Mistakes To Avoid In Google Webmaster Tools

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Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a free tool offered by Google which allows webmasters to bring some modifications to their websites and see stats on how their website is viewed by Google. Submitting your website, submitting your sitemap, geSt a list of all the 404′s on your website, configuring a Robots.txt, all these are just a handful of options GWT has to offer. These tools help webmasters with the optimization of their website but they also help control how Google access and crawls your website. Here is a short video which explains what the Google Webmaster Tools have to offer.

The basic functionalities are pretty straight forward, however it gets more complicated when using the advanced features. The reason being is that some options can greatly affect the SEO of your website. I will be discussing some important mistakes that MUST be avoided while configuring your Google Webmaster Tools.

Crawl Rate

In your GWT, you have a feature which allows you to choose how slow or fast you would like the Googlebot to crawl your website. Using this feature will obviously affect your crawl rate but it might affect the number of pages getting indexed per day.

Modifying The Crawl Rate Through GWT

Keep in mind that if this setting is changed to a high crawl rate, it might consume most of the bandwidth of your server which will create a very high loading time for your website. On the other hand, if you put a low crawl rate, the daily number of pages indexed will greatly decrease. In most cases, it is preferable to let Google decide which crawl rate if best for your website.

Crawler Access

Google gives your the option to see which sections of your website their crawler is allowed to crawl. This feature also gives you the possibility to create a Robots.txt file and request a URL removal. This option can help you if used properly, However, in the hand of an inexperienced user, great damage can be done to your SEO. If you misconfigured the robots.txt file, you might block the Googlebot from crawling and indexing certain sections of your website. This will result in your website to never appear in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Make sure you know what you are doing and only block a certain page if it is truly needed.

Sitelinks

As mentioned in previous articles, I am very active in various blogs and forums and I always see people asking “What is a sitelink?”. Well sitelinks are links that appear in SERPs and help users navigate your website easier directly from the SERPs. Sitelinks attract the attention of users and are calculated using a complex algorithm based on the link structure of your website and the anchor texts that are used in those links.

GWT Allows You To Block Unwanted Sitelinks

Now what the GWT allows you to do is to block any sitelinks which are not targeted, relevant, or useful for the users. Removing the wrong sitelinks can decrease your Click Through Rate (CTR) which will affect your SEO campaign.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is a very good option offered by the GWT. It allows a webmaster to target his website to a specific country. This feature is very useful if you are targeting a certain audience from a certain country. It is particularly helpful if you have a generic Top-Level-Domain (TLD) such as .com, .net, .org, etc. If your domain has a country specific TLD, it is pre-configured and it is not necessary to specify it in your GWT. In fact, for a country specific TLD, the geo-targeting with automatically be set and cannot be changed.

Geo-Target Your Users With GWT

By specifying which country you would like to target, you could significantly increase your rankings for the targeted country results. This feature should only be used if your website is targeting users from a specific country.

Changing Address

The GWT allows you to transfer your existing domain to a new one. This option is only available for domains and not sub-domains or sub-directories. Odds are that most webmasters never use this option but if one day you find the need to use it, make sure to be very attentive of what you are doing. In order to make the transfer successful, you MUST use a 301 redirect to permanently redirect the old webpages to the new ones. Do not forget the 301 redirect because it is crucial to complete the domain transfer. If you do not 301 redirect your pages, you might lose a significant amount of backlinks to your website as the old pages are not transferring the weight over to the new pages. If your old domain name is banned from Google, avoid using this feature. Here is a great article on How to Properly Change Your Domain Name for SEO.

Submitting Sitemap

Through the GWT, you are able to submit your sitemap which will radically increase the speed at which your website is indexed. This is an amazing feature because it makes the submission of your XML sitemap much easier, however this can cause some complications. One of them is that sometimes the XML sitemaps appear in SERPs and your competitors might be able to see them. If you wish for them not to be seen, simply “gzip” your sitemap and submit the .gz version in your Google Webmaster Tools.

Sitemap Submission Is Very Easy With GWT

Another complication probable is when you try to index a very large number of pages in a very short amount of time, and by very large I mean tens of thousands of web pages. Even though the XML sitemap can help speed up the indexation of your webpages, it can also raise suspicion and flag your website for a review. The Google Panda Update targets specifically websites with poor content that are trying to index huge amounts of webpages very fast. Sitemaps are very helpful if used properly, however they could be a killer if they are used incorrectly.