It seems that Google has been improving and redesigning webmaster tools. Webmasters that religiously use webmaster tools to track inbound links and search appearances as part of their search engine optimisation, will know exactly what we are talking about here. Gone are the days of your inbound links updating in 30 day intervals. New site? no longer will you have to wait 60 days to see any kind of results. New site launches can be indexed and collecting data in 2 weeks or less.
Some people may complain about the loss of the page rank statistic in webmasters tools. Google in their infinite wisdom has removed this feature, personally? It just appears obvious that Google shifted some of the focus away from the useless page rank section in order to improve the overall experience with webmaster tools. It is also worth bearing in mind that big G has always said it didn’t want people to buy and sell links based on PageRank value – this latest move does tend to be more in line with that ethos.
Is it really that much of an improvement? YES, links are typically reported back with 2 weeks, search phrases for new sites are showing up in less than 30 days, Overall the experience is improved several times over. This webmaster spends a lot of time analyzing what search phrases are bringing traffic to the sites that I operate. Do you know what your most popular search phrase is?
Google webmaster tools is very good at tracking inbound links. Being able to download a spreadsheet of your links and search appearances in Excel format is a very handy feature.
There are many features within webmaster tools to help webmasters understand how Google views a site. There is even a new feature that lets you see how your site looks to the Google crawler, or Google bot. Try this one out, it is very useful to know how many keywords you are using and what your site looks like through Google’s electronic eyes.
If you are not watching webmaster tools you may just be missing the big picture. Analytics + Webmaster tools should be a part of your toolkit. Google Webmaster Tools can be found here and Google Analytics can be found here
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