'Net Features : GWT

Author Stats Now in Webmaster Tools

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:00:00 GMT

This week Google released Author Stats within its Webmaster Tools product. Authorship annotations (read more here) are fast becoming a must-have element on websites as they provide greater visibility on the SERPs.

The new report will essentially just show how often this annotated content is showing on the search results pages. If an author has associated their content with a Google profile, they will be able to see the amount of impressions and clicks it received. While there’s certainly no guarantee that setting up authorship annotations will matter to SERP position, but it is easy to understand how they might positively influence a users decision to click through.

Google has made several improvements to its authorship annotations since its release earlier this year. For example, an indication of how many Google+ users have the author in their Circles appears on the SERPs, as does the ability to add an author directly to circle. Search engine users can also access comments posted on Google+ about an article shared by the author.

Links to Your Site Report Enhanced at GWT

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:17:00 GMT

Google Webmaster Tools has updated its “Links to Your Site” feature to show which domains are linking to a website. The improvement should provide those responsible for maintaining competitive link profiles with a greater ability to track changes and understand where links to their site are coming from.

The overview page currently shows three sections – who links the most, how you data is linked, and your most linked content.

Selecting the “More >>” link under the “Who links the most” section reveals a new view that shows all the domains that link to your site. The individual listings can be expanded to display the actual pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.

Webmaster can also see the actual pages that are linked to most often. From the overview page users can see a listing of all a site’s most linked page and a link count for each page (as well as a count of domains linking to that page). When one of the pages is selected and expanded you are able to see domains linking to that page and the number of links to the page from each domain listed. Google is now including links redirected using 301 or 302 HTTP redirects to make the reports more comprehensive.

GWT Shows Crawl Errors

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:25:00 GMT

Google released its crawl error feature in Webmaster Tools some time ago (back in 2006), but since it's release webmasters have wanted to know the exact sources of the URLs causing the errors. Well, now it's available. This is important for those involved in SEO for a number of reasons.

The feature will help to identify and track down the cause of a particular "not found" error. This in the end will improve user experience by showing fewer dead-ends and give webmasters the ability to prevent it from happening in the future. If you happen to get those not found errors corrected, you might even find that there is a boost in ranking thanks to additional incoming links. For "not found" errors from your own site, webmasters will be able to put redirects to appropirate URLs in place.