Related tags: Search [+], Engine [+], webmaster [+]
We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.
Here’s what the new home page looks like:
You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon or the “Check site health” link next to that site:
This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.
Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:
You can click on any of these items to get more details about what we detected on your site. If the site health icon and the “Check site health” link don’t appear next to a site, it means that we didn’t detect any of these issues on that site (congratulations!).
A word about “important pages:” as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.” Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.
Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;” in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site. But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.
After you’ve resolved any site health issues we’ve flagged, it will usually take several days for the warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to recrawl the site, see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through our Web Search and Webmaster Tools pipelines. If you continue to see a site health warning for that site after a week or so, the issue may not have been resolved. Feel free to ask for help tracking it down in our Webmaster Help Forum... and let us know what you think!
Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst
| Links for www.google.com | External links | Internal links |
| Previously categorized as... | www.example.com/ www.example.org/stuff.html scholar.google.com/ sketchup.google.com/ google.com/ | www.google.com/ www.google.com/stuff.html www.google.com/support/webmasters/ |
| Now categorized as... | www.example.com/ www.example.org/stuff.html | scholar.google.com/ sketchup.google.com/ google.com/ www.google.com/ www.google.com/stuff.html www.google.com/support/webmasters/ |
Webmaster level: All
Last year we relaunched an exciting feature in Webmaster Tools: Search Queries, an analysis tool that visualizes your site’s presence in our search results. It has two main parts: an interactive graph, and a table containing detailed data related to queries for which your site appears in our search results.
Two of the most important pieces of information in the table are ‘impressions’ and ‘clicks.’ ‘Impressions’ shows the number of times your pages were shown in the search results for a certain query, and ‘clicks’ is how many times users actually clicked on a result from your site.
Based on webmaster feedback, today we’re announcing a slight change in how these numbers are represented in Webmaster Tools, to simplify their interpretation. Instead of showing numbers rounded to two or three digits, the numbers will now be shown with one or two significant digits. For example, instead of Webmaster Tools showing you 246,000 impressions, it will now show 250,000 impressions, which is a nicer representation for a better, less confusing experience. We have not altered the way we calculate the numbers internally, but only changed how we round them in Webmaster Tools. Generally, a difference of less than 10% between the numbers you see now and those you saw prior to this change should not be considered significant.
SEOmoz announced the launch of a new valuable tool named Open Site Explorer. I will not go over the features, every other blog did that.
The tool is extremely powerful, but it is not completely "open" or "free" as the name implies. Either way - the tool is impressive and for the most part, the SEO industry is very pleased with it. That includes Aaron Wall who called it slick, despite being Rand Fishkin's biggest critic.
Read more about the tool at the SEOmox blog and test it out at opensiteexplorer.org.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
It has been about five years since I last interviewed Patrick Gavin, and back then I interviewed Patrick on his new company, Text Link Ads (TLA). Who knew TLA would have such a huge impact on the lives of so many SEOs and shape this industry, for better or worse. I should add that TLA has been a long time advertiser here and RustyBrick, my company, does work for TLA on the development side.
Patrick has stepped down from TLA's parent company, MediaWhiz a few months ago. Patrick has been informing various bloggers about his new SEO venture with Andy Hagans named DIYSEO.com, Do It Yourself SEO. Since Patrick is one of the most successful, honest and caring people in the industry, I thought I would cover a Sphinn thread on this new project. I asked Patrick several questions over instant messenger on DIYSEO.com. Here is that interview:
Barry Schwartz: Hi Patrick, thanks for agreeing to answer some questions about your new SEO venture, named DIYSEO.com. Can you first tell us a little bit about the new business?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry. Sure, DIYSEO is a venture I am launching with Andy Hagans. The product is a SEO software platform aimed at small business website owners.
Barry Schwartz: Can you tell me about some of the software's features? What features will make this the killer SEO app?
Patrick Gavin: To start with our software is not a suite of tools, instead it is a task based system designed to give website owners a step by step playbook on how to improve their natural search engine rankings. It is unique in that it gives advice tailored to specific verticals. When a site owner begins the process, they complete a questionnaire. We then take that data to give them an SEO campaign and task list that is truly geared towards their vertical.
Barry Schwartz: I saw that ShoeMoney wrote about your new tools. But doesn't ShoeMoney also have his own SEO tools he is selling? How does yours compare to his?
Patrick Gavin: ShoeMoney has a great suite of tools. The difference to us is we are not designed for professional internet marketers who are looking for advanced tools. We instead are designed for business owners who want a step by step plan for SEO success. We think there is a need in the market for both expert tools and what we are doing: an SEO system that takes your hand and walks you through a winning SEO plan without having to be an expert.
