Google Webmaster Tool Guide

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Google – Webmaster Tool

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Webmaster Tool Uses Adding/Verifying Site Email Notifications Site Health

Crawl errorsCrawl statsBlocked URLFetch as GoogleMalware

Site ConfigurationsSitelinksURL Parameters

Links to your site Optimization

SitemapsStructure Data

Labs Conclusions

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Table of content


Webmaster tools can be used to:

Audit website effectiveness, SEO

SEO insights and ideas

Monitor website performance

Monitor impact of campaigns on search

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Webmaster Tool Uses


Google Webmaster Tools — helps you with detailed reports about your website to improve site's visibility on Google. All you need to do is confirm your ownership of your website by verifying it!

Verification methods:

Add a meta tag to your home page

Upload an HTML file with the name you specify to your server

Add the Google Analytics code

Verify via your domain name provider.

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Adding/Verifying a site

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35659





Get email notifications about your site for the following reasons: Critical site issues — for example, if your site is down or inaccessible, or if pages

infected with malware.

Crawling or indexing issues — learn about specific problems Google having accessing it.

News and information — even just an informational message that you may find useful.

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Email Notifications


Crawl Errors

Google will list out the number of error pages that Google has detected when crawling your site. This page list two types of error:

Site errors: Lists errors that prevent Googlebot from accessing your site at all.URL errors: Lists errors Googlebot encountered when trying to crawl specific URLs.

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Site Health (1/1)


Crawl Stats

The crawl stats section gives you an idea of how fast the crawlers are able to crawl(read) pages on your site and time spent downloading a page, also the size of a page.

If Google is crawling your site too often, and slowing down your server, you can change the crawl rate!

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Site Health (1/2)

http://www.google.com/


Blocked URLs

Here Google will list out the blocked URLs by robots.txt, it helps you to check that your robots.txt is working as expected.

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Site Health (1/3)


Fetch as Google

This tool lets you see the page as Googlebot sees at the time of crawling, tool return the HTTP response, the date and time, and the HTML code, including the first 100kb of visible text on the page.

This is useful if you're using rich media content and not sure whether Google will crawls it or not, the page returned by the Fetch as Google tool may not contain this content if Google can't crawl it.

If your site has been hacked,

the Fetch as Google tool can help you

Identify to understand exactly what

it is that Google is seeing on your site

You can use this tool to fetch up to 500 URLs

a week per Webmaster Tools account.

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Site Health (1/4)


Index Status

This section provides stats about how many URLs of your site are included in Google index. And also URLs Google was not able to crawl. If you see spike in graph, it indicates that Google can visits your site and crawls your

content. If you see a sudden drop in the number of indexed pages, it may bring your attention

about your site having problem accessing your content.

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Site Health (1/5)


Malware

If Google has detected any malware on your site, this is where they will list out.

If you see a page here you’ll want to get it fixed as soon as possible and click on the “Request a Review” button that will be displayed here.

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Site Health (1/6)


Sitelinks

Some of Google’s search results will show you the links from the same website are called sitelinks.

It helps users to navigate your site easily and that will save time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for.

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Sitelinks (1/1)


Google generate sitelinks through an automated algorithm and only if they’re relevant to user’s query

Site owners can demote the sitelinks if they think that a page appearing as a sitelink is inappropriate.

To demote a sitelink URL, visit to Configurations tab on Webmaster tool.

Note: Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but they will consider a demotion as a strong hint!

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Sitelinks (1/2)


URL Parameters

Use URL parameters tool to tell Google the purpose of the parameters you use on your site, and how Google should handle URLs that contain those parameters. This feature allows you to specify URL query string parameters that shouldn’t be

considered when examining URLs on the site to determine unique URLs. URL parameter feature can be helpful hint to improve the canonicalization of a site in

Google’s index due to duplicate content

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URL Parameters


Links to Your Site

This feature lists the total links to your site that Google discovered during crawling and indexing process.

This page lists the following data:Sources: Who links the most Your Pages: Your most linked contentAnchor Text: How your data is linked

Now links that redirected using 301 or 302

also counts and listed here. This feature helps site owner to understand

Who’s linking to them most !

Note: Blocked URLs and Broken links

won’t be listed on this page

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Links to Your Site


Labs

Webmaster Labs allows you to try out experiments new features in Webmaster Tools. It has the following features

Note: These features are experimental, they may disappear temporarily or permanently, the may or may not become regular feature in Webmaster Tool Labs

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Labs

Custom Search - is the power feature of Google to create a customized search experience for your own website, your blog, or collection of websites. You can customize the look and feel of the search results as per your website look!

Instant Pageviews - are page snapshots that helps users to decide if a particular result was relevant for their query. Instant Previews had some problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews. To help webmasters diagnose these problems, came up with a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs

Site Performance –is an another experimental Webmaster Tools Labs feature that shows you performance statistics of your site. You can use this information to improve the speed of your site and create a faster experience for your users

Author stats - This page shows search statistics for pages for which you are the verified author. Author information appears in search results for the content you create. All you need is a Google+ profile with pic!


Sitemaps

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each

URL, when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site.

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Sitemaps

Sitemaps can be submitted for one of following reasons;

Your site has dynamic content. Your site has rich content such AJAX, Flash

that aren't easily discovered! Your site is new and has few links to it. Your site has a large archive of content

pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.


Structured data

The Structured Data page lists each type of structured data that Google was able detect on your site.

If Google understands the content on your pages, it can be used to create rich snippets—detailed information to help users with specific queries. For example, the snippet for Mark Zuckerberg query might show the name, professional, & company

Structured Data page include the following: Schema.org Microformats Microdata RDFa

This markup helps Google recognize

certain types of data and display

it usefully in rich snippets.

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Structure Data


Conclusions on Webmaster Tool Important tool for monitoring Website appearance to Google Website's performance / SEO URL Errors, crawling issues, Index Status and malware. Optimize rich snippet Sitelinks and URL parameters handling

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Conclusions


Thank You!

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Marketing

Google Webmaster Tool Guide