Ignore Webmaster Tools At Your Peril

January 22nd, 2010 by Dan

Webmaster Tools is a free and powerful tool provided by search engine Google, which provides key insights into your site on the web. Webmaster tools should not be ignored by any website manager/owner.

Reports Provided By Webmaster Tools

There are many key reports provided by Webmaster Tools such as:

Top search phrases
Website performance
What Googlebot sees
Keywords
Internal links
Crawler stats

But the primary area I am going to focus on in this article is the Diagnostics Area. This area provides the Crawl Errors and HTML Suggestions sections.

Crawl Errors

In this section Google will report all of the errors they have encountered whilst trying to access and index your website. All of the errors encountered in the sub headings;Â HTTP â€Ž, In Sitemaps , Unreachable & Timeout should be rectified at the earliest opportunity, as these are effectively dead links, and any traffic (or spider) that comes here will be lost. The Restricted by robots.txt area should also be checked on a regular basis to make sure you are not blocking valid content from the spiders.

HTML Suggestions

Duplicate content is a key issue for SEO, and should be avoided at all costs. Thankfully Google reports instances of duplicate content that they find within your site in the HTML suggestions are, stating instances of duplicate title tags and description tags (key indicators of duplicate content. Any instances of duplicate content should be removed, and if the duplicate was a republished blog or article the newest version should be redirected permanenty to the original.

Google also reports instances of short title tags and description tags in the section as well as highlighting any reasons why your content could not be indexed.

We will be blogging more often about Webmaster tools so why not subscribe to our feed to receive our latest SEO News? Or alternatively discuss this or other topics in the forum

This entry was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2010 at 3:19 pm .

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2 Responses to “Ignore Webmaster Tools At Your Peril”

Abigail says:

January 23, 2010 at 1:09 am

I don’t agree. My experience has been to use non google related service for analysis and reporting. Infact I never ever submit any site to google directly. It is better for the site to be found by google, rather then to informed to them.
MijnCreaties says:

February 2, 2010 at 6:11 pm

Sounds great

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