Google Webmaster Tools - Part 2 - The Dashboard

June 11th, 2008 - 5 Comments
Categories: Google Webmaster Tools

Welcome to part 2 of the Google Webmaster Tools series. This series is provided to give you an insight on how to use Webmaster Tools to optimize your site for Google.

Looking for part 1? Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools Account

Ok, so the last thing we did in part 1 was to verify our site. Hopefully everything went ok and you were successful in verifying your site. Lets log back in to Webmaster Tools so you can view more information about your site.

Dashboard

After logging in you will see the Dashboard. Remember this is where all your sites are listed that you want to use Webmaster Tools with.

Your site should be listed and if you do see it, to the right you will notice 2 additional data fields that are listed. The first one being the Sitemap column. A sitemap is a listing of the pages in your site along with a few other options that tells Googlebot where the pages are and how to go about indexing them.

You don’t have to worry about having a Sitemap right now for your site. Next to the Sitemap column is the Verified? column. This column lets you know whether or not your site has been verified with Webmaster Tools. Hopefully you should see a green checkmark next to your site. If not, review part 1 on setting up a Webmaster Tools Account.

To the right of the table where your site is listed is the Message Center and Tools sections.

Message Center

Provides updates and warnings if Googlebot has trouble crawling your site.

Tools

There are 4 available options listed under the tools section. These links are pretty self explanatory but I will elaborate a bit further on each of them.

Download data for all sites

Clicking this link will take you to a page where you can select to download site data in either the .csv or .txt file format. A .csv file allows you to open the file in a spreadsheet program such as Excel for easier readability.

Summary data for all sites: Inside of this file is information relating to the domain name, whether or not their is a sitemap for the domain name, any errors for that domain name’s sitemap, any warnings that need to be addressed and whether or not the site is verified. This can be useful if you operate a large number of sites as it gives you a quick very general overview of how your sites are doing.

Sitemap details for all sites: Inside of this file is information relating to each particular site’s Sitemap. You will find the domain name, url of the sitemap file, format of the file, type of the file, when the sitemap was submitted, when it was last downloaded by Google, the status of the sitemap (whether it could be reached or not), and how many URL’s were submitted to Google from the sitemap. A little bit more of a specified tool although it only pertains to each site’s Sitemap.

Error details for all sites: This file lists all of the errors that Googlebot has encountered while trying to crawl your site. It lists the exact url it was having a problem with, type of error and the date that Googlebot last checked that URL. This tool is very useful to make sure that Googlebot as well as your visitors can reach all of your URL’s without issues.

Statistics for all sites: This file is the most advanced of all 4 and contains quite a bit of information about each of your sites. The first section is the Top searches for each of your sites. The Top searches section lists the site, the search query, the position in which your site is listed in Google for that particular search query, the type of search, and the location.

An example would be:

http://www.example.com/,example,2,Web Search, (United States) google.com

Each section is seperated by comments and there are 5 different fields.

http://www.example.com/ would be listed under the Site Information column

example is the search query for which the site showed up in google

2 is the position in Google’s index for which the site is showing

Web Search refers to the type of search in which your site showed up, this deals with how you have your sitemap submitted to Google

(United States) google.com is the Google domain name that was used by the searcher, Google has various different domains for certain countries so you can tell if where searchers are coming from

The 2nd section in the file lists the search terms for your site that people actually clicked on from the search results that lead to your site. The format is the same as the previous section, except that the word or phrase after the first comma is the search query that drove traffic to your site.

The 3rd section lists the keywords Googlebot has found for each of your sites. The format is the domain name of the site and then the keywords that Googlebot has found in your site following a comma. As you can imagine, this list can become quite long for your site depending on how much content you have.

The 4th section seperately lists each keyword in each link that is pointing to your site. What does that mean? When somebody links to your site, they can choose to display words related to your site or just display the url of your site.

So lets say, we have a site set up about examples. Our domain name is http://www.example.com. Somebody comes along, finds our site and wants to link to us from their site. They can choose to either display just our url, www.example.com as a link or they can choose to use just a word, example to our site. So what does that matter? Well how somebody links to you is important because it can raise your ranking in the search engines. More on this will be explained further in this series as we get deeper into the information located in the Webmaster Tools.

Anyway, back to the topic. Each word that is in the link to your site is displayed in this section. So from our example we would only have one word showing up and that would be example.

The 5th section lists the entire phrase for a link pointing to your site. So using our above example, there would be 2 lines. One would list the example link and the other would list the www.example.com link.

That’s it for the Tools section of the Dashboard.

If you want to delete your site from the Webmaster Tools, simply select the check box next to your site(s) and click the button labeled Delete Selected. You may have also noticed a Download this table link next to the Delete Selected button. This link provides the exact same feature as the Summary data for all sites found under the tools section under the Download data for all sites link. Basically it is the quickest way to get a general overview of all of your sites.

Note: Clicking this link will download information for all of your sites. You can not select which sites you want information for. At this time, I am not sure whether or not Google will allow this in the future.

Report spam in our index

This is where you can report a site to Google that is trying to achieve higher rankings by using unethical methods, a.k.a black-hat. Google wants to keep their search results as relevant as possible so that they can provide the most useful information when you are searching for it. If you suspect that a site is trying to cheat the Google algorithm, you can report it to Google here and they will personally investigate the matter.

Report paid links

To achieve higher search engine rankings, webmasters will buy links on other websites pointing to their website. Google does not like this because the link is not a natural link. Google wants to provide the best possible search results and when people buy links on a site just to get a link to their site, they are violating Google’s quality guidelines. While Google has quite a few techniques to detect sites that are buying and selling paid links, they can’t catch everybody. This is where you can report a site that is suspected of buying or selling paid links.

Request reconsideration

If you have done things on your site that go against Google’s quality guidelines and they find out, your site will most likely be removed from the Google index. That means that if somebody searches for your site, it wont show up! Obviously, you don’t want this to happen especially if you are running a business online.

There are various reasons as to why your site may have been removed. This is where you politely ask Google to take a look at your site again to decide whether or not your site deserves to be included back into the index.

Note: You want to fix all errors and problems that caused your site to be dropped in the first place. If errors still arise when somebody at Google checks your site, you will be denied re-inclusion until your site is fully void of all errors and issues.

Well that does it for the 2nd part of this series. Part 3 will be coming soon and we will start diving into the actual information that Googlebot has found about your site.

Part 3 - An Overview of the Overview

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