Google Webmaster Tools release more goodness for your website

Google Webmaster Tools have been developing more tools for webmasters in the last few weeks.

When you log into Google webmaster Tools now there is a new menu option on the left hand side – call Labs, this new tool contains a couple of new features and there are more in the pipeline.

Once of the new options in the Labs section of Google Webmaster Tools is “Fetch as Googlebot” which enables you to view the code on any page on your site as the Googlebot sees them.  You can request a Googlebot view for any page on your site by entering the URL, Google then goes off and fetches this page and displays it back to you.  The code which is displayed is exactly what Googlebot will be seeing when it looks at to code so this tool could be really useful to you and your SEO work as you can ensure Google is seeing your code as you intended it as soon as the page goes live, without having to wait for Google to crawl the page before finding out there is an issue.

Another new tool Google are offering information about Malware to help you see what pages are being seen by Google as potential malware distributors and what code they are seeing on these pages that has caused this flag.  This should help you remove malware from your website quicker than the old manual testing methods we’ve all been using previously.

Earlier this month Google also launched a new tool allowing you to specify parameters for Google to ignore which is great if you have session IDs on your website or other database driven query strings which might create duplicate URLs such as www.yourdomain.com/products/product123.html, www.yourdomain.com/products/product123.html?sessid123, www.yourdomain.com/products/product123.html?cur=EUR

This is a useful way of ensuring Google doesn’t see these duplicate pages and only indexes www.yourdomain.com/products/product123.html and not the other pages.  This tool only works in Google and there is still a lot of weight to using the Canonical Tag in the Head section of your pages.

We’ll keep you posted about any new developments in Google Webmaster Tools that can help your website as they are released.