Using Google Webmaster Tools
Day 41 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide
Google has a ton of tools available to help webmasters improve their site. They have tools to diagnose problems, find out who is linking to you, analyze you robots.txt file, and much more. The best part is, all the tools are completely free.
To access Google webmaster tools, go here. You can login with your Google account, and add your sites to be analyzed. If you have more than one site, you can add as many as you want. If you want separate tracking for different subdomains, that is not a problem.
Site Diagnostics
One of the best parts of Google webmaster tools are the site diagnostics. Running a blog, I miss some of the error checking features that you might get from a good piece of web development software like Dreamweaver. Luckily, Google has them all in one place.
If you login to webmaster tools and access your site, go to Diagnostics, you will find this
Quickly glancing at my page I can see there are some problems with it. I have several http errors, some broken links, and some pages which Google can not access because of my robots.txt file. I can drill down to those errors to learn more about them.
My Links Not found errors:
The links not found is one of the best features available. Occasionally I will forget the http:// in front of a link I am adding in my blog. When you do that it becomes a relative link instead of an absolute link. These are all links that are broken in my blog. Now that Google identified them, it is relatively easy to go in and correct them.
I can also look at my http: errors
These errors are a little more troublesome. I have 64 pages which Google apparently can not access. They are all “403 Forbidden” meaning that they aren’t being indexed by Google, and they aren’t driving any traffic to my site. Although I don’t know the cause of the error, now that I know an error exists I will be able to track it down and root it out. Do any of you know why I might get a 403 Forbidden error on my site? I presume there may be a bug in my .htaccess file, but it needs more investigation.
Finally, is there a problem with my Robots.txt file? Google thinks there might be
Googlebot can’t access 62 pages on my site because of the robots.txt file. Looking at the pages I can see that it is not a problem. All of the blocked pages end in /trackback/ or /feed/ or something similar. They are all auxiliary pages on my site, and they were intentionally blocked from Google by the robots.txt file in order to avoid duplicate content.
The bottom line is that Google webmaster tools can be a great boon to you. You should use them. Tomorrow I’ll go into something more fun, tracking who is linking to you. And trust me, this tools makes much more data available to you than a simple Link:www.yoursite.com would.
on July 4th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Excellent post Scott, the webmaster tools are often overlooked, but are essential for the good housekeeping of your blog.
Afraid I’ve no idea what’s causing that 403 error…
on July 4th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Luckily I’m not in a huge hurry to fix everything. As long as I put it on my list of things to do I know that I’ll fix it sooner or later. I’ve found that with most of these things a couple of weeks here or there doesn’t make too much of a differnce to me traffic wise
on July 6th, 2007 at 9:38 am
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on January 7th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Yeah I am a huge fan of the webmaster Tools Google provides us, it is certain ATON better than any webmaster tools that the other search engines provide.
Till then,
Jean