Ever since we first chatted with now-former Googler Vanessa Fox about webmaster tools, Google has released new capabilities for those on a fairly regular schedule.

That routine notched another mark with the debut of content analysis and sitemap details from Google Webmaster Tools. Jonathan Simon described these at the Webmaster Central blog.

Content analysis looks at three main categories: title tag issues; meta description issues; and non-indexable content issues. These appear in the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools.

Title tags may be too short or too long in Google’s estimation, and if a meta description tag looks odd, Google will flag that as well.

"While these pointers won’t directly help you rank better, they may help your site display better titles and snippets in search results, and this can increase visitor traffic," said Simon.

Webmasters using Sitemaps to permit better indexing of their sites by search crawlers have access to additional information with the new Sitemaps Details page in Tools. This shows what Google knows about the Sitemaps the webmaster submitted.

Depending on the site, the Sitemap Details may show the sitemap type; total number of valid URLs; the number of listed URLs in Google’s index; and the dates the sitemap was submitted to and downloaded by Google.

Simon said the new Details page also shows any errors or warnings encountered when Google last crawled specific pages. This allows the webmaster to spend less time trying to figure out how many pages Google indexed from the Sitemap.

On her Search Engine Land post, Fox chimed in on the new features by noting the availability of Video Sitemaps. For sites that use video, these Sitemaps could be the key to being included in web search results as well as video searches.

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After a brief private beta, the Live Search Webmaster Center aims to help website professionals improve their results in the MSN and Live.com Search Engines.

The launch by Microsoft has been long overdue, with rivals Google and Yahoo! offering more comprehensive webmaster services for months (if not years). Given the delay, Live Search Webmaster Center is relatively underwhelming, offering significantly less functionality than its competitors.

The delay aside, the webmaster center will be a valuable resource for site owners looking to do some basic improvements to their results in MSN and Live search.

Some of the key features included are:

• Date your site was last crawled (or if it’s blocked)
• Details of how many pages are indexed in the Live Search index
• A Live Search Rank for your web pages – 5 point scale (different results to Google’s)
• Inbound and Outbound Link Tools
• A basic keyword analysis tool to determine potential rankings

While the Live Search Webmaster Center provides some helpful information for site owners experiencing organic search issues, for the rest – it lacks a lot of the detail provided by its Google and Yahoo! counterparts.

Apparently Microsoft is currently working on version 2.0, so hopefully more functionality is just around the corner.

To explore the new Live Search Webmaster Portal for yourself, sign in using your Windows Live login details. Then verify your site by uploading an XML file or inserting some special Meta data – and you’re on your way.

If you’ve already signed up and taken it for a spin – tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.

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Tag:

Some of the features include:

• E-mail on your own domain.
• Admin tools to help you add and manage member accounts.
• Create and share a photo album in minutes.

Not many people knew of it or even heard about it besides Australian Harvey Sanchez who made the first announcement.

"With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organizations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customized, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft."

Its very simple. All you need to do is sign up (javascript:shiftOpacity(‘getStarted’, 500)) and reap in the benefits.

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Tag:

"If the TLD isn’t location-specific (such as .com), then search engines may use the location of the site’s IP address. This generally works pretty well, but sites that are hosted in a location other than their primary country can run into problems. In addition, large companies may have subfolders or subdomains for each country-specific site, rather than separate domains, and it may be problematic for those companies to secure each country-specific domain.

Now there’s a way to help avoid this type of guesswork, at least with Google. If you want to let Google know the location of your site, simply log in to the Google Webmaster Tools component of Google Webmaster Central.

Access the Tools tab, then choose Set Geographic Target. From there, you can provide information about where the site is located, and Google will use this information as a signal in ranking.

If your domain is a location-specific TLD (such as the .fr example above), Google will show you the country that your site is associated with but won’t let you specify something different. However, if your domain is not country specific (such as a .com or .net), you can indicate the location of the site:

At this point, you can’t specify multiple countries for a site, but you can specify a different country for each site within a domain. If you use subfolders or subdomains for country-specific sites, simply add each to your Webmaster Tools account and specify the location for each one. For example, you might have a structure such as:

www.example.com/ (U.S. site)

france.example.com/ (French site)

russia.example.com/ (Russian site)

You can provide information at a more granular level than country. For example, if your site is for a pizza restaurant in Seattle, you can specify up to the street address (although you can input any granularity that makes sense for your business such as city or state). Remember that if you want to be found for local searches, you should also add your business information to Google Local.

If your site is hosted in the same country you want associated with your site, you don’t need to specify the location in Webmaster Tools. It’s probably worthwhile to do so though, particularly since you never know when a host might move servers or if Google’s database has the IP address listed incorrectly.

