Wednesday, April 02, 2008 at 11:59 AM
by John Blackburn and Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools teamUpdate: The described feature is no longer available.
We launched Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets last month with excitement—and curiosity. Would you find them useful? We thought you might appreciate the ability to create better "dashboards" for your sites, but there's no better way to tell for sure other than to get it out so you can use it.
After our initial release, we saw clear interest in the gadgets, and plenty of suggestions for improvement. So we've spent the past several weeks working on various areas. The biggest improvements are probably for those of you with more than one site: when you add a new tab of gadgets, your gadgets will now default to the site you were viewing when you added them to your iGoogle page. Additionally, gadgets now retain settings as a group, so if you change the site for any gadget in a group, the next time you refresh that page, all the gadgets will show data for that site. And gadgets now resize dynamically, so they take up less room.
Other cosmetic and usability improvements will benefit everyone. We shortened the tab's title to "Webmaster Tools" to save space on your iGoogle page, and added a Google logo/watermark to each gadget to help distinguish them as a group. We think the gadgets look a lot better, with alternating background colors for table rows to make them easier to differentiate, and improved layout in general. The Top Search Queries gadget now shows each query's position, too.
Some of you did tell us you want a 4-column layout, but we feel that the information we display—including some fairly wide URLS—is better suited to 3 columns.
We really appreciate your feedback on these early gadgets, and hope these improvements make them even more useful.
As always, please let us know what you think.
15 comments:
Seeing when the page was last crawled would be nice.
Please bring back 4 columns; works FINE on a widescreen. At least have it as an option for folks to select if the want it. Why be Column Nazis?
Can we already, or will we be able in the future, to allow other accounts to view the gadgets?
@Andrew: The number of possible columns is an iGoogle feature; the Webmaster Tools team doesn't have control over it. You can give feedback to the iGoogle team here.
@JeffG: In order for someone else to see your site in their gadgets, they can add that site to their own Webmaster Tools account. It will then appear in their Webmaster Tools gadgets.
Nice.
I asked this once before, but is there any chance of getting gadgets for analytics?
You'd have to ask the Analytics team; we don't have access to their data.
Thank you!!
Hi. Is there any way that the iGoogle gadget can work for non-US localised iGoogle pages? I have iGoogle set to the UK (and therefore google.co.uk), and it appears that when I view the Webmaster Tools tab that I added, each of the Tools boxes displays the logged out homepage for Webmaster tools. If I change iGoogle to be US, then all appears as it should.
I'm not going to change my localisation, so at the moment the Webmaster Tools gadget offers me no benefit above actually clicking through my links, which is a shame because I'd like the at-a-glance tool.
Thanks.
Hey i cant get my igoogle gadgets to work i own Oxbow Surf Shop and i am trying to moniter my spyder crawls easily but my igoogle home page want disply properly it just has blank tabs any tips?
Does google provide a search suggestion tool, complete with search results for each term that month. Overture used to have a free tool, but I'm lead to believe this was for the ammount of searches in a variety of other engines (yahoo) not including yahoo. I realise analytics has some excellent tools, but seeing actual numbers of searches made on terms would greatly benefit clients setting up google adwords campaigns, rather than a simple graph? Thanks in advance.
any advice for those wanting to move a blogspot location to a .com? or even more pressing, moving a googlepages site to a .com these would both be very helpful posts...especially the latter thanks!
I don't want the left-side tabs at all - I want the option to have top tabs so I can switch easily between tabs. With tabs on the left side it takes up tons of space and is tedious to switch between them since I have so much on each of my 2 tabs. Don't take away my tab freedom!!!!!
good job
My best wishes to Google Team.
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IGoogle now has four columns,even though I chose three columns. the fourth seems to be for gadgets.
How can I get rid of this fourth column?
Can Google water board the tech that programed this unwanted and very frustrating addition?
Hi everyone,
Since some time has 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 Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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