Category Archives: google webmaster tools

Google Webmaster Tools Query Stats

Posted by on February 26, 2007 No comments

I am not sure how long this feature has been around, but I was just scrolling through my list of sites and wanted to see the recent query stats on a few of my sites. I noticed that there is an option to see query stats by search location. This is great, now for foreign sites I can actually see exactly what’s going on within that country.

This seems especially helpful if you are having a hard time getting rankings up in a specific country. In my case trying to rank sub domains from a .com site hosted in the US.

Website accessibility for SEO

Posted by on February 7, 2007 No comments

I think its time to bring up website accessibility and SEO again. One of the things that I constantly rant about is that pages load too slowly and are too big, causing rankings to move down. There are several factors that I have been looking at lately that seem to add additional credibility to this logic. The main thing I keep looking at is latency.

One of which is locations of Google crawlers coming into my global sites. A simple analysis that I have done over several sites that I manage concludes that if you have a TLD or an IP address from a country Google will cross the pond from the local country to crawl the foreign sites.

To add further credit to this I have examined other sites in the same industry who actually host their sites within country. These sites out rank 10 to 1 any sites that are hosted back in the US. Now I know what you are thinking, what does this have anything to do with accessibility? EVERYTHING! Imagine a dialup user trying to pull down your fat slow pages over the pond, what a terrible experience! It’s imperative that these basic things come into play with your strategy.

Here is a small list of things that I look at that seem to make a huge difference.

1). Page Load Speed, if it’s over 500MS on average its way too SLOW! Look at your Google Webmaster Tools under the Crawl Rate to see what Google see’s.

2). Page size, how big is your page? Does it really need to be that big? Do you really need 100 images on it? Are they properly tagged? Do you really need all that graphical crap?

3). Text vs Graphics, how much text is a part of your page? No not the same boilerplate that appears on every page. The unique core part of your document.

4). Section 508 elements? Do you have them? ALT tags, are a great start, this is easy stuff to add and can really help you out. Check out Target.com, they got sued for not having them.

Google back link tool, easy tool for diagnosing URL issues

Posted by on February 6, 2007 No comments

As any SEO would do, as soon as a new toy is available I drop everything and start playing with it. The first thing I noticed is that this is a great way for large site owners to find URL problems. Wow what an amazing insight to huge issues! I was able to find spaces in URL’s strange tracking id’s that I had no idea still existed and trailing characters. What a great tool for my large site arsenal!

This tool is available within your Google Webmaster Tools, simply click the Link tab after you select your verified site.

How do you decide whether you need to submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools?

Posted by on January 17, 2007 No comments

From my experiments over the past year I have found a few interesting conclusions of the effectiveness of the Google Sitemap’s tool. Basically, there is only one reason I would use the Sitemaps feature, if your site has a lot of new content added every day that can possibly be 20-50 clicks deep on your site. These pages are very difficult for Google to pick up quickly, and with a site that is this deep it most likely has millions of pages.

Use this simple logic to determine if your pages belong in the sitemap, if you cannot click to the page from some sort of easy navigation, don’t bother submitting it. Orphaned content will not get ranked, unless it’s linked to by an outside source. If a user can’t click to it most likely they will not find it anyways, unless you run a search based site. Search based sites offer a huge nightmare to crawlers, at this point in time crawlers do not know how to search your site. Thus I would recommend using the keywords that you have in your search logs to create pages. Offer an easy way to get users to these predefined searches and ensure that the URL’s to these search results are clean and are not full of parameters.

From my tests I have submitted sitemaps with millions of pages that have been around for at least a few months, after my tests I could not measure an impact to these pages. Since they where so well indexed before.

What have your experiences been with Google Sitemaps?

Is Google’s Webmaster Tools – Page Rank distribution tool broken?

Posted by on January 4, 2007 No comments

I have just looked at 25 different sites, some new some old. Almost all of them have high Page Rank in the toolbar and drive a tremendous amount of traffic from Google. But they all share one thing in common the distribution in Google’s Page Rank distribution tool within their webmaster tools shows low Page Rank on most of the pages.

Could it be that this data is pulled from a source with bad data? Or is this tool still in beta?

Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

A test on slowing the Google Crawl Rate

Posted by on December 6, 2006 1 comment

Last week I decided to change the crawl rate of one of the sites I control within the Google Webmaster Tools. I am left with mixed results, so far after one week of changing this switch there has not been a significant decrease in crawl traffic from what is normally seen. Admittedly the day I turned it down Google was crawling twice as much as any normal day, it is still crawling at a higher than average level.

Just after this feature was launched, I tried the opposite on a new site that was launched around the same time. I set the crawl rate to faster which has had limited to no effect on the crawl rate.

With this data I believe that this feature may be live on the Webmaster Tools, however it does not have enough of an overriding strength to determine Google’s crawl rate at this time. I would bet that they are still experimenting with what this tool is capable of doing. I will update you as soon as I see a change.