Four advantages of the Google webmaster tools
Are you using the Google Webmaster Tools yet? If you don’t, this articles show you the four key advantages of this tool.
1. Your site’s index status
The tool will show you exactly what the google robots have encountered on your site. I have one big site with more than 100K pages. When I first started using the tool, I noticed the google bots had not found tens of thousands of my pages. Because the tool will show you exactly which pages it could not find, I was able to find the problem. I made a wrong link in one of the most important templates, the template that defined to look of 80% of all the pages!
As you can see in the screenshot below, the number of pages “Not found” has dropped back to 695 and it is still declining on every new craw that Google does. Thank you Google!
2. Crawl Speed
You can set the crawl speed of the Google crawlers on your site. If your server is overloaded all the time, you might want to decrease this speed. But you have to understand that this can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.
More importantly, you can also increase the crawl speed. I increased the crawl speed for most of my large websites and never saw a negative impact on my server’s load.
3. Statistics
One of the statistics that this tool offers is the pagerank distribution. In my opinion this is not very useful but it’s nice to have for large sites on which you can’t look at all your pages manually.
Another more useful tool are query stats. Google shows you the top search queries for which your site ranks well and also the top search query clicks. Although your site’s stats package (like Awstats, webalizer or Google Analytics) should be the one giving you a lot of insight in search queries, this tool still offers something unique. You can compare the top queries you rank for and see if people click on your links. If not, maybe you should start thinking about changing your page titles and descriptions to make them more attractive. Because you can see what you rank well for you are also able to improve your ranking for that keyword/page combination by creating stronger internal and external links to that page.
4. Sitemaps
You can submit sitemaps using this tool. Sitemaps help Google to index all your pages. Sitemaps can also tell Google the frenquency with which a page is updated and the last update time of a page.
As always: I love to hear from you, either by comments or by mail.