Google Webmaster Tools Quickstart Guide

Google Webmaster Tools is a helpful service for all webmasters whether your website is hundereds of thousands of pages or less than ten pages. Google has put together a nice little quickstart guide to show people some of the features and what you can do with the site. Go and check it out.

I personally find the links section of Google Webmaster Tools the most helpful. It shows you a lot more links that Google has about your website than the link: search operator. The search queries is also very informative to give you an idea of what keywords and phrases you are ranking for. It also has a great robots.txt analyser that you can use to check to see if you have your robots.txt file setup properly to keep the robots out of areas you don’t want them in. You can also use it to set a preferred domain, so Google knows that mydomain.com is the same as www.mydomain.com and only reports back one of the site. I would still recommend you use an htaccess redirect for the other search engines though.

While many people praise the sitemaps feature of Google Webmaster Tools, I actually recommend that people don’t submit sitemaps to Google. If your site is being updated constantly then your sitemap gets out of date very quickly. I have also found it does not speed up the indexing of pages by Google enough to warrant the extra work that you have to do to make the sitemap. Just let Googlebot crawl your site and do its job. Why should you do Googles job for them. They need to earn their paychecks somehow.