Google Webmaster Tools Update

Alerting you to 3 new tools: link profiles, query parameters and search CTR changes

Value: [rating=5]

Our commentary: As a Digital Marketer, it's great to see companies like Google offering free well featured tools to allow you to manage your web presence through them. Google Webmaster tools while still basic is constantly evolving and this month is no different.

Over the last week Google has announced several improvements to existing features, the first being the "links to your site" area, the second is an improvement to identifying / managing query parameters on your website & last but not least updates to the search queries report.

1 Links to your website:

While it is still a very basic feature (when compared to Open Site Explorer & Majestic SEO for example) this upgrade does offer great insights to your back links, from volume of links to specific pages through to anchor text analysis. See the full article here and a quick snippet below.

"€œThe "Links to your site" feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you'll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site."€

2 Query Parameters

Most websites still need the ability to set certain items as query parameters, especially most e-commerce based websites. This can lead to large quantities of duplicate content which can be managed in various ways, this being one of them. Within this interface you can identify query parameters to Google and then say whether it should ignore it or not.

"€œWe've moved this feature under its own tab in the Settings section of Webmaster Tools, and introduced a new action to manage parameters. When we introduced Parameter Handling last year, we allowed you to specify URL parameters and whether they should be ignored or not. When you choose to ignore a parameter, you are telling us that this parameter has no impact on the displayed content."€

The full article can be found here

3 Search Queries

A very useful tool from Google, allowing you to track your ranking performance over time and in different countries. Google have now evolved this tool to provide you with a % change metric so you can quickly see how your site is performing against the past.

"€œTime does not stand still and neither should your site. With that in mind we've added a "Change" column next to the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and position columns, making it easier to identify trends for each of these important metrics. The change column is tied to the date range you specify, which should help when you're trying to pinpoint when a particular change occurred."€

The full article can be found here

Overall its great to see Google Webmaster tools evolving and even though it still has a distance to go its hard to see the value in current paid services when the evolving at the pace they are!