Checking out Google’s Webmaster tools at Google Dev Day

May 31st, 2007 | Category: Web Tools, User Experience, Web Usage

I’ve got some other notes I’ll be publishing, but in the meantime, here’s a little interesting tool that if you’re managing a website to know about.

I’m at the Google Developer day here at the San Jose convention center and had a nice close up tour of the Web Master tools that Google provides.

Did you know that you can see who’s linked to you, and export the data? While the data is alpha organized and a bit raw, it may have data (or richer data) than what Technorati brings to you. You can also check out Google queries, and how people found your site, and which keywords they used. I found out that I show up as the fourth Jeremiah in search results. (The Google folks were impressed!) By putting this data next to your Analytics, you can get a better sense of how folks are finding you. I also discovered my blog has a ton of 404 links, likely due to my site being down from dreamhost. Overall checkup? My site’s doing well, although I should upload a sitemap using my RSS feed. Yet another way to observe the User Experience.

Did I tell you I hate the term “Webmaster”? It’s so reminiscent of the sys admin in your IT department that built your first corporate website with flashing graphics.

Update: I’m not the only one that doesn’t like the webmaster title.

5 Comments so far

Arjun Thomas May 31st, 2007 10:04 pm

Will definitely need to give this a test.. thanks for the heads up…

Cheers,
Arjun Thomas.
brian May 31st, 2007 10:36 pm

It’s a decent start. Export is nice, but it would be better if the links analysis could filter out repetitive linking via blogrolls whereby every page of a site links to me (but it’s really just a common include).

Also, when I logged in it said : Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Nov 23, 2006. This is clearly wrong. I recently added a meta description to my home page and google picked it up a week ago.

I liked the instant vote on tool usefulness. Very nice. Why this isn’t merged into google analytics I don’t know.
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