Archive for the ‘Webmaster Tools’ Category

How to Fix the Broken Webmaster Tools Crawl Error Report

A few weeks ago the link to download the Crawl Errors data in Webmaster Tools broke. Google’s taking a long time to fix it but there is an easy way around it which we thought we would share. The download URL is malformed but easily corrected. The URL looks something like this…. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/://:///webmasters/tools/crawl-errors-new-dl… You just [...]

Posted on August 30, 2012 at 8:17 am by chris · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Analytics, Webmaster Tools

Google’s Hidden Interpretation of Robots.txt

Update: Google has confirmed the behaviour and provided detailed documentation. The original Robots.txt syntax was pretty straightforward. You could only use the Disallow directive to exclude pages and each Disallow directive acted like a broad match at the end. This seemed pretty intuitive to most people and for a while the world was a a [...]

Posted on November 15, 2010 at 8:03 am by chris · Permalink · 2 Comments
In: Google, Robots.txt, Site architecture, Webmaster Tools

Google Updates Webmaster Tools ‘Links to your site’

It’s been over a year since Google conducted a survey asking webmaster which features they wanted the most. Our analysis of that survey showed that people were desperate for more information on backlinks. Google obliged by updating ‘Links to your site’ in Webmaster Tools to provide a full list of all backlinks which could be exported in [...]

Posted on November 1, 2010 at 1:29 pm by chris · Permalink · 2 Comments
In: Google, Link building, Natural search, Webmaster Tools

Google says descriptions should be a minimum of 50 characters

Google recently added a new report to Webmaster Tools called ‘short meta descriptions’ which sits under the HTML Suggestions menu. Analysing the data for a few large sites quickly showed that descriptions of 49 characters or less are included in the report. So what is the impact of having a ‘short’ meta description? On the [...]

Posted on September 3, 2010 at 5:05 pm by chris · Permalink · 2 Comments
In: Google, Natural search, Webmaster Tools

Top Search Queries report deconstructed

Those people at Google working on Webmaster Tools have been keeping everyone pretty busy recently with new toys to play with and now they’ve announced an exciting update to the Top Search Queries report. You can see the total number of impressions, clickthroughs and a clickthrough% for your keywords. You can see the data for [...]

Posted on April 15, 2010 at 2:10 pm by chris · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Analytics, Natural search, Webmaster Tools