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Have you been using Google Webmasters Tool ?
If you’re serious about your site’s general health, I very much recommend using it. But its also a fact that its an “ignorable tool”, you could check the main dashboard and get away with it. But digging more into the tools available can reveal some very interesting info. Here are a few examples.
Webmasters tool helps find the pages from your website that gets the maximum traffic from Google. This is not just ranks, but pages which people think are relevant on your site by judging you from the SERPs. This necessarily doesn’t mean the top ranks. Sometimes, the best converting pages are way below the top ranks, but because your meta description/page title is compelling they gather much traffic.
This can be found at >
Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)
Google Webmasters tool also shows those keywords for which your site ranks on top of Google SERPs.
Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)
Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)
Go here, first. Then copy paste the URL in to the box, for which you need to find the backlinks frolm around the web. The backlinks keep “popping” with the Page Rank details of the source page (In my case, the PR links were broken most of the time).
If you go here (Your site on the web > Subscriber stats), Google webmasters tool will list down the feeds it detected from your site, and you could submit anyone of those as a valid sitemap, by a single click.
Google Webmasters also gives you a lot of clarity on which pages on your site has short meta descriptions/ long meta descriptions/ duplicate meta descriptions etc. Pretty much a consolidated approach to trouble shooting meta description errors. Clicking on the link, whichever is available, lists down the entire list of URLs the problem were detected on. Very effective!
(You can also find errors with Title tags there)
Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions >
If you’re unsure how to create a Robots file and what to include in it, Google Webmasters Tool has a neat wizard that does the job well, it creates a custom robots file, according to your preferences. (Find it at Site Configuration > Crawler Access > Generate Robots.txt)
If your site targets users in a particular location, you can suggest Google which country you’d like to get exposure from. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org.
Find it at – Site Configuration > Settings
Go to Site Configuration > Sitemaps and it will show you a small summary of number of URLs indexed and number of URLs submitted. Although this is most of the times ignored, you could find out if any pages are not indexed on Google by calculating the difference. If there is an alarming number of pages not indexed, then it might need your attention.
Why ? You could then try and leverage on it with some clever internal linking strategy.
Go to > Diagnostics > Crawl Stats
Have you found anything interesting with Google Webmasters ?
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I have a question: if i already submitted a sitemap.xml, should i my RSS Feed as addition sitemap? Is it necessary?
What is different between XML sitemap and RSS Feed sitemap?
BTW thanks for this useful info!
Reply
Mani Karthik
Replied:
If your sitemap.xml is already submitted and all the pages are working fine, then I dont see why you should submit the feed. Its an alternative way to submit a sitemap, that’s all.
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Really useful article Mani and i think you can also add Subscriber stats as i will tell you how’s visitor are responding to your website as well as one good feature is that one can monitor number of website ( should have control on them )by one account.
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Thanks for the long list of tips. I always submit the xml sitemaps to google and yahoo. It helps.
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This is great information. I’m forwarding it to my address book. I couldn’t agree more. It’s about time we had some informed conversation on this. Internet Marketing Company
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really informative post..awesome!!
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