Finding Success with Google Webmaster Tool

What is the Google Webmaster Tool?

The Google Webmaster tool application is a free of charge web applications offered by Google for webmasters or developers. The Google Webmaster Tool enables webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility for their particular websites or pages. In a general sense, the Google Webmaster Tool is a bundle of resources that enables a webmaster to observe and reference various statistics revolving around indexing status.

The Google Webmaster Tool is an agglomeration of the following services or tools offered by the Web giant: the Google Webmaster Tool enables a webmaster to submit and check a site map, check and set the crawl rate for a particular webpage and view various statistics concerning how Googlebot accesses a particular website.

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the search program used by Google, which collects various documents from the Internet to create a searchable index for the Google search engine. When a user conducts a search for sites that display a particular IP address, the user will often see the googlebot’s IP address. If a webmaster aims to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or another programmed spider, they can do so through initiating appropriate directives in a robots.txt file.

What is a Sitemap?

A site map is a list of pages of a web site made accessible to users or web crawlers. A site map may be distributed as either a document or a planning tool for web design or a web page. Regardless of the delivery style, a site map is typically organized in a hierarchical fashion. This structure enables visitors and search engine spiders or bots to find pages on the site.

What else does the Google Webmaster Tool do?

The Google Webmaster application allows a webmaster or web developer to generate and check a robots.txt file. Additionally, the Google Webmaster tool enables creators or designers of web sites to discover pages that were previously blocked in robots.txt files by chance. The Google Webmaster Tool will also list all internal and external pages that are linked to the respective site.

The Google Webmaster Tool also enables a webmaster or developer to see what keyword searches on Google led to the site being listed in the SERPs; the Google Webmaster Tool also provides the click through rates of such listings. In addition to these statistics, the Google Webmaster Tool allows these individuals to view statistics concerning how Google indexes the site and if it came across any errors while observing it.