Using Google Webmaster Tools To Monitor Your Site

Google, as we all know, offers an incredible amount of tools to virtually everybody on the internet, for free. Webmasters are no different, as Google gives us Google Webmaster Tools, which is a great set of tools to monitor the crawling of your sites, reporting on errors the crawler found, content analysis, links to see what pages Google has cached, which pages indexed, pages that have links to yours, and much more.

These tools are all free to the user, and very handy for a webmaster. Each account can have many domains in it, so you can monitor your sites all from one place. Combine these tools with Google Analytics, which is also free, and you have yourself a pretty darn good monitoring and analysis system.

In the webmaster tools there are a few sections available. One is called "Diagnostics", and this contains all the crawl info, of web crawl and mobile crawls. It reports any errors the crawler finds, robots.txt restrictions it found, and the like. It also has content analysis which reports on the meta information it found as well as any content indexing problems.

The "Statistics" section reports on keywords used to find your site, what Googlebot sees and such that can also be used along with Analytics reports.

You can also upload sitemaps, it has links reports and much more. In my way of thinking and working, the crawl info is the most useful. It's nice to know when they last crawled the site, what they crawled, what is indexed and what isn't and that sort of information.

If you aren't using these tools, consider it. Very useful.