Google Webmaster Tools provides a set of useful tools to evaluate, manage and modify how your site is seen and treated by Google and other search engines. While most of the toolset outputs information you could figure out on your own, if you’re busy (who isn’t?) or if your site has several developers and content contributors (most do) Google webmaster tools provides a consolidated way to keep track of how your site interacts with search engines.
Getting started with Google Webmaster Tools
In order to use Google webmaster tools you need to verify that you’re the site owner. Google gives you two ways to do this – inserting a tag in the head of your page, or uploading a file to your site. Verification is immediate so once you’ve setup the verification you can get started.
Prefered Domain
Found in Site configuration > Settings
Select which version of your domain you want Google to use – e.g. www.mysite.com or mysite.com. Choosing which version (canonical URL) you prefer tells Google to treat both versions of the link as one. This is important to avoid duplicate content hits. If Google sees both versions as separate pages then it evaluates its relevance separately. Since one of the biggest influencers on search algorithms is inbound links, you want site A’s link to you as www.mysite.com and site B’s link to you as mysite.com to count as 2 inbound links to the same page.
You can also set this via the the canonical URL tag
<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com" />
For further reading on the canonical URL tag, SEOmoz has a great article on why the canonical URL tag is so important and how duplicate content can hurt your SEO ranking.
If you can’t set the preferred domain
It’s not obvious, but in order to set the preferred domain you need to verify both versions of the URL. If you don’t, Google will tell you it can’t change the setting until you verify the site. I got hung up on this at first, so make sure you verify both www.mysite.com and mysite.com with Google webmaster tools.
Crawl Errors
Found in Diagnostics > Crawl errors
This sections ists the problems Google is having indexing your site. These include
- Inbound links to pages that don’t exist
- Pages blocked by robots.txt
- Pages in sitemap.xml that are inaccessible
Sitemap
Found in Site configuration > Sitemaps
The default location for sitemap.xml is at the root of your site. If you have multiple sitemaps or the sitemap is located elsewhere, here’s where you can tell Google about it.
Robots
Found in Site configuration > Crawler access
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a file search engines use to understand which pages you want or don’t want to be indexed by search engines. There are 2 configuration settings
- noindex – don’t add this page to search engines
- nofollow – you can index this page, but don’t follow any of the links on this page when spidering the site
How to create a robots.txt file
Google webmaster tools can create robots.txt file for you. It allows you to specify pages and directories to both allow and block. Even though I know how to create a robots.txt it’s so simple to do here and avoids human error (because, you know, I make mistakes occasionally).
HTML Suggestions
This section lists some potential places for improvement in 5 key areas
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Long meta descriptions
- Short meta descriptions
- Title tags
- Non-indexable content
How to Use the Output from Google Webmaster Tools in Wordpress
On Wednesday I’ll be posting a review of a set of Wordpress plugins to help make some of the improvements recommended by Google webmaster tools.
