Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 9:00 AM
Webmaster level: All
We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.
Here’s what the new home page looks like:
You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon
or the “Check site health” link next to that site:
This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.
Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:
A word about “important pages:” as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.” Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.
Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;” in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site. But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.
After you’ve resolved any site health issues we’ve flagged, it will usually take several days for the warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to recrawl the site, see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through our Web Search and Webmaster Tools pipelines. If you continue to see a site health warning for that site after a week or so, the issue may not have been resolved. Feel free to ask for help tracking it down in our Webmaster Help Forum... and let us know what you think!
We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.
Here’s what the new home page looks like:
You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon
or the “Check site health” link next to that site:
This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.
Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:
- Have we detected malware on the site?
- Have any important pages been removed via our URL removal tool?
- Are any of your important pages blocked from crawling in robots.txt?
A word about “important pages:” as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.” Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.
Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;” in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site. But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.
After you’ve resolved any site health issues we’ve flagged, it will usually take several days for the warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to recrawl the site, see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through our Web Search and Webmaster Tools pipelines. If you continue to see a site health warning for that site after a week or so, the issue may not have been resolved. Feel free to ask for help tracking it down in our Webmaster Help Forum... and let us know what you think!
41 comments:
That's a nice move. So many forums were saying G didn't work with them when they had issues.
As you say, webmasters with good judgement should already care to know every ampersand about their site.
This is definitely a step in the right direction. I like the new redesigned home page, good to see sites with issues are flagged right in the home page (not that I have any that are unhealthy :-) The more signals you can add to the health check, the better.
Love the idea of Site Health but can't say I like the new design. Each site takes up way too much vertical space so you have to scroll loads to see more than 5 sites. Coupled with GWT's insistence on having separate profiles for www vs non-www it's pretty annoying!
The 404 URL removal is considered not healthy? What do you meant by that? If you report what is unnecessary, this leads to more harder yet inefficient work rather than smarter.
We're more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine's cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.
It could be easier if you created a video introductory about this new panel. I like the word "Health" included... that makes us "SEO Doctor" aren't we?
It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.
This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity.
This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.
It's great to see Google continuing to implement new functionality into webmaster tools.
Was wondering for last of couple of weeks if GWT would have a redesign any sooner with changes in Google Analytics and Adsense.
And, here is the new GWT with a promising look and a thumbnail image of the Webpany on the first screen.
Will be looking into depth more changes that had been done to GWT.
Nice idea. Good implementation of site health. It would be better if you are adding filter option like GA, wherever it necessary.
That scared me! I have a number of intranet-ish sites which are not indexed. So robots.txt disallows everything. But Webmaster Tools regards that as "Severe health issues are found on your site" and gives it a red pling.
Surely a correct robots.txt isn't a severe health issue.
This is really good. I hope it'll help all webmasters finding errors/issues easily.
Even blogger change.. All the google web service.
Is it possible to get more information on "The 404 URL removal is considered not healthy?"
Thank's a lot
Good looking update, wish more of my sites had thumbnail images for quicker recognition when scrolling through, but that's only a minor issue (I just use Find/search to get to the site I want to check out)
Can you work on a way to separate 404 errors from internal and external links? It would be great to isolate internal errors in Webmaster Tools rather than have to click into each individual error to find out where it comes from.
Not an amazing update tbh
I second DisgruntledGoat, this change is good although I don't like all the space that is taking vertically, there should be a sorting option by site health without the site's thumbnail, we already know how our sites look.
I want to be able to collapse this. I have over 200 accounts i have to go through.
There is SO much that needs improvement in WMT.
I have a long list at http://aplawrence.com/Web/google-webmaster-tools.html but my major issue is that you keep showing problems that were fixed long ago.
I WANT to be able to fix problems, but when you keep showing issues that are long gone, you make it all that more difficult.
Google Analytics constantly rejects my sites for anayisis.
http://tradingglobal.tradebit.com
http://globaltrading.tradebit.com
http://mysite.verizon.net/reszk00z/
its great to know about site health, by this i came to know real problem & can check,where i have to correct to get solution.
very nice movement from google...
Thank you Google - great addition to the Google Webmaster Features.
Great news to hear about the new webmaster tools.
i guess we should now be able to focus our attention more on website health.
It can be sometimes overwhelming to note some problems if you are not a geek but someone always makes it easier like you did.
Yup seems impressive. I will try it and see what it results in.
Similar view to others.
Too much vertical space per site.
No longer being verified is important to me, so should be before good sites not after.
We have sites that exist for testing, or as aliases to overcome limits in browsers, and these have robots.txt files excluding otherwise apparently interesting (duplicated) pages - get over it! I want to just say "I know, we don't want them indexed stop bugging me". Do we need a "I really mean it flag" in robots.txt. I seem to remember IE proposed a "I really mean my mime type header for HTTP once...".
Now come on - own up - how did you thumbnail my site with "disallow: /"
Hi, why is it that all the "urls submitted by sitemaps" and the "urls on web index" of all my sites went terribly down? Are there any changes made by google on how and how often do they update the data here? Thanks
When does the picture associated with each website get updated on the WMT Home page? I ask, because I rolled out a new Home-page, and the new page is cached, but the pic on the WMT Web-page is the old pic.
I'm getting "severe health issues" on Blogger blogs, and it's pointing to the robots.txt file. But Blogger does not provide any ability to edit the automatically generated robots.txt. FYI. Needs to be fixed.
I agree with Allen Brown when he said
I have a number of intranet-ish sites which are not indexed. So robots.txt disallows everything. But Webmaster Tools regards that as "Severe health issues are found on your site" and gives it a red pling.
Surely a correct robots.txt isn't a severe health issue.
This is annoying as all get out as it gives the impression there are real problems with a site when they're not but just considered a problem because Google wants you to let them search everything.
Isn't there some way we as a user could choose to not have these messages displayed? Or at least indicate the message should be ignored on future log ins into our tools dashboard once we've determined it's not a real problem, just a faux issue created by Google?
This is a great feature that would help eliminate many potential problems and dangers to the sites that one may be managing. Thanks for the introduction and details about "site health."
Does this "Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health" eventually disappear or does it stay? All I did was block and then request for removal of my Blogger archive pages from Google SE.
i took the test twice once that day and the first pee of the next day they both said i was with baby i went to the DR. today he said i wasnt with child not at all. So they lie the first responce test my heart is BROKEN in two thanks for the phoney test. so no but the test cause it lies lies.
After you’ve resolved any site health issues warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through your Webmaster Tools pipelines. You should show us the details.
very nice discussion it is very useful for me. thanks a lot
Thanks for google, the master of the web in the world.
Google help us growing on internet
I came here because of the SEVERE HEALTH ISSUE my robots.txt generates. I do not want my /test folder spidered. That is to preserve my site health. Can you possibly tone the warning down? Thanks
Thanks for the great read.
When I login to my webmaster account, I see a bug in the google's webmaster tools website. The processing continously keeps happening and nothing happens. I tried several times in last 1 week assuming that it may be temporary error. But the issues is something wrong with google webmaster tools website. I have got the screen shot and want to report bug to google but there is no form, no email, no methods to report bugs in google website and finally I had to use this way to report errors. However, by this method I cannot post screenshot nor can I report to google technical team to inform them about the problem. Can anyone of you guide me the support email or way of contacting google so that I can report this issue to them.
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