The document summarizes the tools available in Google Webmaster Tools. It includes sections on verifying a site, the dashboard, site settings, search appearance, structured data, data highlighter, HTML improvements, search traffic, links to the site, internal links, Google index status, content keywords, removing URLs, crawl errors, fetching as Google, robots tester, URL parameters, and additional tools. Google Webmaster Tools provides insights into how Google sees a site and helps with search engine optimization.
2. Contains
Introduction: Google Webmaster Tools
Verification
Site Dashboard
Site Settings
Search Appearance
Search Traffic
Google Index
Crawl
Additional Tools
3. Intro : Google Webmaster Tool
Google's Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort.
It helps you see your website as Google sees it.
The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site,
what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more.
A site that's active in Webmaster Tools has a better shot at being fully indexed
and ranking well.
4. How You Can Verify?
Before you can access any data on your site, you have to prove that you're
an authorized representative of the site. This is done through a process of
verification.
There are five main methods of verification currently in place for GWT.
5. Now that you're verified, you can log in and start to examine the data for your
site.
The first screen you'll see is the dashboard. This gives you a quick view into some
of the more pertinent information for your site, along with any new messages from
Google.
Dashboard Appears After Login
6. Here you can tell Google some things about your site if you're not able to tell
them in other ways.
You can also set your preferred domain – whether you want the site to show up
in the search results with the www or without the www.
The crawl rate option allows you to slow down the rate of Google's spider's
crawl.
Site Settings
7. Clicking on the ? icon to the right of this menu option delivers a nice breakdown
of the various elements of a search engine results page (SERP).
Search Appearance
8. Here you can see information about all structured data elements that Google's
located on your site, whether they're from schema.org or older micro formats.
Structured Data
9. The data highlighter allows you to help Google identify some types of structured
data on the pages without the need for the code to actually be implemented.
To use the tool, you need to login to Webmaster Tools, choose your site and
then click “Optimization”, then “Data Highlighter”. It gives you the option to tag a
single page or multiple pages, verify the tags, and then “publish” it to Google.
Data Highlighter
10. Here is where GWT will inform you of issues with your title and description tags.
As titles and descriptions should be unique for each page and should be within
certain character length ranges.
Clicking through on any of these errors will give you a more descriptive overview
of the error and will also give you a list of pages where the error was detected.
HTML Improvements
11. Search Queries : Here you can get an overview of the top keywords that
returned a page from your site in the search results.
Data shown here is collected in a slightly different way from your analytics
platform, including GA, so don't expect the number to exactly.
Search Traffic
12. The Search Queries section is broken down into five main indicators:
Query: Query gives you details on what keywords your site is currently ranked for. It's
important to remember that "rank for" means showing up in the SERPs – not necessarily
actively attracting traffic
Impressions: If you've ever wondered how many people are seeing your website for a
specific keyword search, this will tell you.
Clicks: Of the people who are seeing your site, how many are clicking? This information lets
you know how many searchers seeing your site are taking action and clicking on your search
result.
CTR: Your CTR, or click-through rate, is the percentage of people that are clicking on your
site in the search results.
Average Position: This metric tells you where your site typically ranks for each keyword.
Search Queries
13. This section identifies the domains that link to you the most, along with your
most linked to content. While you most likely won't see every link that Google's
found for your site.
Links to Your Site
14. Here you can see the top pages on your site sorted by the number of internal
links to those pages.
Any pages that show 0 internal links have been orphaned and should either be
linked to from somewhere on your site, or redirected to an appropriate page.
Internal Links
15. The Index Status allows you to track the status of your site within the Google
index. How many pages are they showing as being indexed? Are there any
worrying trends? Have you accidentally blocked large sections of your site from
Googlebot? This is a great place to get the answers to those questions and more.
Google Index Status
16. This section displays the most common keywords found by the Google crawler as
it navigated your site. One thing to keep an eye on here is if you see unexpected,
unrelated keywords
showing up, that's usually an indication
that your site may have been hacked
and hidden keywords have been
injected into your pages.
Content Keywords
17. If you want to remove a page from your website, The first step is to either
remove the page itself or 301 it elsewhere so that it can't be crawled and indexed.
Enter the URL that you want to remove, click continue, then select whether you
want it removed from the search results and the cache, just from the cache or if
you want an entire directory removed. Clicking Submit Request adds it to the
removal queue. Typically this request will be processed in 2-12 hours.
Remove URLs
18. Crawl Errors - Here's where you find out about the errors that Google has
detected when crawling your site over the past 90 days.
GWT shows you the number of errors, lists the pages and shows a graph of your
count over time for that particular error so you can see whether it's been a gradual
change or a more sudden occurrence.
Crawl
19. Here is where you can basically view your pages as Google sees them. They'll
return the HTTP response, the date and time, and the HTML code.
This is a great way of verifying that the Google crawler sees the page as you
expect it to and that there are no externally injected hidden links on the page.
You are allowed 500 fetches / submissions a week, and 10 linked page
submissions per week (submitting a page and all pages linked from it at the same
time).
Fetch as Google
20. This section is the place to test out your current robots.txt against any pages on
your site to verify whether they can be crawled or not. You can also test out
modifications to your robots.txt to see whether they'd work as you anticipate
against various pages on your site.
Robots Tester
21. What it does is that it allows you to specify URL query string parameters that
shouldn't be considered when examining URLs on the site to determine unique
URLs.
For example, if you had a tracking parameter that you use for a particular
campaign, then the page is obviously the exact same page as when it's reached
without the tracking parameter. Entering the tracking parameter in here tells
Google that they should ignore the tracking parameter when looking at the URL.
URL Parameters
22. This section contains links to tools that are outside of GWT, but are of interest
to webmasters, such as the Structured Data Testing tool, which enables
webmasters to test their schema implementations, the Structured Data Markup
Helper, and others.
Additional Tools