Why this new tool? Says Google:

"Google has been listening to the concerns of the webmaster community and knows that they sometimes have problems with the geographic location of their sites. We do our best to determine the location of sites and rank them appropriately but are excited to provide webmasters new ways to give us additional input," said Amanda Camp engineer with Webmaster Tools. "At SES San Jose last year, we heard from many webmasters that this was one of the most important issues for them, so we’ve been working hard to come up with a solution that would be easy for them and would benefit searchers as well.""

Comments

 Google determines these sitelinks automatically so you usually don’t have a say in that, but now you can disable specific sitelinks. Just go to the Google Webmaster Tools, verify your site in question, and switch to the Links -> Sitelinks menu entry.

I can see the menu entry but don’t see the option to disable sitelinks yet for one of my sites which has sitelinks, but as I only verified that site just now, maybe it simply takes a bit of time. The official Google Webmaster Blog though posted a screenshot of what it should look like.

In related news, Search Engine Land reports that sometimes, up to 8 sitelinks will be displayed now instead of the usual 4. Can anyone find an example for that?

Comments

On June 5, Google Webmaster Central blog announced its plans to restructure Webmaster Tools help and on the next day, it released new Webmaster guidelines like hidden text or hidden links, cloaking or sneaky redirects and automated queries to Google, to name a few.

Complaints and suggestions from webmasters and user for what they would expect in the latest Webmaster Tools Help Center include:

1. "It’s not as easy as it should be to find the information you’re looking for. You’d like Google to do a better job of surfacing the answers to the most common questions.
2. The browse structure doesn’t make it easy for users to find help, and sometimes search depends on users knowing exactly the right term to search for.
3. You like the idea of context-sensitive help – on-the-spot assistance (often shown in a tooltip that appears when you hover over an item) that doesn’t require you to click to a different Help page.
4. Right now, it’s not clear when new Help information – or new features – are added, and you’d like Google to look at calling these out.

You want Help to be more useful:

1. You’d like Google to look at adding videos and graphics
2. You’d like us to providing the kind of information that’s relevant to the average webmaster, who may not have a deep knowledge of SEO techniques. You’re looking for good and understandable answers to common questions.
3. You’d like us to expand the actual content, and do a much better job in explaining potential reasons why sites may have dropped the rankings."

Some of our personal feedback include:

1. If Google Webmaster Central can show the status of crawl of sitemap in the dashboard. Basically date when Google last crawled sitemap.xml, this will be handy for webmasters who have more than one site in Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Regular mail to be sent if some error occur in the xml file will be helpful as not all the Webmasters login to check the Webmaster Tools daily.
3. Also some way of integrating it with Google Analytics will really be helpful.

Comments

Regards
Clive

Kalena’s Answer:

Dear Clive

Search engines don’t update on the basis of keywords. They re-index the code on your pages and how often they do this depends on their own update schedule. If you’ve verified your site with Google’s Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer, you can view your stats to get an idea of how often your site pages are indexed.

Whether or not your site begins to rank for new target keywords depends on how well you’ve optimized your pages for those keywords and how relevant the search engines now determine it to be. If you’ve optimized well and your pages are indexed regularly, you should see the results within a week or two. But in terms of Google, you may need to wait for a major database shuffle before you see your revised pages showing up for new keyword searches.

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Webmasters, Take Note Of Universal Google

Google’s recent Searchology event disclosed a number of changes to the way they can present search information. Their previous issues with making Google a universal search have been overcome.

That’s a good thing, according to Vanessa Fox. Search results may return all kinds of content that would normally turn up in separate vertical searches.

“Since more of those results may now be returned in web search, if you have content that is returned in these others searches, more potential visitors may see your results,” said Fox. She recommended that webmasters look at what they have, and make sure the applicable Google services know about it.

News content, whether current or historical, should prompt a webmaster to submit it for inclusion with Google News or their News Archive search. Webmasters for local businesses should submit information to Google’s Local Business center so it shows up in regular search and on Google Maps.

Video providers have a choice of hosting content on YouTube or Google Video. Users of Webmaster Central can opt-in to have enhanced image search enabled for their sites as well.

Google Expands Anchors

Webmasters should be pleased with the latest news from Google’s Vanessa Fox. The product manager for Google’s Webmaster Central announced some changes to the anchor phrase function of that toolkit.

Vanessa described the changes to the anchor phrase information on the product’s blog. She listed five enhancements now available in the Page Analysis link under Webmaster Tools’ Statistics tab:

• We’ve expanded the number of phrases we show to 200.

• You can now see the variations of each phrase (for instance, with different capitalization and punctuation).
• More sites now have access to the anchor phrase report. So, if you didn’t have this report before, you may have it now.
• We’ve brought back the report showing the most common individual words in anchor text (you asked; we delivered!).
• We’ve expanded the number of common words in anchor text and common words in your site that we show to 100 each.

Knowing how people find one’s website can help search optimization and marketing efforts greatly. Webmasters who aren’t spending some time with Google’s product may want to consider it now.