Google’s Webmaster Tools, Part 2
Author of this post: Karen Morrill-McClure | About Blog Authors »
So, after reading Part 1 of this series, you signed up for Google’s webmaster tools and added and verified some of your sites. Now what are you going to do? Well, why not start using the tools to understand and improve your Google page rank, and squash some bugs in the process?
Here’s what’s available via Google’s webmaster tools:
Overview –This is Google’s summary view of your site.
Diagnostics – These are the errors the Google robot discovered while crawling the site.
Statistics – This is how your site appears in the Google index, and it tells you which search terms will return your site.
Links – You can see the pages that link to yours and the sitelinks generate by Google.
Sitemaps – A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site, and it’s useful if you have a deep site that cannot be easily indexed by Google’s robot.
Tools - You can use these to target your site geographically. You can also determine the crawl rate of your site and do other good things.
Using the Tools: The Overview and Diagnostics Sections
Here you can see when the home page was last crawled and check the site’s status in Google. This is helpful when the client asks, “Is my site in Google?”. You can also find out what problems Google has when crawling the site; this is the meat of the Diagnostics section.
The Google robot crawls every link on your site and will let you know if it encounters any problems. The most common error messages and their meanings are discussed below.
HTTP Errors - Have you ever tried to visit a web page and instead received a message about an HTTP error? Well, that’s the outcome the Google robot encountered here. You’ll see exactly which page caused the glitch, so you should be able to fix the problem quickly. A page may be missing or something might be wrong with a script or the server.
Not Found - This means the Google robot followed a link on your site only to discover that the page doesn’t exist. Often, this is because an address was typed incorrectly, but it could mean that there’s a link on your site leading to a page that’s unavailable. You can see what pages are producing the errors, and try to visit them yourself. Then, you can search your site and find the broken links.
URLs Not Followed - This result indicates a problem with a redirect or the length of a dynamic link - all that stuff after the ”?” in some links.
URLs Restricted by robots.txt - We’ll talk about robots.txt files in another post. For now just know that they’re text files that can be used to bar search engine robots from certain parts of your site.
URLs Timed Out - These pages never finished loading. A really long DNS lookup (maybe a problem with your hosts dns server) could be the cause, or the server could have been too slow to respond.
Unreachable URLs - This is a catch all phrase for several errors that mean the URL was unreachable. It could be a DNS issue, or perhaps the server stopped responding.
You can find out what pages the robot had trouble with by clicking the more details links. Remember that anything that’s underlined is a link and will lead you to more information.
