Ignore Webmaster Tools At Your Peril

Webmaster Tools is a free and powerful tool provided by search engine Google, which provides key insights into your site on the web. Webmaster tools should not be ignored by any website manager/owner.

Reports Provided By Webmaster Tools

There are many key reports provided by Webmaster Tools such as:

* Top search phrases
* Website performance
* What Googlebot sees
* Keywords
* Internal links
* Crawler stats

But the primary area I am going to focus on in this article is the Diagnostics Area. This area provides the Crawl Errors and HTML Suggestions sections.

Crawl Errors

In this section Google will report all of the errors they have encountered whilst trying to access and index your website. All of the errors encountered in the sub headings; HTTP ‎, In Sitemaps , Unreachable & Timeout should be rectified at the earliest opportunity, as these are effectively dead links, and any traffic (or spider) that comes here will be lost. The Restricted by robots.txt area should also be checked on a regular basis to make sure you are not blocking valid content from the spiders.

HTML Suggestions

Duplicate content is a key issue for SEO, and should be avoided at all costs. Thankfully Google reports instances of duplicate content that they find within your site in the HTML suggestions are, stating instances of duplicate title tags and description tags (key indicators of duplicate content. Any instances of duplicate content should be removed, and if the duplicate was a republished blog or article the newest version should be redirected permanenty to the original.

Google also reports instances of short title tags and description tags in the section as well as highlighting any reasons why your content could not be indexed.