Wednesday, April 18th, 2007...11:26 am
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools is an invaluable service for anyone running a website. If you haven’t used it before I suggest checking it out.
Once you’ve added your website and verified that it is yours you can start using Google Webmaster Tools to get an array of information on how your site is being are crawled and indexed.
- Check which pages of your site have been indexed.
- Check for any web crawl errors.
- Get an analysis of robots.txt.
- View crawl statistics.
- Find out the top search terms which are sending visitors to your site.
- See which of your pages have the highest PageRank.
- Check how many backlinks you have as well as where the links are coming from.
- Check how pages are linked internally to your site.
- Manually add a sitemap.
- Choose your preferred domain for indexing. www.mysite.com or mysite.com.
Google have also just announced a new feature which will allow you to remove a URL which has already been indexed. For example if you haven’t been using a robots.txt file and Google has indexed some duplicate content you will now be able to go in and remove any URLs that shouldn’t be there.
Very handy, but I suggest you have a good read of the post in the above link before you try removing a URL. If you mess up you could end up removing your whole site from Googles index.
2 Comments
April 21st, 2007 at 9:29 am
I have found that there are lots of free tools to check back links and other analysis. The problem is that they all come up with very different statistics.
April 30th, 2007 at 3:20 am
[...] also provides a facility in its Webmaster Tools to request expedited removal of pages from the index, but you should be careful when using [...]
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