Google Webmaster Central

I discussed Google Sitemaps in another tip. If you set that up, and then click on your URL in your site list, you’ll discover that Google is offering a lot more than sitemaps in what they’re now calling Google Webmaster Central.

Here are the new features:

Diagnostic Features

• Indexing summary – This lets you know when Google last crawled your site and displays any errors they may have encountered. I used this today to repair five broken links in a site I manage.
• Preferred domain – The www version of your site (http://www.yoursite.com) is technically a sub-domain of the non-www version (http://yoursite.com). Because of this, and because of a glitch in Google’s system, they sometimes see the two versions as separate, duplicate sites, and have actually penalized some sites for duplicate content. Also, because some sites link to your www version, and some to your non-www version, your PageRank (link popularity) gets diluted. So far, the workaround for his has been to use a 301 redirect, which I’ll explain more in a future tip (because it’s still a handy tool). But now, with a tool called “Preferred domain,” Google lets you select whether you want the www or non-www versions of your URLs displayed.
• Robots.txt analysis – A robots.txt file is a small text file that blocks the search engines from crawling certain areas of your site. You should use one even if you don’t want to block them. This tool tells you whether your robots.txt file is set up correctly, and lets you test to see how changes to the robots.txt file would change access to specific URLs.
  

Statistics Features

• Query stats – This feature shows you the top search queries that most often returned pages from your site. This information may not be too useful, because it may show you queries for which you rank well, but which so few people use that they result in little or no traffic. There are better ways of checking this.
• Crawl stats – This will give you a rough idea of how many pages have high, medium or low PageRank—or none at all.
• Page analysis – This gives you a list of the top words Google is finding in your site. It would be really cool if it showed you this on a page-by-page basis, but right now it just shows you the words it sees in the whole site. It also lists the text in links from other sites to yours.
• Index stats – This is a list of the advanced search commands. Here they are:
  
  • Indexed pages in your site - site:yoursite.com
  • Pages that refer to your site's URL - allinurl:yoursite.com
  • Pages that link to your site - link:yoursite.com
  • The current cache of your site - cache:yoursite.com
  • Information Google has about your site - info:yoursite.com
  • Pages that are similar to your site - related:yoursite.com
    

Submitting a site to Webmaster Central has no impact on rankings, positive or negative, but when a site is having difficulty getting properly indexed in Google, it can help you figure out why. If your site has been penalized, you can file a re-inclusion request through the Webmaster Center. Google has indicated they may notify some sites through the site's webmaster console if they are violating Google's guidelines in some way. This will give you a chance  to fix the problem getting penalized.

The URL for Google’s Webmaster Tools is http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

Feel free to forward these tips to friends who might enjoy them. If you would like to see a particular topic covered in a future tip, let me know.