Google Power Tool for Webmasters
If you run a blog or any other website for that matter, you might want to check out Google Webmaster Central – in particular their Google Webmaster Tool – if you haven’t already seen it.
Google Webmaster Tool is a great tool for webmasters who want to see and manage how Google crawls their site(s). If you have a Google ID you can add all the sites that you control to a dashboard. From here you can see intimate details for each site. After adding justaddwater.dk I found that Google was encountering some HTTP errors when crawling our site. This of cause is very important since other users unfortunately also encounter these errors.
When diving into the errors I can see that some links to our site point at stuff that is not there. I unfortunately cant see where these links come from. They could be external or internal I guess, but I have to manually look at my site to see. Adding a “source” for the link would be very easy for Google and be a great benefit to the webmaster.
Besides web crawling problems, the tool also gives loads of other interesting information. I suggest you take a look your self, but to just summarize I quote Google:
Statistics
Top search queries
See which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked.Crawl stats
See your distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site.Subscriber stats
If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.What Googlebot sees
See details about how the Googlebot sees your site.Index stats
Learn how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site.
Links
Pages with external links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.Sitelinks
See which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results.Pages with internal links
See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.
Sitemaps
Add and manage your sitemaps (including code sitemaps).
Tools
Analyze robots.txt
See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.Enable enhanced image search
Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.Manage site verification
See all verified owners of this site, and optionally reverify them.Set crawl rate
See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.Set preferred domain
Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.Remove URLs
Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal.
Technorati Tags: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Webmaster Central, sitemap, sitemaps, tool, review, search engines, http errors, accessibility
October 22nd, 2007 at 16:50 (GMT-1)
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October 31st, 2007 at 08:12 (GMT-1)
I am already familiar with google webmaste tool. but I like your niche information about google power tool for webmasters
May 4th, 2008 at 07:18 (GMT-1)
Oddly enough, I found this post while searching for power tools (drills, routers, etc.). I hadn’t heard of analytics but it looks like a tool that webasters should use. Thanks for writing about it.
May 7th, 2008 at 18:46 (GMT-1)
Oh,
Does google actualy give out this great tools for free? so great. I have been using other tools to analys my keywords and stuff. But i think this tools is more accurate ( cause it is from Big G).
Btw, i use others plugin for generating sitemap ( not manually) for expample AIO Seo for WordPress, VbSEo fo Vbulletin… it works great and save time.
Thanks
Chris.
May 11th, 2008 at 20:33 (GMT-1)
hi, i found this information very useful for webmasters like me;
so i developed a website called http://webmsterstips.co.cc where i puted a lot of useful tips about google and webmaster i still working on it ; i like your work go one….
June 3rd, 2008 at 23:36 (GMT-1)
Hi. I found the tools to be a good help, particularly the link checker bits, they list every link coming into your site instead of just the odd one or two that gets listed on the search engines. As well as telling you exactly how google see your site. A great set of tools for every site owner.
July 9th, 2008 at 22:18 (GMT-1)
Google Webmaster Tools really are great tools. It really is a great thing to find out all this information about your site. Google Webmaster Tools give the webmaster insight that is essential for optimizing the performance of a site.
July 11th, 2008 at 11:19 (GMT-1)
I think the only time I ever used their webmaster tools, my site ended up getting banned from google, lol. And I wasn’t doing anything shady, at least that I know of. That was probably the first and last time for me using it.
July 15th, 2008 at 02:33 (GMT-1)
I have used it in the past to see how it works. It works fine, as long as you are not using it on a new domain. i find that it delays indexing that way.
September 11th, 2008 at 00:52 (GMT-1)
Although i have been using all that tools since 1 year but I think there is still some lack of utilities which should be there. Once I have setup sitemaps, Wrongly I did it twice and it was so difficult to get out of that mess. Using WordPress, I think there are many plug-ins which are much better than Google’s sitemaps utility.
October 11th, 2008 at 16:59 (GMT-1)
here’s a little tip you may not be aware of re Google sitemaps.
on static sites where pinging is harder, and youev made chanegs tou want re-cached quicker than Google’s usual schedule, if you delete and resubmit the sitemap from the Google panel you can usually force an immediate re-crawl of the homepage, and often your new pages too.
it doesnt always work, about 80% of the time it does though.
December 5th, 2008 at 20:43 (GMT-1)
My problem with sitemaps is our content changes so often, it is a pain to recrawl our content with a sitemap builder every time I post an update. I have a basic sitemap for Google, but I let it’s spiders find the new stuff.
The Webmaster tools are great though.
December 26th, 2008 at 14:55 (GMT-1)
Google webmasters show me 5 404 errors but I checked everything, couldn’t find any. Any ideas?
February 12th, 2009 at 04:30 (GMT-1)
The Google Webmaster tool is a must for any webmaster. Especially for checking broken links – it’s lead me to more than a few in the past couple of months.