Google’s Webmaster Tools Updated

Google has recently updated their Webmaster Tools to provide even more useful information for Webmasters. Perhaps most usefully, there were changes in "Statistics > Top search queries". In particular, there is now access to historical data (up to 6 months) which can be helpful in analysing trends in how, in terms of keywords, visitors (using Google) are finding your site and what content they are interested in so you can deliver more relevant and related content to further satisfy your visitors’ requirements.

Additionally, top search queries and top clicked queries has a new column (%) showing the percentage that the search/clicked queries ranks for out of the top 20, e.g. searches for "google webmaster tools" may account for 34% of your top 20 search queries and "yahoo site explorer" for 16%.

Other changes are also under "Tools > Set crawl rate" where there are now graphs showing the past 90 days of Googlebot activity. There are three graphs showing:

• Number of pages crawled per day
• Number of kilobytes downloaded per day
• Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)

Alongside each graph there is also a minimum, average and maximum value. These graphs should help you identify if the crawl rate needs to be faster, slower or if there is some problem with your site which is stopping Googlebot from being able to crawl it effectively (e.g. incredibly slow page loads).

Let’s hope Google will soon deliver more useful tools, too.