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This series is almost over! One more post to go after this one, although this is the last part detailing the sections within Webmaster Tools. I will finish up this whole series with an overview post of what I have talked about.
In part 7 we looked at the Sitemaps section of Google Webmaster Tools and today we will be looking at the last section, Tools.
Tools
The Tools section is by far the largest section of Webmaster Tools with 9 pages. Analyze robots.txt, Generate robots.txt, Manage site verification, Set crawl rate, Set geographic target, Set preferred domain, Enhanced image search, Remove URLs and Gadgets comprise the 9 pages.
Analyze robots.txt
A robots.txt file’s purpose is to give instructions to search engine robots. It can be used to allow and disallow robots to certain directories or URLs on your site. Some things you don’t want the robots accessing and a robots.txt file is the way to do it.
When you arrive at the page, you will notice a small table with some data in it. The first, robots.txt URL is, you guessed it, the URL of your robots.txt file. Last downloaded is when Googlebot last accessed the file. Status is whether or not Googlebot was able to find and read the file.
Below this table you will notice some text and possibly a box with some text in it if you have a robots.txt file. Googlebot will take the entire robots.txt file and copy it into here. It is a copy of your robots.txt file and is used as a reference to the text area below it.
The text area below allows you to enter in certain URLs and check whether or not those URLs are accessible to robots through your robots.txt file. If you have a really big robots.txt file and you don’t want to sort through it, this is a quick and easy way to test specific directories or URLs to find out if you have a correctly formatted robots.txt file.
After you enter URLs to text against, you will want to choose the Google robots in which you want to test against. By default, Googlebot is selected as pretty much most everybody will be testing against it.
A drop down selection box allows you to select up to 4 other robots. Each has a short description next to them so I don’t feel that they need an explanation. You don’t have to choose to test against another robot though, you can just leave the drop down box at the default selection and it will only test against Googlebot.
Click the Check button and the results of your query will load up and display information regarding your query.
Generate robots.txt
If you don’t know how to write your own robots.txt file, Webmaster Tools lets you create one.
Upon visiting this page, you will notice some steps to take to create your file. The first is, Choose your default robot access. Choose either of the 2 selections and proceed on.
Next step is, Specify any additional rules (optional). This is where you can restrict certain directories or URLs. Your first option is to select the Action to take. Choose either Allow or Block depending on your situation and what you want happening. Your next option will be to select which robot you want to give or prevent access to. After selecting the robot, you now have to input which directory or URL that you want to either allow or disallow access to by that particular robot.
After entering the files or directories, click the Add link to the right of the text area and it will add the entry into the mockup robots.txt file below. Once you have listed all your entries, click the Download button and Webmaster Tools will give you a properly formatted file to use.
Manage site verification
You have the option to allow another Webmaster Tools user to access your Webmaster Tools account on this page. If you want to add another owner to your site, that person will have to go into their account, add your site to their account, and either grab the meta verification tag or the file and have you upload it to your site. After you upload the file, you can verify the new owner by click the Reverify all site owners button and if everything went ok, the new owner should be verified and can now access information provided by Webmaster Tools. Note: The new owner cannot access private information regarding your account or change settings, they can only view the information inside of Webmaster Tools that I have discussed in this series.
Set crawl rate
If Googlebot has visited your site, you will notice 3 graphs upon loading this page. The first graph in blue, shows the number of pages Googlebot has crawled on your site. The second graph in green, shows the number of kilobytes that Googlebot used to access the files on your site. The third graph in red, shows how much time Googlebot spent downloading your site’s page in milliseconds.
Next to each one of these graphs are Maximum, Average and Minimum colums.
Below these 3 graphs is the current speed at which Googlebot crawls your site. If you have a large site, Googlebot’s constant crawling could be taking up valuable resources. If you find this is happening, you can choose to have Googlebot not crawl your site as often to free up resources.
Set geographic target
Geographic targeting can be used to boost your site’s placement in location specific searches. Say your site is about hotels in downtown Windsor, Ontario which is located in Canada. By selecting a certain geographic location such as Canada, when somebody does a search for hotels in Canada, your site may show up higher in rankings as it is more location specific then say, hotels in New York.
Set preferred domain
I mentioned this very quickly in one of the earlier parts and this section mostly has to do with how your site appears in Google’s index. If you are looking to build PageRank for your site, which most people are, you only want your site to have one domain name.
Example: People can visit your site by typing in either, www.example.com or by typing in example.com. To prevent the splitting of PageRank between these 2 different versions of your domain, you want to set a preferred domain in Google. Note: You don’t have to set this as there are other ways to automatically direct one version of your domain name to the other version.
Enhanced image search
Google is constantly working on ways to give searchers the most relevant information. If you have optimized your site you will have most likely created an alt tag for your images. Considering Googlebot cannot “see” an image to know what it is, we use the alt tag to tell Googlebot and other robots what the image is about. By enabling this feature, you can better help Google to provider searchers more relevant information and in turn, possibly provide you more traffic ;)
Remove URLs
This is where you can remove a page, directory or even your entire site from Google’s index. There are certain situations where this may come in handy and should only be used if you know what you are doing.
Google explains pretty well how to go about removing content from their index so I won’t go over every single little detail. Just make sure you read the paragraphs at the top of this page to ensure that you don’t run into any problems.
Google won’t remove the content right away, you have to wait for approval. It can take a few days for this to happen so once you do submit a request, check back in a couple of days to see if there is an update.
At the bottom of this page you will notice a table. This table contains information on content that is currently being reviewed after a request and information about content that was successfully removed.
Gadgets
If you use iGoogle at all, you know about gadgets or widgets. If you have a iGoogle homepage, you can add certain gadgets so that you can view information about sites in your Webmaster Tools account, without having to actually be inside of Webmaster Tools.
You can choose from 8 different gadgets to have on your homepage; Crawl errors, Content analysis, Top search queries, Subscriber stats, What Googlebot sees, External links, Internal links and Sitelinks.
Each of these has been explained in previous posts throughout this series, so if you are wondering what each one is, check out some of the other posts.
Well, that does it for the Tools section of Webmaster Tools and that does it for this series. Don’t forget, I will be posting up an overview post just to give a quick rundown and answering any possible questions that may have arisen.
Thank you for reading this series and I hope that you learned at least one useful thing from it.
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