Webmaster tools of different search engines
Search engines have some tools for the webmasters to understand how engines crawl and index their website. Webmasters can diagnose problems & get feedback from the engines about their website. Here also we will use one google account to access the google webmater tool. This is a place where we come to know the way search engines feel about our site. These information we get from the search engines are specific to our website so before giving us any details , engines will be asking us to verify the ownership of the website.
Verifying ownership of your website
We may have to place a simple html file at the root of the site having a specific file name. This file you can download from the webmaster tool and using FTP you can upload the same file to root of your website. After uploading you can ask engine to check. Engine will open this file ( check the presence ) from the root of the website to authenticate the user. Another way is to add one meta tag to home page.
Once our ownership is established, engines will give lot of information about the website. We will discuss some of the important tools here. Before that let us find out the tools of different search engines.
Bing ( MSN ) tool requires an windows live ID or your hotmail email address
Yahoo! Search has merged Site Explorer into Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console google account is required.
Outbound Links
This is one of the quality score in search engine algorithm. Quality of the site depends on quality and relevant outgoing links from our site. These links adds rich user experience and provides value to the content of the page. Webmasters don't have any control in incoming links ( Links pointing to your site ) but engine knows the outgoing links are fully under the control of the webmaster so consider this as a indication of the quality of the site. For this reasons spammers or hackers try to plant links in hidden form at different location of the site. In forums or in other sections where visitors crate content, we have to take care and should not allow linking to low quality sites, popularly known as bad neighbourhood. By using this tool we can get a list of outbound links and we can take action on this.
Back Links
Yahho site explorer is more accurate here. We can see who are linking to us and monitor our growth in back links. These links are one of the important criteria for site ranking in google algorithm.
Crawl Issues
Google webmaster tool displays a list of crawl errors. Some of the important information are broken links, restricted by robots.txt file, not followed and sitemap issues. Here we can identify any area which are accidentally blocked by robots.text file or any other issues.
Crawl State can tell you about the bot activity in your pages and you can get some idea on how much data engines are downloading and this can also indicate the speed of your server hosting your site.
You can know how engines are using your robots.txt file and find out if any thing is blocked accidentally, this is there in both bing webmaster central and google webmaster tools.
Internal Linking
This can be used to find out if any duplicate page issue is there. Try to find out pages with internal links like this .
www.plus2net.com/forum/
www.plus2net.com/forum/index.php
It is always better to link to any one of the above page. Practically both the URL point to same page so duplicate page issue we can avoid by indentifying pages having links ( in two different ways ) like this. Consistent linking style is always better.
Ranking tool
Google webmaster central has a ranking tool to tell you what are the keywords giving you good ranking and their click through rate. The data can be monitored over a period. However there are better ranking tools available than this. We can have detail discussion on monitoring search engine ranking.
HTML suggestion of google webmaster tool
This is the best tool and google webmaster tool is popular for this. Google gives a list of pages having duplicate meta tags, long Meta description, short meta descriptions. Similarly you can find out lot about pages having short title or long title , duplicate titles and non-informative titles etc. Note that title tag is one of the important tag for ranking and Google gives highest importance to keywords present in your title tag.
Mobile friendly
The uses of mobile for browsing the internet are growing regularly. It is not easy to create a page which gives good user experience in Mobile and Desktop users. You can use this tool to check mobile friendliness of your site.
Mobile Friendly testing tool
Schema Verification
You can add mark-up tags as per Schema to your site. Google provides a testing tool for this .
Structured Data Testing tool
Beside all these features there are more tools to understand how search engines interact with your site. It is advisable to take a close look at these tools at a regular interval to know about possible problems or improvement opportunities of your website.
This article is written by plus2net.com team.
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