Today I’m going to talk to you about Google Webmaster Tools, most SEO account managers will turn to GWT as soon as a new client comes on board, as it allows us to see how Google treats your site, as well as giving an indepth analysis of how often it’s crawled, if there are any major issues with Meta or Robots.txt and will even tell you how many URL’s are indexed (although this feature is known to be inaccurate at times).
Let’s start with the dashboard (Click to Enlarge):
Once you’ve created a site and verified it, you will be presented with a dashboard similar to this one.
As a safety measure I have removed all identifiable key terms and e-mails from this image.
This dashboard allows us to see all the most important information about our site. I.E The highest trafficked keywords, how many links your site has, whether Google is experiencing any crawling errors, what Google perceives to be the most important or significant key phrases for your website and if you’ve submitted a sitemap, how many URL’s are indexed.
So without going into too much depth, and exercising no real effort we can now see exactly how Google treats your website, and with this information where you may be going wrong (or right) in your SEO campaign.
If we expand the menu’s on the left we are treated to a whole smorgasboard of tools and data sets that Google currently has of our website.
Site Configuration:
- Sitemaps – Self explanatory but allows you to see sitemap data, including pages indexed and submit multiple sitemaps.
- Crawler Access – Very useful if you’re having issues with your site not appearing in Google’s index at all. This section allows you to test your Robots.txt, generate a Robots.txt using a very simple form, and even remove URL’s that you don’t wish indexed.
- Sitelinks – High quality and authoritative sites are given ‘Sitelinks’. These usually appear when a site is positioned 1st in the SERPS.
- Change of Address – If you are changing URL, this allows you to tell Google directly. However you will need to enable a 301 redirect or robots.txt off the old site for this to work.
- Settings – By checking the settings of your website you can modify a geographic target (for internationalised domains only, e.g. .com .co .tv), set a preferred domain, change crawl rate and add parameter handling. It will even suggest certain parameters it believe it should be ignoring.
Your Site On The Web:
- Search Queries – See which search queries are bringing in the most traffic and impressions. Unfortunately the statistics in the Search Queries area is quite often out by as much as 90%, so the data should not be taken at face value. If you check with Google Analytics and correlate the data together you can see just how far off it is.
- Links to your Site – Recently changed, Google now tracks a larger number of links to your site. This used to be strictly limited to what Google perceived to be high quality or sitewide links but now includes all sorts of garbage
- Keywords – A handy tool that shows the repetition of keywords on your site and significance. If you’re wondering why you aren’t ranking for certain key terms, this can assist you.
- Internal Links – Shows your internal link flow.
- Subscriber Stats – Shows how many Google subscribers there are to your RSS feed if you have one, and allows you to submit your feed as a sitemap.
Diagnostics
- Malware – While performing a search you may occasionally come across a little message below your results that says something along the lines of – “warning this site may harm your computer”. Google can now detect infected websites, and if your site has been the subject of an attack you can contact Google via this tab to inform them of any changes or fixes to your website.
- Crawl Errors – If Google has come across any errors while browsing your site they will show up here, although if you have prevented Google via robots.txt you may see a number of ‘false positives’ in the results page.
- Crawl Stats – Shows how often Google scans your website in graphical format.
- HTML Suggestions – If your site has duplicate Meta Data or finds issues with non-indexable content it will show you which pages need attention.
Labs:
- Fetch as Googlebot – Useful for detecting sites that are cloaking or redirecting and diagnosing poor results.
- Sidewiki – Allows users to comment about EVERY website, the downside is that you have to have Google Toolbar installed. Never really took off.
- Site Performance – Google recently announced that page load speed is now a ranking factor, you can see how well your site performs with this tool and a list of suggestions to bring down your page load speed (usually involves Gzip)
- Video Sitemaps – A very new tool that “lists processing errors Google found with your Video Sitemap, as well as warnings about potentially problematic issues.”
GWT changes on a regular basis, and used to include information like PageRank, however this has since been removed as Google regularly states that PageRank should be seen as as only one of the indicators of how well your site is performing, and toolbar PageRank updates every 3-4 months, so is quite often not a true reflection of how well your site is currently performing.
In essence, Google have provided all SEO’s with a plethora of data that they hold on their website, and how to improve rankings with one simple tool. Those not using it should reconsider.
For further information regarding Google Webmaster Tools you should check out Matt Cutts’ blog and the Google Webmaster Tools help centre.
- The SEO Dentist
