Philip Nicosia

The New Google Webmaster Tools

Attention, webmasters—Google Sitemaps is changing its name, and then some.

Initially the Google Sitemaps program was just one tool to help this search engine giant index all the pages in your website. By registering under it through a Google Sitemaps account, and submitting an XML map, you could at least guarantee that the spider would see all the steps you’ve taken for search engine optimization.

But now there’s more to Google’s services than keeping track of your pages, and the new name reflects that. Now called ‘Google Webmaster Tools”, it’s got multiple features to assist you in handling all aspects of website management.

The old features are still there. Sitemaps submissions still follow the old steps, and the sitemaps protocol (thank goodness) stays the same. You can still check on your submission status and review any reports of web page errors. However, the blog’s been retooled and new programs have been added, all for the purpose of helping you improving your website’s visibility on Google.

It’s a great move, especially since studies have verified that Google is favored by Internet users. At least 80% of the total web population uses it, and numbers are climbing. It’s become synonymous to finding information on the web, and has even been adopted into the language: if you want to get data, you “Google” it.

But competition’s tough, and users don’t have the patience to scour through tens of thousands of search results. You need to be in the top 15 sites, so visibility and search engine ranking is crucial. Google’s Webmasters Tools help make that race just a little easier.

For example, you’ve changed your web team, and someone’s been given the pink slip. That means that person should no longer be able to access the site and make changes. The old Google would’ve let you remove his verification file, but now, you don’t have to wait for the periodic updates (crucial if that person wasn’t too happy about the, er, company restructuring, and may use his account to take revenge). Now you can click on “manage site verification”, remove it yourself, and then click “Re-verify all site owners”.

Essentially, Webmaster Tools helps you take better control of your website management. You’re no longer just passively submitting your site, you can monitor it and edit accordingly.

Blogging at Webmaster Central

The blog has been retooled to focus primarily on webmaster topics: the webmaster tools, the Sitemaps protocol, and anything related to the science of crawling through sites and indexing it.

One of the most welcome changes is its user-friendly archiving system. Blog entries are grouped into categories, making it easier to find the information you’re looking for (it is a search engine company, after all). There are also links to Google’s other webmaster tools, for easy navigation.

Finding Help at Google Groups

The Google Webmaster Help groups is an online forum where you can raise your technical concerns and be heard. Some of the more frequently asked questions already have existing threads, with suggestions from experts, Google employees, and other members (there are about 7,500 users already). You can also post your questions and follow links to other sources of information.

Managing your Site

But the meat of the changes lies in the site management tools. Let’s you want to check in your site, www.abc123.com. Visit “My Sites” and you’ll see your sites registered in a handy chart form and whether they’ve been verified or not. You can also find other tools, like reporting spams, or requests for re inclusion. .

You can also perform diagnostics at the indexing summary page, which lists all of the obstacles the Google spider encountered when it went through your site. This includes HTTP errors, restrictions from robot txt, URLs that were unreachable or timed out. You can then check the specific pages where the errors occurred (for example, you’ll see a link was disabled). Google also records the last time that they tried to access that page, in case you had already made corrections since then.

Anther welcome feature is being able to submit the preferred domain name (should you drop the “www” or not?). This is a great boost in link canonicalization and helps in issues with duplicate content, that could affect sites that don’t use the function of “301 re-direct”.

Query stats reveals ranking, and which types of queries get you in the top rankings (a tool for search engine optimization strategies!) There’s the additional practicality of being able to check your performance in different geographical locations, That’s fantastic if your website is targeted towards particular demographics. Google also gives crawl stats so you know which of your pages get the most visits and had the highest individual rankings.

Another interesting feature is page analysis. It lets you compare your own anchor text and how other websites commonly describe you—peer feedback, so to speak. In terms of marketing strategy, understanding where your appeal lies and how the web world views the significance of your content may help you discover which pages to build. Who knows, they may be link opportunities here—and we all know the importance of links in Google search engine ranking.

The index stats enable you to link out to the different searches, which may be useful for those who don’t know how to use these functions (although some believe that precisely because this feature is targeted to newbies, it would’ve been more user-friendly if a pop-up box could briefly explain what each one was about). Experts at Search Engine Optimization may not find anything new here, though.

All in all, the Webmaster Tools are very useful, powerful, and geared for both professional webmasters and the man-on-the-street running a small home-based business and wanting to check whether or not his website’s performing well. While the new name is quite a mouthful—so much for the old adage that business names should be short and sweet—changing it does do justice to Google Sitemap’s attempts to be more than just an indexing tool.

If you’ve not created an XML Sitemap yet or are not sure how to then try XML-Sitemaps.com‘s easy to use online generator.

Every time I log into my Google sitemaps account I see on the summary page for one of my sites number of URLs not found and number of pages restricted by robots.txt with a polite little exclamation mark and a note saying you might want to take a look at this.

URLs Not Found

With the URLS not found on closer inspection they are pages that don’t and have never existed on the site in my case. They are simply incorrect links that Googlebot has found while doing their crawl of the web and are either misspellings of URLS or badly formatted links.

As long as the links don’t show up as having been found in your own sitemap (in which case you should fix that) then there is little really that you can do to stop these errors from showing. It would be nice if Google at some point decided to show the originating page then at least you could contact the webmaster of the site and ask for the link to be corrected.

