New Features Poll On Webmaster Tools - July 31st, 2007
Matt Cutts, the famous Google blogger, wrote a blog post last week about what should be the next feature to be added to the already brilliant Google Webmaster Tools. He wrote down some ideas that he thought might be useful as well as some suggestions from a Google Blogoscoped Forum thread. Here is his final list.
- More information about penalties or other scoring issues
- Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
- Show links on your site that are broken
- Show PageRank numbers instead of none/low/medium/high
- Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
- Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
- Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
- Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
- Some type of rank checking
- A way to list supplemental result pages
- Option to "disavow" backlinks from or to a site
- Show causes of 404 errors
- Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behaviour
- Tell Google a parameter doesn’t matter
- Show pages that don’t validate
- More documentation and examples
- Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)
- Integrate “Add URL” feature
As of writing this article this list in actually in the correct order, with the scoring issues item getting 32% of all votes. The next one down (duplicate content) only get 14% of all votes, so this poll has a clear cut winner. I don’t see this being implemented as it might give away too much information. However, as Mr Cutts has put it on this list there is a fair chance of it being adopted.
Personally I would like Google to implement a little bit of code that works with the FireFox extension GreaseMonkey. The Google Webmaster Tools external links script only runs when you look at your sites backlinks in Google Webmaster tools and gives you information about the page that is linking to you. Here is a description of what the script discoveres:
- If the backlink is there then the PageRank and anchor text of the link are displayed.
- If the backlink has is a rel=”nofollow” then the information is displayed in orange and in strike through text.
- If the backlink is not found then the PageRank of the site is displayed in red.
- If the backlink is from an image then the image alt text is displayed.
This gives a quick indication of what strength of sites are linking to you, which is much better than just displaying a bunch of links. Also the fact that it shows missing links in red means that you can quickly find out why they are missing rather than wait for them to drop from this list and then figure out which ones have gone.
Google webmaster tools is already a brilliant suite of tools, so any addition to them can’t be a bad thing. It has already turned it self into a standard tool for any SEO professional and it’s popularity can only increase.
Phil
Programmer, Research and Development
