Here are some little-known or often-missed methods of change Google Webmaster Tools to suit your needs, starting from before you’ve even reached the console for a specific website.
Power Users
If you have a great number of websites to manage using Google Webmaster Tools, switch to Compact View on the homepage.
Click the list icon, next to the Sort options, and you can change the outlook so many more site profiles fit on to the home screen.
If you usually just click straight through to a site profile, this is one choice you may have missed – but it can streamline the page substantially for power users.
Notifications
The homepage is also where you can set up email notifications for any automatic site messages – just click on the Settings cog at the top-right, and click through to Webmaster Tools Preferences.
Regardless of its name, this page is all about site messages, allowing you to alter the default language if you wish, and to set up email notifications.
You can, if you choose, change the notification Type to ‘All issues’ for much more recurrent emails about your site health – helping to flag up things you might otherwise have missed, if you have a lot of profiles to manage.
Authorship
At the time of script, the Labs section – where new features are beta tested to make a decision whether they should be included in the main Webmaster Tools suite – has an ‘Author stats’ page.
If you have set up Google Authorship, this allows you to view statistics for all of the pages that are linked with your Google+ profile and have been crawled and indexed by Google.
Click on the ‘Filters’ button for higher segmentation of this data by Search type, Location and Traffic – so, for example, you can see which are your best-performing pages on mobile devices in the UK, or in the middle of Image search users in the US, and so on.
Data on this page includes imitation, clickthroughs, CTR and average ranking – making it a powerful page if you are trying to decide the positive impact of setting up Google Authorship on your site.
Additional Tools
The Additional Tools page is worth a look if you usually gloss over it – it is basically a list of links to services that can be beneficial to your web presence, such as setting up a Google Places page, or submitting your products to Google Product Search.
Site Profiles
Once you’ve clicked through to an personality site profile, the options available to you become much greater – and some of the methods we’ve previously mentioned above change, so it’s worth checking them again.
For instance, the Settings cog now has much more in-depth preferences, allowing you to link Google Webmaster Tools with the applicable site profile on Google Analytics, check your site verification details, and so on.
The Labs list should now also include more options than it did on the homepage, so again, determine whether any of those are value trying.
Google Analytics
If you linked your Google Analytics account as mentioned above, look out for hyperlinks from Webmaster Tools to Analytics.
The bottom of the Search Queries page is one example of where this occurs, and while it can be easy to miss, it gives you a direct judgment between the data collected by the two platforms.
Remember as well that the precise figures obtained may differ, due to the different methods used by each platform, so it’s significant to compare the two before drawing any conclusions about the success or failure of your web marketing.
Google Penguin & Webmaster Tools
The Google Penguin update was a major algorithm update designed to remove copy and keyword-stuffed content from the top of Google’s organic search results.
If your site was affected by the update, Webmaster Tools can help you to respond, addressing the nastiest infringing content first, and building a better library of site content to help you come back to the top rankings.
HTML Improvements
This option is found under ‘Search Appearance’ on the site dashboard and flags up frequent meta tag in rank including page titles and descriptions.
According to Google, these will not directly affect your search ranking, but giving a sole, descriptive title and description to each page is still good practice.
Detached URLs
If you have URLs that have been flagged by Google as copy or keyword-stuffed content, you may wish to remove them from the search index entirely, rather than risk having them damage your ranking.
Under ‘Google Index’, click ‘Remove URLs’ to submit a removal request – but make sure the page meets Google’s removal supplies first.
These require either that the page is deleted entirely or that it is blocked using robots.txt or a meta no index tag.
Click ‘Advanced’ and then check ‘Removed’ and hit the ‘Update’ button to see how many pages have been detached from your site, and when Google delisted them from its index.
URL Parameters
At last, you may wish to organize URL parameters if dynamic URLs put you at risk of having the same content come into view at multiple URLs, and therefore be identified as duplicates by Google.
‘URL Parameters’ is found under ‘Crawl’ and can tell Google what parameters are used in your URLs, so that they can be accounted for in its assessment of what is duplicate content, and what is simply the same content accessed vigorously.
This is an option that should be used carefully, to avoid delisting large sections of your site entirely, but it may be the best answer if dynamic URLs proved problematic following the Google Penguin update.The Google webmaster tools can help small businesses exploit their online presences.
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