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Google Webmaster Tools - How Are Yours Doing?

         

Sally Stitts

7:36 pm on Mar 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



How are your webmaster tools doing?
Here is how I feel about mine -

Site configuration
Sitemaps - SUPER excellent, works very well, VERY FAST - Every page indexed, except the one I excluded.
Crawler access - I block one page, just to have a robots.txt, and prevent a pile of 404s
Sitelinks - Not optimized, due to the incomplete Internal Links cited below
Change of address - Not applicable, but a sweet feature
Settings - Target users in US, display as www.example, let Google determine crawl rate

Your site on the web
Search queries - Impressions, clicks, and CTR WILDLY INFLATED by 10 times and more (from outer space!)
Links to your site - Tens of thousands, excellent
Keywords - Useless single words - 2-word and 3-word phrases would be far more useful.
Internal links - Incomplete, unfinished, INCONSISTENT, very slow to update
Subscriber stats - Who cares? RSS is dead (for me, anyway).

Diagnostics
Malware - Not detected (I sure hope not - only a hack could cause this).
Crawl errors - VERY SLOW to update when fixed (months)
Crawl stats - Excellent, looks fine
Fetch as Googlebot - USE IT! Showed me an htaccess problem.
HTML suggestions - Just one today - bogus issues raised in the past, due to URL interpretation (false duplicates)

Labs
Site performance - "Faster than 68% of sites" - Good enough for me
Video Sitemaps - Not applicable, don't have one.

I find it ironic that the best way to speed up "Site Performance", is to remove Google code. Sorry, can't do that.
(Proof of the wall between search and AdSense)

Are your observations/ feelings similar?

tedster

10:29 pm on Mar 3, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I use Webmaster Tools for a lot of different websites, but I have to agree on the Site Performance area as being problematic. If you don't already know a lot about speeding up a website, the generic advice given can be way out in left field for any specific situation. I've seen webmasters hurt their websites by following it blindly.

Those who depend on free Analytics are not about to remove GA scripts, anyway. The burden of speeding up that kind of 3rd party call is on Google. The same holds for Twitter and Facebook badges, which both can make a make hang instead of loading.

So I say:

Labs
Site performance "Faster than [some]% of sites"

That helps me. Leave the rest of it alone.

AnkitMaheshwari

9:38 am on Mar 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Keywords - Useless single words - 2-word and 3-word phrases would be far more useful.


I look it from the perspective that the most occurred keyword in this report should be matching the theme (most relevant) of the site as that would help in overall authority and ranking in that niche.

g1smd

9:52 am on Mar 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Internal links - total rubbish.

Site has ~5000 pages indexed.

WMT shows "internal links" from 550 pages.