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Google Webmaster Tools provides a large amount of features to help configure, maintain and troubleshoot your website. One of these features is the “What Google Sees” page which provides some insight into how the Googlebot is interpreting your site. Provided are a list of phrases, keywords and content types which can be used as a troubleshooting tool, as well as a valuable insight into how your site is viewed.

The phrases section lists external links to your site and the anchor text these links are using as well as possible variations. The content section shows the distribution of file type and encodings across the website.

However, the most useful feature is the keyword section. Here you will find a list of keywords that the bot has found across the site separated into two self-explanatory columns; “In your site’s content” and “In external links to your site”. With this information you can check to see if any unexpected keywords are appearing in the results which may be a sign of something malicious happening on your site. By checking this list for expected keywords you can ensure that the bot is picking these up, if not then it could be an indication of a problem with the site preventing this keyword from appearing. Through using the other tools on offer, such as the “crawl errors” page or ensuring an up to date sitemap has been submitted, you’ll be able to locate the source of the problem.

Nick Price
SEO Programmer

Using a custom 404 page could make the difference between a sale and someone going to your competitor. A custom 404 page is a page that has been created for when a user entered an address or follows a link to a page that no longer exists. It is a growing trend in websites to present custom pages but many websites are miss handleing pages that can not be found. Some people instead of presenting a 404 error redirect straight to the homepage without presenting a 404 error.

This may make sense from a usability point of view so the user never sees a 404 page, however if a search engine finds a 404 page because you have removed a product or changed a URL and it doesnt present a 404 header response then it wont be informed that the page no longer exists. This means that google cant update its index accurately and you could fine that google will then be filled with links that ultimately display the same page. If the redirect they use is a 301 redirect then this can cause big problems as google may cache the URL that doesnt exist with the content from your homepage. If google receives a 404 error then it will alter its index and remove pages that no longer exist.

Google webmaster tools will check for this and will not let you verify your website if your 404 gives a 200 ok response.

So what can you do? Well its simple, you create a custom 404 page that can be just as informative for your users as your homepage. Make sure that you use the template of your website so the user will always see all of your navigation. In the content of the page. A simple message saying the page is not found but maybe recommend other pages of the site for the user to look at, More importantly, make sure the page returns a 404 error for the search engines.

Gary
Senior SEO Programmer