Google Monday - Google Webmaster Central
My kids stopped saying googoo and gaagaa years ago so why should my blog? The GooGoo for Google Monday series will now be known simply as “Google Monday”.
About a month ago, I gave you 50 steps to a successful blog. Some of those steps were realistic and some were meant to give a touch of humor. Of those steps, step 11 had the most out clicks by far. Step 11 simply states to submit your site to the Google Webmaster Tools. This tells me that many people didn’t know about these tools and I just can’t let that continue, as they contain much more than a place to submit your sitemap. Webmaster Central is broken down to 6 main sections.
Find out if your site is indexed by Google. Simply enter you URL to find out if it has been indexed and to show the last time the Googlebot last successfully accessed your site. This is good info to have for the brand spankin’ new blog to know when Google has found them. And for the seasoned blogger that has seen a sharp decline in organic traffic from Google; this can be a great tool to give you a hint as to why.
Webmaster tools (including Sitemaps)
There is simply too much in this section to explain every little bit. But for a quick list of some of its tools:
- analysis of your robots.txt file
- list all errors encountered by the Googlebot
- a page analysis (including phrases that link to your site and keywords in your site)
- Query stats (Which shows what searches results in traffic to your site)
- URL Removals (when you absolutely positively have to get your content out of the Google index immediately)
- Preferred Domain (Help Google index your site by choosing a default domain. For example, I prefer http://www. blisslogs.com as opposed to http://blisslogs.com even though both URL’s will get you to the same page. By submitting your default domain, Google will redirect it all the way you want it.)
- This list goes on. Maybe I should devote an entire post to each tool.
Learn about submitting content for Google properties such as Google Base and Google Book Search as well as submitting your URL to Google’s index.
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. Lots of information on anything new in the Webmaster Central. This is where new features will be explained as well as guidelines for webmasters everywhere.
Google’s discussion group for webmasters
A great place for we webmasters to give feedback to the mighty Google. Who knows, with this official forum, maybe they’ll listen.
Nobody likes to read help files, but this is a good place to start before jumping into the discussion group. Do yourself a favor, check out these help files; they give you tips on all aspects of website ownership.
Posted on August 6, 2007
By Jason Spence
Filed Under Google |
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