One of the most useful aspects of Google Webmaster Tools is the ability for webmasters to assess how “crawlable” their site is. In the “Diagnostics” section, one can see the reason Google is unable to crawl and index certain pages of their website. Here are some of the issues Google will report on in this section:

• “In Sitemaps”: This is where Google will show which URLs are inaccessible from an XML Sitemap that you may have uploaded to Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration>>Sitemaps. Here, Google will display the URL it’s having difficulty with and the associated problem it may be having:

 

 

In the above example, the errors could have been caused because the Sitemap contains older, removed pages and/or the URL contained within the Sitemap has been manually restricted (intentionally) by the webmaster.

• “Not Found”: If this section appears in the Diagnostics utility in Webmaster Tools, it could mean that Google has detected pages that issue one of the most common header responses: 404 Not Found. These errors can be tricky as they may show up because Google has found links from external websites leading to pages that you have removed from your site. It could also mean that Google has detected links on your website that are “broken” and Google will show the page where this broken link resides so you may update or remove it.
• “Restricted by robots.txt”: This section displays pages on the site that have been blocked from web spider crawling via the site’s own robots.txt file: www.example.com/robots.txt. A robots.txt file is a simple text file, uploaded to the root directory that tells spiders which sections of the site to skip. This section is a useful way to see if the instructions you’ve entered into the robots.txt file are correct and functional.
• “Unreachable”: Will include pages from the site that are completely inaccessible to the search engine spiders due to onsite server or network errors. These errors will usually not appear after the webmaster/IT administrator has fixed the webserver in question.

For a more comprehensive list of diagnostic errors found in Webmaster Tools, visit: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35120

For those keeping up with the “Google +1 Button” hype, you may have realized by now that you can access its associated data via Google Webmaster Tools:

From your dashboard, click to expand the “+1 Metrics” section; this will reveal sections on Search Impact, Activity and Audience. In this section, you will see:

The Search Impact report: Will show you the impressions (how many times have pages with the +1 button shown in search results). Will also display the clickthrough rate (how many people actually selected this page in search results). Important because you’ll want to be able to distinguish the effectiveness of using the +1 button on certain pages compared to others.

The Activity report: Allows webmasters to view how many times a page has been “+1’d” from a specific page or from search results.

The Audience report: Displays demographic data for the +1’s such as age location and gender.

As with much of the specific numbers in all of the metrics in Webmaster Tools, much of it is an “average” or an “aggregate” number. For instance, the data you are able to view in the categories above is only displayed if a certain number of people have clicked on your +1 button. 

Learn all about it from a recent Google Webmaster Central Blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html.

We have all probably viewed site links within Google’s organic search results before.  The site links that you have most commonly seen, until recently, have probably looked something like this:

The purpose of site links is to help searchers navigate your website more easily.  They are essentially shortcuts to help funnel searchers to the specific page they are in need of as quickly as possible. However, earlier this week when searching, I noticed something very different about how Google was showing site links. Instead of site links looking similar to the image above, they now are appearing more prominently on the search engine results page. Below is an example of how these site links are now being displayed:

These enhanced site links appear most frequently when a brand name or specific website name is searched.  As you will see, there are quite a few more links displayed (up to twelve) in the newer version of site links, versus eight in the older version. In addition, the URL and one line of text are displayed, making them stand out even more.

At this time, these site links are automated; marketers can’t specify which links they want to appear. These site links can also change from query to query leading to better results for the searcher, and hopefully for the marketer, too.  These changes are now reflected in Google Webmaster Tools where you can manage your site links. Although marketers can’t select specific site links to show, they can demote site links (removal is not guaranteed).

So how do you get site links like this to show for your organic listings?  The best tactic is to make sure that the search engines can easily crawl all of the pages on your website and that you have a proper website structure. If your site does not have an optimal structure, these site links may not appear.  In addition, optimizing your meta data for every page should help, as a portion of title tag appears within the site links.

Check to see if site links are displaying for your website.  If not, search engine optimization may be in order.