Earlier this week, I began my final installment of this series about Google’s Webmaster Tools with a discussion of the robot.txt file, geographic targeting and the enhanced image search capability. Today, we’ll delve even deeper into the Tools Section. I’ll talk about site verification, crawl rates and preferred domains, and I’ll also tell you how to remove URLs from the Google search index. Enjoy!

Manage Site Verification

Anyone with a Google account and FTP access to your site can verify the site and view its stats using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Here you can see who has verified the sits, so at least you’ll know who’s checking up on you.

Set Crawl Rate

There are two reasons why you might want to adjust Google’s crawl rate: either it’s crawling your site too often and eating up your bandwidth, or it isn’t crawling often enough, meaning your updates aren’t accurately reflected in the current search results.

On this page you can request that Google adjust the rate at which it crawls your site. The change isn’t guaranteed, but at least you’ve done all you can.

Set Preferred Domain

Most sites can be reached via URLs with or without the www prefix. For example, www.tridivas.com and tridivas.com both take you to the same place. If you prefer one address to the other, and wish it to appear alone in your search results, you can state that preference in this section.

Again, as is often the case, there’s no guarantee that Google will respond to your wishes.

Remove URL’s

Did you know that you can ask Google to remove URL’s from its search index? I know it seems counterproductive, and yes, most of the time you’ll be asking them to add, not delete, your sites. But there are occasions on which you may wish to request a removal.

For example, when someone leaves a company and the company doesn’t want its pages to appears as results in a search for that person, this action makes sense. Even if the pages have been removed from a site, the results may still be in Google’s cache. When you request that a URL be removed, the wipe is complete.

I learned the hard way that Google is a busy little bee when it comes to indexing pages and sometimes finds pages on your web site even if they aren’t linked to anything else. These pages could contain info that you don’t want everyone to see. The best thing you can do if this is the case is make sure that the robots.txt file prevents robots from crawling those pages. If you do find that they have made their way into Google index, use the remove URL’s function to get them out of there.

That’s it for this series. I hope enjoyed it. I’ll be back soon with more posts on other topics.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.