Google Webmaster Tools: Cutting Through the Mystery Part 1

Google has an absolutely superb set of Webmaster Tools that can be of immeasurable value to you in your ecommerce endeavors.

However, that being said, these tools can be more than a little mystifying and overwhelming to the Average Joe or Jane.

For many ecommerce entrepreneurs, it’s difficult to determine which of these analytical and data tools are things that are on a need to know basis versus a nice to know basis.

How do you sift through all of those complex webmaster tools to find the ones that will be most helpful to you and your online business?

First, let’s begin by looking at how Google categorizes its Webmaster Tools. There are three basic categories:

1. Site Configuration
2. Your Site on the Web
3. Diagnostics
   

We’ll begin with the first category of Site Configuration, and look at the reports available, as well as what information they provide, and whether or not the data calls for any action on your part. We’ll break this down into subcategories.

Sitemaps: The first subcategory of Site Configuration. From here you can submit an XML sitemap to Google using a file that exists on your server. Google will detect the type of sitemap you submit.

Crawler Access:  Next subcategory. This is your robots.txt file command center. Among other things, you can use this area as a sort of testing ground for tweaking your robots.txt commands and testing them against the URLs you desire until they are just the way you want them. There is also a handy option here that allows you to remove a URL from Google’s index.

Sitelinks: The next subcategory. If Google is showing a sitelink for your site that you don’t want it to show, you can use this feature to tell Google to quit showing that link in search engine results page.

Change of Address: This subcategory is where you let Google know that your website has moved to a whole new domain. Please note that this feature doesn’t replace the regular 301 redirects for a domain.

Settings: In this subcategory, you are able to control 3 separate aspects of Google’s crawling, indexing and the way it ranks your pages. There is a geographic target section here that lets you focus your website traffic on a specific country. The crawl rate feature in this subcategory is where you tell Google how to crawl your site. If this seems to be working fine, don’t mess with it.

We will be covering more of Google’s Webmaster Tools in future articles!