Reuben Yau

So Google released a new version of their webmaster tools, which has some nice features, but also some frustrations.

After logging in you’re presented with a dash board, showing highlights of certain report segments, unfortunately this can’t be customized, which really sucks, although at least they did a pretty good guess at the stats I like to monitor. There are four report segments shown:

• Top search queries
• Crawl Errors
• Links To Your Site (was previous labeled external links)
• Sitemaps

If I could customize this view it would be fantastic.

The left nav has 3 main menu options:

• Site Configuration
• Your site on the web
• Diagnostics

The functionality beneath those is pretty much the same as before, just with some cosmetic treatments. Under each of these there are in total 12 reports. With that number of subnav items, I really would have liked to see them all available without having to expand the three top items. Come one Google, it’s just 12 lines, 15 with menu headings.

I’ve been using webmaster tools from the very beginning and I consider myself an advanced user, so I would also like to be able to turn off the dynamic help items.

One big enhancement is that the message indicator follows you around in the top right corner of each page, which is really helpful. Previously it was only available on the screen after you’d just logged in, so if you leave your browser open and on a specific site profile, it could be days before you knew you had a message.

As well as the internal links and links to your site reports, I’d also like to see a report showing sites that you link to. This would be really helpful in determining if your site has been hacked or and help monitor outgoing to links if you have a site with multiple contributors or authors.

Taking this one step further, the outgoing links report could also show you if the page you’re linking to turns into a 404. That may get webmasters to proactively change their links. No self respecting webmaster wants to send their users to a 404. So rather than have the site owner try to chase the inbound 404 links, sending emails, which often get confused with other link requests, or just never make it past the spam filters, webmasters could see the errors and make corrections. How cool would that be?

I did notice that some oddball sitemap files had showed up, although they had big red X symbols next to them, meaning that they have errors. It would be helpful to see a mouseover popup describing the error, rather than making me click through each one to see the error.

There are some nice things in there, but overall, it’s pretty much the same as it was before, except for more plusboxes. I’m imagining a design meeting at Google, someone stands up and exclaims: “We need more plusboxes!”