This includes details based on content-type, like stats from Web, Videos, Images and News featured more prominently.

“This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed,” explains Webmaster Tools engineer Kamila Primke. “With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.”

There is also now the ability to test a sitemap. “Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors,” says Primke. “Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.”

Google also has a new way of displaying errors, which the company says better exposes what types of issues a sitemap contains. Rather than repeating the same kind of error numerous times for one sitemap, Google will group errors and warnings, giving a few examples.

For sitemap index files, Google aggregates errors and warnings from the child sitemaps that the sitemap index encloses, so users won’t have to click through each child one at a time.

The functionality of the delete button has changed as well. It will now remove the sitemap from Webmaster Tools from both your account and the accounts of the other owners of a site.

Google defines “cross-domain URL selection” as when the representative URL (the URL representing the content in a duplicate content scenario that Google’s algorithm decides to use) is selected from a group with different sites.

In other words, the selection Google goes with when two or more sites are showing the same content.

“When your website is involved in a cross-domain selection, and you believe the selection is incorrect (i.e. not your intention), there are several strategies to improve the situation,” says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far.

Google highlights three main reasons for unexpected cross-domain URL selections: duplicate content including multi-regional sites, configuration mistakes and malicious site attacks. Far points to various resources for each scenario in this blog post.

“In rare situations, our algorithms may select a URL from an external site that is hosting your content without your permission,” says Far. “If you believe that another site is duplicating your content in violation of copyright law, you may contact the site’s host to request removal. In addition, you can request that Google remove the infringing page from our search results by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

At least the WMT messages should help alert you when it’s happening.

“This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe,” says Google product manager Evelyn Kao.

There’s a chance that your Google experience will be slower with SSL because the computer your’e using has to establish a secure connection with Google. This is interesting, considering that Google has put so much effort into speeding things up.

It’s worth noting that you can just go to https://www.google.com when you’re signed out, and still use encrypted search.

Naturally, webmasters and SEOs are contemplating the effects this will have on search engine optimization and analytics.

Sites visited from Google’s organic listings will be able to tell that the traffic is coming from Google, but they won’t be able to receive info about each individual query. They will, however, receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to the site for each of the past 30 days in Webmaster Tools.

“This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic,” says Kao. “If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”

“When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google ‘organic’ search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site,” says Amy Chang on the Google Analytics blog. “Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google ‘cpc’.”

“We are still measuring all SEO traffic. You will still be able to see your conversion rates, segmentations, and more,” she adds. “To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token ‘not provided)’ within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that ‘cpc’ paid search data is not affected.”

Google is making the encrypted search available on all of its search properties except for Maps.

Several months ago, Google launched a pilot program, but now, the new set of reports is available to everyone. “The Webmaster Tools section contains three reports based on the Webmaster Tools data that we hope will give you a better sense of how your site performs in search results,” says Google Analytics Associate Product Manager Kate Cushing. “We’ve created a new section for these reports called Search Engine Optimization that will live under the Traffic Sources section.”

That includes reports for queries (impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries, Landing Pages (impressions, clicks, position and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages) and Geographical Summary (impressions, clicks and CTR by country).

Google says it has made various improvements to the reports based on feedback from the pilot program.

Perhaps these reports will help webmasters who have been affected by Google’s Panda update figure out some things.

Users must link their WMT and GA accounts obviously. To do so, go to the WMT homepage, click “manage site” next to the site you want and click “Google Analytics” property. Select the property you want to associate with the site and just save it.

“As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Susan Moskwa. “Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.”

For one, subdomains are now counted as internal links, which makes a great deal of sense. Here’s a chart showing how links have changed:

“If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links,” says Moskwa. “We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.”

She does note that if you own a root domain, your number of external links may appear to go down.

“URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” explains Kamila Primke, Software Engineer with the Google Webmaster Tools Team. “This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot’s crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you’re sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.”