From a user point of view there is nothing worse than getting to a 404 page not found like below.

A good idea to stop this from happening is to create a customized 404 page for your site. That way even though the page cannot be found your visitor has some form of navigation to the rest of your site and hopefully they will delve further rather than closing the window in their browser.

It’s worth noting that if you create a customized 404 page you should check it with a header checker to make sure your server stills returns a 404 error code.

URLs Restricted by Robots.txt

When you log into your Google Sitemaps account if you see the error urls restricted by robots.txt with a number greater than zero in your summary then it is definitely worth checking out. This means you are blocking Google from indexing pages from your site. It is so easy to make mistakes with your robots.txt file and if you are unsure about any changes you make you can test them with Google’s robots.txt checker within your sitemaps account.

I have received countless emails from people saying that our sitemap generator at XML-Sitemaps.com doesn’t pick up all their pages only to find they have inadvertently blocked access to robots with their robots.txt file.

I have these errors show up all the time on one of my sites as in my case it is because I have chosen to block certain areas and pages of the website. These pages were designed specifically for individual users of the site and serve no purpose for the rest of the visitors. These pages aren’t linked to on the site anywhere and have been picked up from external links pointing to the pages generated by the users.

There are lots of reasons why you might choose to block robots from areas of your site but it is equally important to make sure you don’t block areas you want indexed too.

I’ve never felt the need to buy an iPod before as the only music I tend to listen to is what I hear on the radio but now I have had a change of heart.

There are so many great podcasts available which I do try to listen to but find it distracting to listen to these on my PC. So now I’ve decided to order an iPod so I can download the podcasts onto it and hopefully I’ll have more of a chance to listen to them when I’m on the move.

Some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are:

The Best of Chris Moyles
Scott Mills Daily
Webmaster Radio

I’m sure I will be listening to more once my iPod arrives.

When I first got my Sony PSP I noticed in the menus a link to “LocationFree”. I didn’t have a clue what this was so I searched on the internet and found that you could watch TV wireless on your Sony PSP if you had a LocationFree base station. How cool is that? Unfortunately these were only available in the US at the time.

Sony have now released these in the UK a short while ago and although they were out of  stock on their online store I found one on Ebay which was also a bargain and I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy it.

Setting up my PSP to receive TV was a piece of cake and took less than 5 minutes. All I had to do once I had connected the base station to my Sky+ box was to put it into setup mode then get the PSP to find it and register itself and I was set. I have to say I was a bit dubious how well it would work but to my amazement the picture quality received on the PSP was excellent.

Next thing to do was setup the remote control by downloading the codes to my PSP. This again was a simple exercise and now I can happily control my Sky+ satellite receiver anywhere in the house or garden.

Now I had got the PSP working the next task on my list was to get it working with my Sony UX180P. This wasn’t quite as straightforward as the PSP and took a little longer. Mainly because I don’t think the instructions were all that clear or I wasn’t reading them properly.

The confusing thing to start with was that I couldn’t connect to the base station. It turns out that unless you have the base station connected into your router by cable it won’t work. It wasn’t a problem for the PSP but the pc was a different story altogether.

This is one thing that I had overlooked when reading the specs before I bought it. Being a wireless device I had thought it would connect to my router wirelessly but this isn’t the case. It needs to hard wired in with a cable. Now this was going to be a problem for me as the location of the base station was going to be in a different room to where my router is. Luckily this didn’t turn out to be such a big problem after all. I bought a Netgear wireless game adapter and plugged it into that and it worked straight away.

Picture quality on the PC was equally as good as the PSP and again was excellent. My only disappointed is that on the PSP there is a button to control the picture format so if you are feeding it with a widescreen signal you can stretch it out to fill the whole screen as it should be but this feature isn’t available yet for the PC. I only hope they support this in the future with an upgrade to the software.

Now for the tricky part. I wanted to set it up to watch TV over the internet. This involved setting up port forwarding in the router to the base station which wasn’t such an issue as I had done this before with my wireless camera. The only real problem I had was finding out how to setup the dynamic dns service in the base station. This part got me scratching my head a lot as it wasn’t that clear in the instructions. The problem I had was I was looking in the wrong place. Instead of the advanced settings it was actually in the easy setup menu. Once I had found the correct menu it was as simple as can be. You don’t need to sign up to anything and the dynamic dns service assigns you a web address to connect to the base station with.

In the specs it says that the minimum requirements are a broadband connection with upload and download speeds no less than 300kbs. As my current provider only gives me a maximum of 256kbs and probably doesn’t achieve that I was a bit dubious to whether it would actually work or not. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did and although the picture quality wasn’t anywhere near as good as connecting directly to the base station it was perfectly viewable. I would say it was as good as watching a program recorded on an old VHS video tape.

Things can only improve when TalkTalk finally let me go and I get a different provider with 3 x the upload speed I’m currently getting.

So now I can happily watch anything on TV from home including all recorded programmes on my Sky+ box anywhere in the world where I can connect wirelessly to a hotspot or a 3G connection with my Sony UX180P.

I have to say it is pretty amazing and if anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be able to do this you would have laughed in their face. Imagine what we will be doing in another 10 years?