Search First

Webmaster tools: more specifically, the tools provided by the big three guys.

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Live Search Webmaster Portal [Beta]

Google Webmaster Tools

Main features include:

Site index

A list of all the sites that you own

Verification

Allowing you to take ownership of the websites. This allows Google to give you access to the rest of the tools and information about the site that nobody else can access

Statistics

This gives you a list of useful information. The most important 3, in my eyes, are:

• Top search queries
• What Googlebot sees
• Crawl stats

What Googlebot sees is a summary of relevant phrases and information that it has extracted from your site. You can use it to discover what may need optimising on your site.

Links

View a summary of your inbound links in more detail than link:example.com will give you. You can also discover the number of internal links that your own pages are being linked from. This can be useful in finding out how easily people can find your content.

Diagnostics

This gives you an overview of any crawl problems that Google encountered.

Sitemaps

Self explanatory really. If your site truly requires it then registering your sitemap through this area is where you need to be

Tools

• Analyse robots.txt
• Manage site verification
• Set crawl rate
• Set preferred domain
• Enable enhanced image search
• Remove URLs

Great tools here. Analyse robots.txt does what it says on the tin really - site verification also. Set crawl rate is great if you don’t change the site much and you feel that certain areas are getting a lot of attention. Set preferred domain gives you the power to specify www or non-www in the listings. Remove URLs allows you to expedite the removal of areas of a website

Yahoo! Site Explorer

The interface of the Site Explorer differs significantly from Google. In the Yahoo interface, the list of domains contains buttons associated with the main actions:

• Authenticate
• Manage
• Explore

Explore

This takes you to the interface giving you information on indexed page count (referred to by ‘Pages’) and IBL count (referred to as ‘Inlinks’). It’s very basic but quick to get to and informative with the Pages and Inlinks counts displayed in parentheses to the right of their respective links.

Authenticate

The authentication file here is unique to the individual website with a unique string inside it. Alternatively you can add a meta HTML element to your website’s homepage that is also unique. The authentication process can take several hours before you get access to your newly added site.

Manage

You get four tools in this area:

• Feeds
• Dynamic URLs
• Authentication
• Actions

We’ve already covered authentication and the feeds section allows you to register site feeds to help it discover content faster. Dynamic URLs assists you in telling Yahoo’s spiders about certain non-essential query parameters that aren’t necessary (because they may actually be some form of session ID). Actions gives you a summary of actions you have applied.

To remove a URL from your site in the Site Explorer you simply Explore the domain in question and locate the URL. An authenticated site will give you extra buttons in the Explore area allowing you to remove the URLs.

Live Search Webmaster Portal

Coming soon I guess. We’re registered for the beta program but as yet haven’t received our invite. Here is the last email:

From: *****@microsoft.com
Subject: Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta
Date: 2 October 2007 18:03:59 BDT

Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta

Thank you for filling out the survey for the Live Search Webmaster Portal Beta program!

In order to provide the highest level of service to our Beta Partners, we have started off the beta program with our first group of participants. As the program is rolled out in phases, we will incrementally increase the number of participants until all applicants have been accepted by late November. The information you provided us thru the registration survey will help us determine when the right timeframe is to bring you into the beta program and ensure that our participants represent the widest range of industries and company sizes.

Sit tight and we’ll report on it as soon as we can.

Comparison of the two active portals

To be honest, they both have their merits, and they both are an essential tool to a webmaster. Yahoo! Site Explorer offers a quick-and-easy interface that helps you to get to the necessary tools fast. The Google Webmaster Tools are more structured and segregated. You have a lot of information at your disposal but while it is certainly a KISS interface, it is also potentially slower to perform an action.

Two great tools, I hope that the third is as useful and powerful.