Webmaster Tools Gets a New Look to Go With its New Features


There have been some updates to Google's Webmaster Tools this month, some more noticeable than others.

First, the very noticeable makeover of the navigation and a new dashboard help you get a quick first look at how things are going on your site. The navigation bar on the left has now grouped similar features into the following categories:

  • Configuration: Things you configure and generally don't change very often.
  • Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK.
  • Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who's linking to you; where you can explore the data about your site.
  • Optimization: Where you can find ideas to enhance your site, which enables us to better understand and represent your site in Search and other services.

The new dashboard shows you a list of the newest and most important messages in the center of the page, with 3 status charts at the bottom: Crawl Errors, Search Queries, and Sitemaps. These can all help you get an idea of what needs your immediate attention without having to dig too deeply into your data.

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For those who manage a larger number of sites, Google has also added in a compact view to your site list that hides the large site preview thumbnails, making it easier to see more sites to manage at once in the list.

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There are some less noticeable improvements to Webmaster Tools as well. First, instead of 35 days you can now see up to 90 days of historical data. Showing changes however still has a 30 day limit.

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Next Google has made it so you can see your basic query data as soon as you verify ownership of your site, instead of having to wait to see the data.

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Finally, Google has started collecting the top 2000 queries for which your site gets clicks.

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