Google's Webmaster Tools Updated

Google has been hard at work on their Webmaster tools and they've enacted some pretty major changes that affect who and how you can view data for your site.

First off, Google has added in a highly requested feature that allows you to grant other users different levels of access to your Webmaster tools account.

Before this change, there was only one option and anyone that needed access had to be given owner level access. This allowed them to change properties without your permission and potentially mess up your whole day. With Google’s new User Administration page you can grant up to 100 new users access to your account and then decide what level of authority they have, either Full or Restricted.

Full access allows a user to view all your data, and take actions like change site settings and demote sitelinks, while a Restricted user will only be able to view most data and perform some actions like Fetch as Googlebot and change message forwarding for their account. A list of differences between user access levels can be seen here.

Next, Google has completely revamped their Crawl Errors feature. First they divided the data between two categories: Site Errors and URL Errors.

Site Errors, of course, affect your entire site - like DNS errors and problems fetching the robots.txt file. If you start getting a lot of these errors over a course of time, Google will attempt to send you an alert to let you know something is wrong. However if you have no errors, Google will instead show you a panel showing an all clear on your site.

URL Errors affects only a specific page on your site. These errors happen after Google has resolved your DNS, connected to your server, and fetched your robots.txt, but then encountered an error after it requested the URL. The errors are even broken...