Do you use URL parameters in Webmaster Tools? What do you think of the changes? Comment here.

Google is now letting users describe the behavior of parameters. For example, you can let Google know if a parameter changes the actual content of the page.

“If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value,” says Primke. “Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter.”

Those would be: let Googlebot decide, every URL, only crawl URLS with value or no URLs.

Users can tell Google if a parameter sorts, paginates, determines content, or other things that it might do. For each parameter, Google will also “try” to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that it has already crawled that contain a given parameter.

To bring up the use of caution again, Primke warns about the responsibilities that come with using the No URLs option. “This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the ‘No URLs’ option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to ‘Every URL.’ You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is ‘Only URLs with value=x.’”

She runs through some examples in this blog post, and there is more related information in Google’s Webmaster Help forum.

Be Careful About Selling the Same Stuff From Multiple Domains

As long as we’re discussing webmaster issues for Google, I’ll also point to the latest Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts, who discusses selling products on multiple domains. The user question he sought to answer was:

“I manage 3 websites that sell the same products across 3 domains. Each site has a different selling approach, price structure, target audience, etc. Does Google see this as spumy or black hat?”

Cutts says, “On one hand, if the domains are radically different lay-out, different selling approach, different structure – like, essentially completely different, and especially the fact that you said it’s only 3 domains, that might not be so bad. Clearly if it were 300 domains or 3,000 domains – you can quickly get to a fairly large number of domains that can be crowding up the search results and creating a bad user experience…by the time you get to a relatively medium-sized number of sites.”

“The thing that was interesting about the question is that you said it’s the same products, as in identical. So it’s a little weird if you’re selling identical products across 3 domains. If you were selling like men’s sweaters on one, and women’s sweaters on another, and shoes on a third….I’ve said before, there’s no problem with having different domains for each product, and a small number of domains (2, 3, or 4) for very normally separable reasons can make perfect sense, but it is a little strange to sell the same products, so if they’re really identical, that starts to look a little bit strange – especially if you start to get more than 3 domains.”

“Definitely, I have found that if you have one domain, you’ve got the time to build it up – to build the reputation for that domain…in my experience, when someone has 50 or 100 domains, they tend not to put as much work – as much love into each individual domain, and whether they intend to or not, that tends to show after a while. People have the temptation to auto-generate content or they just try to syndicate a bunch of feeds, and then you land on one domain vs. another domain, and it really looks incredibly cookie cutter – comparing the two domains, and that’s when users start to complain.

Do you think Google takes the right approach to sites selling products from multiple domains? Share your thoughts here.

The email being sent out by Google looks like:

Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to (your website)

Many webmasters seem to be completely taken off guard by this email. And to that end, many have discussed their concerns on the Google webmaster forum. One of the many such queries discussed on the forum is by studione on the 16th July 2011
is http://playarena.nl/

“ Hi
I noticed this message send from Google two weeks ago about detecting unnatural links on my site www.playarena.nl/. My site is an online flash game site, with many games to be played.
I read the guidelines: links added as part of a link exchange scheme may be considered excessive. I’m using Linkex for finding reciprocal link partners and by now have only two reciprocal links. Is using Linkex banned by google, as I read that exxesive use of reciprocal is not excepted. But in my case its accepted.

Could somebody help me out on this.

With Kind regards,

Playarena”

How to avoid this:

• Make sure other websites link to your website, however in a natural way to increase your page ranking
• Don’t participate in link schemes which include, manipulating, buying or selling PageRanks. According to Google’s Matt Cutts “remove the paid links that pass PageRank”. In addition to that, avoid linking to web spammers and engaging in too much reciprocal linking
• Consider evaluating your link exchange scheme and discard off the links that would be unaccepted under the Google’s guidelines.
• Also consider evaluating the content on your website and other websites which are along similar lines to yours
• Furthermore, avoid using lists of keywords in an attempt to “cloak” pages, or upload “crawler only” pages

Once you have made the above recommended changes:

• Sign in using your Google account to Google webmaster tools
• Add and verify the website you want Google to reconsider
• Request Google to reconsider your website

Once requested to be reconsidered, we suggest you hang in there tight. Google is usually fair to both the the webmasters and the users, you won’t have much problems there. 

