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Archive for November, 2007

Get closer to Google with WebMasters Tools

Categories: Principles Tools Website Analysis
November 27th, 2007 by Pete

Instead of trawling though your website statistics –a tedious and highly interpretable chore at best – assuming you even have access to your website statistics – check out these information systems provided by the major search engines:

  • Google’s Webmasters Tools  where there are some excellent free tools to interpret your site’s performance from a Google persective and they are regularly adding new capabilities including:
    • Diagnostics showing any issues GoogleBot encountered in your site
    • Statistics including ‘top search queries’ and where your site ranks for these
    • Links inbound and outbound as detected by Google – critical for PageRank
    • Sitemap registration and status information
    • Tools that allow you tune your site’s relationship with Google
  • Yahoo Site Explorer is similar to Google’s Webmaster Tools but with less capability
  • Live Search Webmaster Center is Microsoft’s beta webmaster centre with even less capability

Each of these facilities require you to register yourself , then add a file or metatag to your site as an authentication test. 

A very important function in each facility is the ability to register your website’s Sitemap.

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The Google Site: command

Categories: Principles Tools
November 15th, 2007 by Pete

Site: status
You can use the site: command to discover how much of your website Google has indexed. 
Indeed most other search engines provide this functionality as well. 

The syntax is:  site:<your website adddress>  as illustrated below

The search result displays all of the pages in your site that the search engine knows about.

Check to see if that correlates with how many pages there actually are in your site. 

Don’t be surprised if there are some pages that the search engine hasn’t found as this is very common and typically due to ‘GoogleBot unfriendliness’.

With search engines believing your site is smaller than it actually is there’s a negative impact on your site’s search ranking, but more importantly key pieces of your content is not available to be found in searches by prosective clients !

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