We all love Google, right? They have given us a heap of great applications, on top of their superior search engine. Today's tool that has just been brought to my attention is the Webmaster Tools.
<b>What is it?</b>
Put simply, its a set of tools to help you optimise your site for search engines (namely Google, surprise surprise).
The tools included are seperated into 3 tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics and Sitemaps.
<u>Diagnostic</u>
Here you see errors that were encountered when the spider was crawling your site. Great for tracking down dead links, although realistically, most webhosting comes with much more in-depth reporting on such errors.
There also seems to be a tool for Mobile website crawl errors, which could be much more interesting if you are into that sort of thing.
Also include is a robots.txt tool, which allows you to modify your robots.txt and test it from the site. Again, who really cares. Perhaps my robots.txt isn't as complex as some are though, it could be useful for poeple who have more than a few lines to their robots.txt!
<u>Statistics</u>
This is more interesting, it ties into google searches to see what users have been searching for to reach your site. Again, this is something that any decent web stats can provide from referrer headers.
Something that it much more useful is the Crawl stats and page analysis, which breaks down you pages into High, Medium, Low, and unranked, depending on where your pages appear in google page ranks in searches. It also provides the highest ranked page on your site.
The page analysis evaluates your page content, breaking it down into the type of file, and the most common words used on your site. Considering most modern search engines work on page content, instead of the META keywords element, this is a handy little tool. If your pages mention one topic more than another, that should help the page ranking, and so on. Realistically, this is the most useful site in the package.
<u>Sitemaps</u>
Sitemaps are an interesting thing, it allows you to add an XML based sitemap to your site. Why you really need to do this isn't really well explained. It helps Google to find all the pages on your site, and to do it faster. Although if it can't find pages simply by crawling your site and following links, what is the chance that you will add them to the sitemap? I dunno, maybe I'm missing the point...
I guess this is probaby more useful for larger or less organised sites. And to aid in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in such an environment. Although, I think the effort would be better placed in producing cleaner, easier to crawl webpages than in creating a sitemap.
<b>Conclusion</b>
I'm a little underwealmed by this offering by Google I must admit. I had high hopes (while at the same time not entirely sure what to be hopeful for), and really what I got is something that most webstats (certainly awstats) already provide you in more detail. Although, like most Google services, its still in beta so perhaps I just need to keep an eye on the toolkit and hope it grows.
<a href='http://www.google.com/webmasters/'>Webmaster Tools</a>
- Sneddo
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