Using the Google Webmaster Tools to Optimize Your Site

Friday, June 27, 2008

This post will explore one way that we use Google’s Webmaster Tools to optimize our site. In case you're not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, they are found in the Webmasters area of the Google site ( here ), and you can get a quick introduction from our article about the predecessor application, called Google Webmaster Console.

One of the most useful areas of Webmaster Tools is the overview screen. The overview provides a summary of any issues that Google sees with your site.

For example, let’s say that you decide (like iData recently did) to update your site and re-organize the content, but you don’t want to lose search engine rank accumulated by the old pages/URLs. As those who’ve been through the process know, in this situation you want to use 301 redirects to let search engines and site visitors know about the change. For our update, we implemented 301 redirects for almost all of our old site pages (we thought) using the URL redirect functionality built into our Synapse Publisher CMS.

Soon after the move, when we looked at the overview, we started seeing pages from the old site showing up as not found. Clicking the not found error brings up the Web Crawl report with details of the URLs. This report is great, because it gave us a handy list of pages we’d missed creating URLs for.

To fix these pages, I logged into Synapse, went to the URL Redirects screen and added the missing links.

I then went back to the Web Crawl report and clicked the missing URLs in order to make sure that they were fixed. Clicking the links now brings up the redirected page of new content, which is exactly what we want.

Visiting the Overview report and looking at the Web Crawl report are important not only when you have gone through a major redesign. It’s a good idea to use these tools on an ongoing basis to make sure that you have not deleted or moved content that Google has indexed.
Posted by: Mark Reichard at 1:46 PM
Tags: Google

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