Barry Schwartz: Would you consider any tools currently out there similar to yours? If so, which ones?
Patrick Gavin: I wouldn't consider any current SEO tools as similar to ours. We are taking a new approach to SEO and I think you would have to look outside of the SEO industry to find similar approaches. Among those would be Mint.com and Basecamphq.com.
Barry Schwartz: You have been in the SEO industry for a really long time. You are most famous for Text Link Ads, the company you founded and sold to MediaWhiz. How does this product differ from the Text Link Ads product, in terms of market-a-bilty? Do you think it will be as successful?
Patrick Gavin: The product is really quite different from TLA. Where TLA focuses on advanced "off page" SEO techniques via link buying, with DIYSEO we are offering a full service SEO platform that will instruct users with actionable on page and off page SEO actions. In terms of marketability, the market opportunity is tremendous. Adwords has some 1.5M+ advertisers buying keywords on a PPC basis. Most of these are small business owners. Some 75% of clicks go to natural search results, not PPC. All of these PPC advertisers would love the additional exposure in natural search so that is why we are so excited about this opportunity. We think we can drive value to our clients and if we can do that we will be successful.
Barry Schwartz: So our readers know, can you explain if you are still working for Text Link Ads?
Patrick Gavin: I am no longer an employee of MediaWhiz (Text Link Ads' parent company) but do some part time consulting to MediaWhiz. MediaWhiz and TLA have a number of exciting initiatives underway and I remain close to the business as a number of my best friends (and some real talented people) are there.
Barry Schwartz: To be frank, why are you asking bloggers, such as myself and ShoeMoney to write about DIYSEO when it is not even live yet?
Patrick Gavin: Well I have never been shy about promotion :-) We wanted to build some buzz to build up an initial contact list that we can then invite to our beta launch and other fun things we are doing. The SEO community is great about participating and giving feedback that we can then act on. Having been in the industry since around 2000 has given me the opportunity to build relationships with some great people and I am very thankful to be in the position to be able to get the word out on this project.
Barry Schwartz: Since I am being pretty direct, let me point you to the Sphinn thread on the topic. Some folks in our industry find the announcement on Sphinn's home page to be considered spam and should be removed from the home page. What do you think about that?
Patrick Gavin: I think it's great. Again the SEO community is a lot of fun. We will never agree on everything and I am sure we will have a few DIYSEO dissenters once the product is live but I have found that is what makes the SEO community so much fun. Fiery discussions and if you listen/read close enough there is some great feedback in those discussions.
Barry Schwartz: Finally, I asked those that follow me on Twitter @rustybrick that I am interviewing @patrickgavin right now and asked some to send questions. @shoemoney sent a question, he asked. Can you ask him about his twitter contest and if he is happy with the results [www.diyseo.com].
Patrick Gavin: Twitter has been an interesting ride for me. Shoe did a post recently about Twitter being his #3 traffic sourse http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/05/05/for-those-who-still-dont-get-twitter/ and that really got me tuned back in to the marketing power Twitter has. Twitthis.com powered the Twitter contest and the results have been very impressive. Since the contest started my @diyseo follower count has gone from about 100 to 1,400 and still growing, so yes very happy!
Barry Schwartz: Thanks Patrick, I am looking forward to the DIYSEO product. Any words you want to end with? Like maybe the launch date or something else?
Patrick Gavin: Thanks Barry it has been my pleasure. We are not ready to announce the launch date just yet but if you sign up at www.DIYSEO.com you will be the first to know! :-)
I am not a heavy user of SEO tools or toolbars, but Aaron Wall's latest tool, he named The SEO Toolbar has received a ton of feedback and buzz from the SEM industry. The day it was released, which was some time last week, about a dozen or so SEO blogs wrote about it. Most people praised this toolbar as the only tool SEOs need.
This toolbar is jam packed with features including link data, directory information, competitive data, rank checking, keyword research, RSS reader, comparison tool and much much more. To see all the features, go to The SEO Toolbar.
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
Today we're going back to basics. We'll be answering the question: What is a website?
...Okay, not exactly. But we will be looking into what a "website" means in the context of Webmaster Tools, what kind of sites you can add to your Webmaster Tools account, and what data you can get from different types of sites.
Why should you care? Well, the following are all questions that we've gotten from webmasters recently:
In each of these cases, the answer was the same: the data was there, but the webmaster was looking at the wrong "version" of their domain in Webmaster Tools.
