Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

It has tools that let the webmaster:

• Check and set the crawl rate
• List internal and external pages that link to the site
• See what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs, and the click through rates of such listings
• View statistics about how Google indexes the site
• Submit and check a sitemap
• Generate and check a robots.txt file
• Set a preferred domain (i.e prefer wikipedia.org over www.wikipedia.org or vice versa).

Criticism and Controversy

The list of inbound links on Google Webmaster Tools is generally much larger than the list of inbound links that can be discovered using the link:somewebsite.com search query on Google itself. Google is tight lipped about the discrepancy. The list on Google Webmaster Tools includes nofollow links that do not convey search engine optimization authority to the linked site. On the other hand, the list of links generated with a link:somewebsite.com type query are deemed by Google to be "important" links in some ill-defined sense.

References

• Ma, Liz (2008-07-14). "Introducing the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program". Google Blog. Google. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introducing-google-webmaster-tools.html. Retrieved 2009-02-21. 
• "Webmaster Tools shows Crawl error sources". Webmaster Central Blog. Google. 2008-11-13. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/webmaster-tools-shows-crawl-error.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-21.  (this reference needs to be updated or removed)

External links

• Google Webmaster Tools