Posted by on June 14th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
Google has once again made the lives of webmasters a lot easier thanks to the additional features they launched for Webmaster Tools just recently. Google’s Webmaster Tools offer new elements and enhancements of existing SEO-related tools that allow users to check search engine optimization statistics and monitor the visibility and trends of a website in the search engine results pages.
This free service from Google currently provides webmasters the means to check or set the crawl rate for a website, detect error logs every time a site encounters problems, view keywords used to search for your site, monitor a site’s robots.txt file, and many other SEO-related applications. Now, site owners and webmasters who frequently use Webmaster Tools can notice new features and upgrades that will give professionals in the SEO industry and the online community more pertinent data about the condition of your business website from a search engine perspective, including Google Webmaster Tools DNS Verification, upgraded Malware Reporting, and enhanced Top Search Queries data.
The newer version of the Webmaster Tools offers a new feature where you can have the option to quickly verify all the web sites within your domain. Previously, Google only offers users either the HTML file or meta tags methods to verify their sites into Webmaster Tools. This is positive news for people who are more familiar with DNS records or who are struggling with the current HTML file and meta tag methods. Using DNS verification allows the Webmaster to become the owner of an entire domain and all of its associated web sites and subdomains.
It only takes two quick steps to use this method. First, you have to enter the TXT record to your domain’s DNS configuration. Then, just click the Verify button. Once Google detects the DNS TXT record, the user will become the verified owner of the domain. However, there are instances when it would take some time to change the verification status, so it’s important to check the changes regularly.
Just recently, there were some members of the online community using the Malware Details feature in Google Webmaster who got confused and thought that the application went missing. It did not actually disappear; it has just officially graduated from the Labs section and was moved to the Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster Tools.
The Malware Details feature of the Webmaster Tools allows users to check and monitor if your site is affected with malicious malware and may be distributing it. It also fixes your web pages and cleans the malware from your web site in an instant, making everything quicker for webmasters instead of undergoing several page iterations while reviewing the site.
However, Google just recently updated the feature’s algorithms and has made malware detection and reporting even a lot faster than ever. The response time is now four times faster and its detection capability is wider in scope. Google seems to be more determined to push the battle against malware threats by equipping webmasters a more powerful tool to detect and eliminate malicious pages.
Frequent users of Top Search Queries feature in Google Webmaster Tools would rejoice with Google’s latest enhancement that now provides more extensive and detailed data for each individual search query. In previous builds, Webmaster Tools only presented basic data regarding the average position of your web site at which your pages appeared in the searches for a specific query.
With its latest update, it now allows users to browse through the given search queries in a more user-friendly Top Search Queries report. Click on each of them allows you to see the impressions or the number of times your site showed up in search results for a specific query, the clickthroughs or the number of clicks that a query got from users to visit your site’s pages, and the percentage of clickthroughs for impressions. The Top Search Queries report presents the chart and breakdown of the top search queries to give you a clear picture of how likely your search results are clicked per query and how much your site ranks for the given keyword.
Previously, Webmaster Tools only revealed top 100 queries. Now, Google significantly increased the amount of data available and expanded the number of queries they show.
Moreover, to save more time for users, Google Webmaster Tools already generates a graph derived from the given data and displays it within the page. It helps webmasters visualize and understand search engine traffic for their web site over time without having the chore of compiling the chart themselves. With this feature, users are able to check the status of a specific query from the chart. It also offers options similar to Google Analytics where you can choose the data range you’d like to observe, i.e. you can choose what particular week you would like to see.
Site owners and SEOs will definitely benefit from Google’s latest additions for Webmaster Tools. With these new features, webmasters can analyze search engine traffic and site visibility more accurately, acquire even more ideas on how to increase a site’s online presence, and realize the full potential of any business website.
