Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 1:28 PM
Written by David Sha, Webmaster Tools TeamWe launched Webmaster Central back in August 2006, with a goal of creating a place for you to learn more about Google's crawling and indexing of websites, and to offer tools for submitting sitemaps and other content. Given all of your requests and recommendations, we've also been busy working behind the scenes to roll out exciting new features for Webmaster Tools, like internal/external links data and the Message Center, over the past year.
And so today, we're unveiling a new look on the Webmaster Central landing page at http://www.google.com/webmasters. You'll still find all of the tools and resources you've come to love like our Webmaster Blog and discussion group -- but now, in addition to these, we've added a few more you might enjoy and find useful. We hope that the new layout will make it easier to discover some additional resources that will help you learn even more about how to improve traffic to your site, submit content to Google, and enhance your site's functionality.
Here's a brief look at some of the new additions:
Analyze your visitors. Google Analytics is a free tool for webmasters to better understand their visitor traffic in order to improve site content. With metrics including the amount of time spent on each page and the percentage of new vs. returning visits to a page, webmasters can tailor their site's content around pages that resonate most with visitors.
Add custom search to your pages. Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a great way for webmasters to incorporate search into their site and help their site visitors find what they're looking for. CSE gives webmasters access to a XML API, allowing greater control over the search results look and feel, so you can keep visitors on your site focused only on your content.
Leverage Google's Developer Tools. Google Code has tons of Google APIs and developer tools to help webmasters put technologies like Google Maps and AJAX Search on their websites.
Add gadgets to your webpage. Google Gadgets for your Webpage are a quick and easy way for webmasters to enhance their sites with content-rich gadgets, free from the Google Gadget directory. Adding gadgets to your webpage can make your site more interactive and useful to visitors, making sure they keep coming back.
We'd love to get your feedback on the new site. Feel free to comment below, or join our discussion group.
15 comments:
I guess my comment is more targeted for Webmaster Tools. I'd like to see a similar tool like the Dynamic URLs offered by Yahoo Site Explorer.
That would be a really useful tool for sites which depends on tracking codes to measure clickthroughs, improve usability and conversion rates.
It's nice that we can use the analytics tool without having to rely on running PPC campaigns and adding search to the site without having to have an adsense account as well.
I have been developing gadgets aon my own, so it's nice to be able to use a WYSIWYG now in the webmaster tools to make it even easier to create gadgets and add other features to my websites.
Hi there,
Just noticed a bug in the Statistics (tab) -> "Pages that link to your site's front page link."
When you click on this link it always returns zero hits. I discovered today that it needs a space between the link: tag and the query domain name.
This is the webmaster link as it is now and always returns zero hits for me:-
link:www.domainname.com
After manually adding the space character, this works and returns multiple hits
link:[space]www.domainname.com
Otherwise a useful tool!
thx
My sites lost ranking in google serps but i didn't get any messages from google. Does it mean that my sites are OK?
What kind of messages do you send via WT?
Any particular reason why the Webmaster Central links to google.com/webmasters/sitemaps, as opposed to google.com/webmasters/tools?
Thanks-- it looks good. While doing a bit of search engine rescuing for a fellow in the news last week, I suggsted that Google take a leadership role in Search Engine Orientation (SEOr), to help out ordinary folks who may not consider themselves "webmasters" per se, but want to understand how ranking works. This sort of information may be in any "SEO for Dummies"-type book, but I'm not sure if it's easily reaching the millions of Google searchers, and the perhaps thousands who fret about what their name brings up.
When looking at my sites' links using the Webmaster Tools, I can no longer see past the first page of links listed (either 30 or 100). Is this feature no longer available, and we must now download the .csv file to look at all of our links? If so, then that is far too inconvenient, and I will no longer be using Webmaster Tools.
If it is an error, please correct it in the near future.
Thanks you so much. I'm using Webmaster and Analytics to analyze and improve my site. That's great.
Here is a usability tip: Make it possible for people to login from your ( http://www.google.com/webmasters/ ) page.
I like the new changes, but something seems to be wrong with the verification system on the new setup. It keeps asking me to verify every time I click a link even though I verified last year when it was first set up. The last time I tried to go back to the verification page, it lost my verification key and is now throwing this error message when I log in:
Warning Our system experienced a temporary problem while accessing verification data for some of your sites. Please try again later.
My verification .html file was recently inadvertently removed from our website. When this occured I lost access to all Statistics except "Index stats". The .html file was then reinstated for my site and I was able to view it in the Webmaster verification tool. The site is marked verified by I can still no longer see "What Googlebot sees", "Crawl Stats", etc. The site is marked verified but no luck.
Anyone know how to fix this?
Hi, How to Sitemap Generator!, please tell me.
Hi- HAve a new site that i did the sitemap and google html for the verification. It's with a yahoo store so that was easy enough. Yahoo gives you a specific line for you to add the google code. Problem? Google gives me a code 404 can't find and does not verify the address. Any help will be appreciated.
What happened to the reinclusion tool? One of my clients got blacklisted due to bad code by a webdev person; we found and removed the code and now need to get the site back into Google. But reinclusion page is gone. Who do we talk to about this?
Hi everyone,
Since several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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