Check out Page Traffic Buzz for more articles by Navneet Kaushal.

“Today’s redesign offers webmasters a simplified experience that allows them to quickly analyze and identify trends – while also bringing new and unique features to the industry,” a representative for Bing tells WebProNews. “Our goal is to help webmaster make faster, more informed decisions and drive new insights about their website by presenting them with rich visuals and more organized, relevant content.”

Enhancements include:

• Crawl delay management: Lets webmasters configure the bingbot crawl rate for a specific domain.
• Index Explorer: Allows webmasters to the ability to access data in the Bing index regarding a specified domain.
• User and Role Management: Provides site owners with the ability to grant admin, read/write or read-only access to other users for their site.

Crawl deal is configurable by hour. Users can ask Bing to crawl slower during peak business hours or have it crawl faster during off-peak hours. There is drag-and-drop functionality that lets users create a crawl graph by clicking and dragging the mouse pointer across the graph. Individual columns can also be clicked for fine-tuning.

Index Explorer, Bing says, is a “complete rewrite” of the Index Tracker backend, focusing on freshness, performance, extensibility, reduced machine footprint, and stability and failure detection. New sites will have this data as they sign up.

The company also launched the ability for webmasters to manage deep-links and added over 40 new educational documents and videos to the Toolbox site. The content covers things like: using Webmaster Tools, data explanation, link building, removing/blocking pages from Bing’s index, SEO guidance, managing URL parameters, rich snippets (schema.org), canonicalization, nofollow, managing redirects, 404 page management, etc.

Bing says you can “count on more monthly content being added” to Webmaster Tools in the near future.

“Webmasters have long been asking for better integration between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics,” Google says on the Webmaster Central Blog.

The SEO reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper analysis, Google says. “For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.”

Search queries data includes:

• Queries: The total number of search queries that returned pages from your site results over the given period. (These numbers can be rounded, and may not be exact.)
• Query: A list of the top search queries that returned pages from your site.
• Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in search results, and the percentage increase/decrease in the daily average impressions compared to the previous period. (The number of days per period defaults to 30, but you can change it at any time.)
• Clicks: The number of times your site’s listing was clicked in search results for a particular query, and the percentage increase/decrease in the average daily clicks compared to the previous period.
• CTR (clickthrough rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site, and the increase/decrease in the daily average CTR compared to the previous period.
• Avg. position: The average position of your site on the search results page for that query, and the change compared to the previous period. Green indicates that your site’s average position is improving.To calculate average position, we take into account the ranking of your site for a particular query (for example, if a query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, then the average position would be 1.5).

Webmasters can use the search queries data to review the query list for expected keywords and compare impressions and clickthrough rates. It can also be helpful for keyword ideas for paid search campaigns.

“We hope this will be the first of many ways to surface Webmaster Tools data in Google Analytics to give you a more thorough picture of your site’s performance,” said Trevor Claiborne of the Google Analytics Team. “We’re looking forward to working with members of the pilot to help us identify the best ways to make this happen.”

If you’re both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics admin, you can sign up for the pilot here. Each individual user must sign up for the pilot if they want access to the new reports.

"Nobody likes to duplicate effort," said Google software engineer Sean Harding. "Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you’re ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They’re very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today."

"If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button,’ he says.

Google notes that this method of verification only works if you’ve migrated to the newer asynchronous version of the tracking code. The JavaScript has to stay in place on your site or your verification will expire. You also have to remain an admin on the Google Analytics account that the code is associated with.

If you’ve verified your site, you can add additional verified owners via the verification details page. The verification page has a new interface as well.