Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
And, format aside, it looks like 1/3 of my external links have gone bye-bye in this new format. Not sure what the purpose of this is -- sometimes things are best left alone.
The new look doesn't seem to have the link to file one.
gouri: Select a site, then look to the left and you'll find "Reconsideration requests" under "Help with," which leads to a help page with a link to the form.
I found it where you mentioned but my WMT is offered with the web host so there is a meta tag on the homepage. I did not have to add a site into my WMT account by logging into my Gmail account. As a result, I am not sure what to do because in the choose a site option in the reconsideration request I don't have a site to choose?
I, for one, liked the old look better.And, format aside, it looks like 1/3 of my external links have gone bye-bye in this new format.
Yes, I agree entirely! Although I'd say 9/10+ of my external links have disappeared!
I logged in just a couple of days ago (before the switch) to check on the external sites that were linking to me. I manually checked a lot of these links, and they were indeed valid! The reason for my external link checks was that I was moving the site to a new server and restructuring a lot of the content - the idea being I was going to setup a load of 301 redirects from the old to the new, based on what others were linking to. Now I log back in to download the links in order to setup the redirects (I've not moved the site yet) and it's almost empty! (Yes, I should have downloaded them a couple of days ago when I had the chance, but I didn't think they would just go "bye-bye"!) *sigh*
And yeah, having almost all of my links now gone is pretty dumb too.
Seriously, I am not going to be using this tool any more, it's actually pretty much useless in its current form. I can never understand why a company insists on re-designing their UI and actually making it much worse. Do companies like this just have too much spare time on their hands or something? If it aint broke don't fix it.
The actual sitemaps referred to in the index file are shown as added and updated (downloaded) regularly, with a green status tick, but only a '--' in the Format, URL submitted and Indexed URLs columns. Clicking on each of these sitemaps does give the correct "Total URLs in Sitemap" and "Indexed URL in Sitemap" values.
Google's recent changes have been very annoying.
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...QQ...eh well...we will just have get used to 'em i guess
"Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://example.com/. Please verify http://example.com/."
Not sure how I can do this as it's 301'd to the www anyway. Can't they compare the domains and work out that www is a standard subdomain?
And I see the Verification option has disappeared so I couldn't re-verify anyway.
Apart from that the geolocation selector is grayed out. Not a problem since the site is a .com aimed world wide but odd nevertheless.
Another thing: the site has been ranking well in the SERPS since the site was launched a couple of months ago so it must have been crawled, but according to crawl stats the site has never seen a crawler, has downloaded 0 bytes in the past 90 days and has spent zero milliseconds doing it.
It tells me the sitemap, which was accepted last week and was re-downloaded yesterday, is X and awaiting processing ("this may take some time" - a week?!).
And the ONLY internal link shown is one they are not supposed to have, from a disallowed page (which it acknowleges IS disallowed) to a disallowed contact form. And the linking page has noindex,nofollow,noarchive at the top of it so it shouldn't even have found the link.
I noticed that links coming from some article directories are missing in this view apart from others.
JohnMu: ...we built a new backend for gathering links data as part of our new UI and we decided not to follow 301s. The reason we did this was a lot of users were trying to go to the source page that we mention has the URL and were unable to find it since we were showing the final destination URL rather than what was specified on page.We understand this change has solved issues for some users, but created new problems for others and we are going to look at ways to solve this problem.
Webmaster Help Forums [google.com]
Although I'd say 9/10+ of my external links have disappeared!
Most, if not all, of my previously reported external links seem to have returned! :)
