Google has announced several new features in its Webmaster Tools package. These include more extensive alerts for webmasters on potential issues detected on their sites such as hacking and spam.
A growing number of Irish businesses use Google’s free suite of Webmaster Tools to generate detailed reports about their pages’ visibility on Google.
These tools basically give a “Google eye view” of your site – a key consideration for search engine optimisation given Google’s position as the number one search engine.
Alongside the metrics software Google Analytics (also free), Google Webmaster Tools provides key data about internal and external links to your website, showing which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and how users arrive there.
The tools show how Google crawls and indexes your site, then diagnose problems it encounters such as broken links or not having a sitemap in place.
Automated security alerts
The new security alerts from Webmaster Tools will focus on:
- “Spammy or abused user-generated content”
- Abused forum pages “or egregious amounts of comment spam”
- Suspected hacking
The tools will also provide webmasters with next steps to get these problems fixed so that the site is back in Google’s search results.
A useful tip is to get these Webmaster Tools messages forwarded to your email address for instant updates, rather than having to visit the webmaster console to check for alerts.
You can set up this alerts function through the message section of the Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Shared ownership
Google has also made it much easier to share verified ownership of websites. The new verification delegation feature streamlines this process of adding new verified owners (including extra email addresses for security alerts).
Many large websites require a collaborative effort to maintain, so this is good news for Irish sites with multiple webmasters, as well as organisations that are running multiple sites.
In the past, a separate account would have to be created for each person and then verified through the metatag or HTML file verification process for Webmaster Tools.
This was time consuming and laborious, but now you can quickly add or remove the other person’s Google account on the Verification Details page.
Learn more
View video tutorials of Google Webmaster Tools on its YouTube channel