A little background
The majority of tools and settings in Webmaster Tools operate on a per-site basis. This means that when you're looking at, say, the Top search queries report, you're only seeing the top search queries for a particular site. Looking at the top queries for www.example.com will show you different data than looking at the top queries for www.example.org. Makes sense, right?
Not all websites have URLs in the form www.example.com, though. Your root URL may not include the www subdomain (example.com); it may include a custom subdomain (rollergirl.example.com); or your site may live in a subfolder, for example if it's hosted on a free hosting site (www.example.com/rollergirl/). Since we want webmasters to be able to access our tools regardless of how their site is hosted, you can add any combination of domain, subdomain(s), and/or subfolder(s) as a "site" on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. Once you've verified your ownership of that site, we'll show you the information we have for that particular piece of the web, however big or small it may be. If you've verified your domain at the root level, we'll show you data for that whole domain; if you've only verified a particular subfolder or subdomain, we'll only show you data for that subfolder or subdomain. Take Blogger as an example—someone who blogs with Blogger should only be able to have access to the data for their own subdomain (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), not the entire blogspot.com domain.
What some people overlook is the fact that www is actually a subdomain. It's a very, very common subdomain, and many sites serve the same content whether you access them with or without the www; but the fact remains that example.com and www.example.com are two different URLs and have the potential to serve different content. For this reason, they're considered different sites in Webmaster Tools. Since they're different sites—just like www.example.com and www.example.org—they can have different data. When you're looking at the data for www.example.com (with the www subdomain) you're not seeing the data for example.com (without the subdomain), and vice versa.
What can I do to make sure I'm seeing all my data?
Even though example.com and www.example.com may look like identical twins, any twins will be quick to tell you that they're not actually the same person. :-) Now that you know, we urge you to give both your www and non-www sites some love in Webmaster Tools, and—as usual—to post any follow-up questions in our Webmaster Help Group.
Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst
The Webmaster Tools GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of Webmaster Tools, such as setting a geographic location or your preferred domain. For those of you that aren't familiar with GData, it's a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit Sitemaps programmatically. Now you can also access and update site-specific information. This is especially useful if you have a large number of sites. With the Webmaster Tools API, you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.
What can I do?
We've included four new features in the API. You can see and update these settings for each site that you have verified. The features are:
How do I do it?
We provide you with Java code samples for all the current Webmaster Tools API functionality. Here's a sample snippet of code that takes a list of sites and updates the geographic location of all of them:
Where do I get it?
The main page for the Webmaster Tools GData API explains all the details of the API. It has a detailed reference guide and also many code snippets that explain how to use the Java client library, which is available for download. You can find more details about GData and all the different Google APIs in the Google Data API homepage.
It has been confirmed via a WebmasterWorld thread that many search ranking checking tools have been working over the past day or so.
Just about a month ago we reported about the issues people were having with WebPosition Gold and other rank checking tools. We first thought Google was going after these rank checking tools but then we learned that the issues were due to Google testing out new HTML structures and layouts in the search results pages.
The WebmasterWorld thread reports that not only is WebPosition Gold now working, but other rank checking tools also. So maybe the Google experiment is over or maybe it is on a vacation? Or perhaps, the tools built in a fix for the scraping issues.
I still know Google hates these tools but will they go as far to block them?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
The historically popular search engine ranking software, WebPosition, has reportedly been blocked by Google from checking rankings automatically.
A WebmasterWorld thread reports that WebPosition is no longer able to process one's search rankings as of August 5, 2008. Old time WebmasterWorld member, Barbara 'WebMama' Coll, who has been a member of WebmasterWorld since 2002, said:
Has anyone else noticed that after years of threatening it appears that Google has now blocked WP Gold from reporting rankings through their tool? We called the WP support line and they said they are waiting for Google to 'do' something and have NO ETA has to when it will be fixed.
There is no estimated time when the software will begin working again. This software has been around forever and I believe Google has threatened to block it many times. In fact, Google has named WebPosition Gold in their SEO guidelines saying, "Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
So maybe Google did something about it finally? Or maybe not. Time will tell.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Aaron Wall has written a pretty awesome rank checker tool Firefox plugin that checks various keywords against results on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. Here's a sample screenshot of what you're expected to see:
While it looks like it's pretty accurate from my perspective, on Sphinn, one of the users note that it isn't completely accurate. Aaron has responded to inform us that the tool "clusters 100 results per page to minimize scraping on Google. That clustering can cause a shift in ranking compared to only seeing 10 results per SERP."
But I gotta say -- this is probably one of the tools that should have been made earlier and just hasn't been. Now, you really don't need an API key to run ranking tools. You can do it out of the convenience of your web browser. Thanks, Aaron. This rocks.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.