Subscribe to RSS FeedGoogle Webmaster Tools Diagnostics
Yesterday I went over the Overview page in Webmaster Tools in part 3. Today we will be discussing the Diagnostics page of Webmaster Tools.
The diagnostics page deals with errors that Googlebot has encountered while crawling your site. There are 3 different sections; Web crawl, Mobile crawl and Content analysis.
Web Crawl
The web crawl section lists error or problems with pages designed for viewing on the web. Inside of the web crawl section there will be 7 different sections referring to certain parts of your site.
The first one is: Errors for URLs in Sitemaps. If you have submitted a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools and Google has attempted to read the Sitemap this is where errors will be placed if Google finds any. Specifically if any of your URLs cannot be accessed by Googlebot.
The second one is: HTTP Errors. This relates to Googlebot having a problem accessing a page of your site. Some errors that you may find in here are 404(not found), 401/407(authentication), domain name could not be found as well as trying to access a local IP(127.0.0.1).
The third one is: Not found. This one is pretty self explanatory but when Googlebot visits a link and a page does not show up for that link, this is where you will find these errors. Useful for finding broken links on your site which you should fix asap.
The fourth one is: URLs not followed. This is somewhat like the previous Not found section except that it deals specifically with the URL itself and not the resulting page. Redirect errors and cookie errors are the most common errors listed here.
The fifth one is: URLs restricted by robots.txt. Robots.txt is a file used to tell search engine robots like Googlebot to do a certain task with a certain file, url or directory. Usually you are limiting Googlebot from accessing a file, url or directory through Robots.txt so the errors displayed here you usually don’t have to worry about. Though it is always safe to check to make sure that everything is working ok.
The sixth one is: URLs timed out. If Googlebot tries accessing a page and it takes too long to load. an error will be shown here. This could be caused due to the server being down or slow or the page not loading due to an error in code.
Last but not least is: Unreachable URLs. This is related to Not found except that it deals more along the lines of server network issues when a page cannot be found or doesn’t load. This could be due to a DNS error, network error or the connection being refused.
Mobile Crawl
If you have designed your site or certain pages for use on mobile devices and Google encounters an error, this is where the error will show up. Mobile devices currently do not have the ability to display a web page as well as on a desktop or laptop. Mobile devices are limited to screen size and certain applications not being able to load and display the content correctly.
You should be definitely watching this section if you want to make sure that your site or pages are being displayed correctly on a mobile device.
Content analysis
This section of the Webmaster Tools deals with Meta description issues, Title tag issues and Non-indexable content issues.
Meta tags are tags placed within the head tags of a webpage. Meta tags can be used to display the description of the webpage, keywords for the webpage and other useful information.
Title tags are used for displaying the title of the webpage at the top of your browser window. If all of your title tags are exactly the same Google will throw an error and let you know. Also, if a title tag is too long or too short, there will be an error as well.
Non-indexable content is referred to as content on your page such as Flash, video and images. Googlebot cannot read Flash or video, however it can read the alt tag used inside of an image tag.
The Diagnostics page of Webmaster Tools can be a very useful tool. Errors on your site can turn visitors away and you don’t want that happening. It is a good idea once Googlebot starts crawling your site to check out the Diagnostics page to make sure that everything is running smoothly.
Thats it for part 4. Part 5 will be discussing the Statistics page which gives you a good amount of information as to how Google views your site and the data that it extracts from your site.
Part 5 - Google Webmaster Tools Statistics
Related Posts
SOCIALIZE