might have a duplicate content issue if that not selected number is rising.
Malware:
If your website has detected malware by Google it will show malware information here. Google pay close attention to the message boxes and will send messages if Malware is detected as well.
The 'Traffic' Section
Search Queries:
This helps to find some keywords for which our site is shown in the Google results page but not clicked. We can find more queries in Google Analytics interface page. Focus on CTR% in search queries, if it is low then our meta descriptions and title tags are not good, so we can add other structured data or a verified author to help CTR rates.
Links to your site:
This provides the top 1000 domains that have links to pages on your site. We can download the links from "Download more sample links" and "Download Latest Links", the second one is better useful than first. But these domains do not give the information of where these links are coming from.
Internal Links:
Using this tool we can diagnose the pages which are getting more links.
The 'Optimization' Section
Sitemaps:
Here we get the report about each sitemap which we have submitted for our site. Google scans our sitemaps and find errors if any occurred in its crawl.
Remove URL’s:
You can request URL’s which you do not want to show in Google search results. Only authorized members can do this.
HTML Improvement:
It shows the list of URL’s that our site do not have unique or long title tags, or short meta descriptions. Click on the issue to see the URL's which you have to improve.
Content Keywords:
It lists few keywords that Google thinks about our site. If you do not have spam keywords here then your site is good.
Structured Data:
It shows the structured data along with the number of URL's that Google was able to detect in your site. It is useful to verify all the pages you think are marked up correctly.
The 'Labs' Section
Custom Search:
If you want to build our own search engine, you can build with this custom search. If you want to get results from a particular sites using custom search then here are the two options that are standard edition and site search which shows the result pages with ads and without ads.
Instant Previews:
It shows the preview of your pages that appear in Google results pages. Enter any URL to look at the preview or leave blank to show the home page.
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