20 Apr 2010

Updates to Google Webmaster Tools

Author: John | Filed under: Google, Tools

Check out some of the updates to Google’s Webmaster Tools. The one that is making the biggest impression is the new “Top Search Queries” feature that comes up on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. You not only get a list of keywords, impressions, and click-throughs, you can find out where in the search engine rankings your page showed up for specific keywords. You can get a graphical representation of impressions over time periods that you can define.

You can in addition find out how many links there are to your site and where they’re from, you can find out if there have been any crawl errors. You can learn all about your internal links and statistics for your subscribers. A section under the “Labs” menu helps you gauge your site performance and walks you through installation of the Page Speed add-on for Firefox that gathers all kinds of data on how fast your page loads and what, if anything, you can do to make it load faster. This tool is likely to get some miles on it now that site speed has been added into the mix of things that determines website ranking.

Seriously, if you have a free or slow afternoon at work one day, you should go through each of the Webmaster tools and find out stuff about your site you might never have known.