The month of July saw the Google webmasters launching many new tools for ease of use for both webmasters and users. There is a lot of practical information about Google – discovering, crawling, indexing and Googlebots. This month a personal favourite new feature from the Google Webmasters has to be The Structured Data Dashboard. This provides webmasters with greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for their website.
The Month’s News from Google Webmaster Tools
New Crawl Error alerts from Webmaster Tools
This month the Google webmasters have rolled out crawl error alerts to keep people updated about the state of their site.
Googlebot regularly visits websites and can detect if they have regular occurring problems e.g. 404 File Not Found, 403 Forbidden, 503 Service Unavailable, etc. If Google picks up on this it usually means visitors to a website are also experience problems.
Google can now send you a message about what it has detected -Google hopes that with the increased communication that potential issues can be fixed quickly and efficiently.
The new Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors feature divides errors into two types: Site Errors and URL Errors. Have a look at the full blog for further information.
On web semantics
In web development terms, semantics refers to semantic markup, which means markup used according to its meaning and purpose.
This is an in depth article looks at modern day web semantics.
Markup used according to its purpose means using heading elements (for instance, h1
to h6
) to mark up headings, paragraph elements (p
) for paragraphs, lists (ul
, ol
, dl
, also datalist
or menu
) for lists, tables for data tables, and so on.
Stating the obvious became necessary in the old days, when the Web consisted of only a few web sites and authors used tables to code entire sites, table cells or paragraphs for headings, and thought about other creative ways to achieve the layout they wanted.
Behold Google index secrets, revealed!
Using the new index status feature in webmaster tools Google will now show you how many pages from your site have been included in Google’s index. The index status is under the Health menu and shows how many pages are currently indexed.
If your website is being successfully discovered, crawled and indexed by Google your number of indexed pages will steadily increase. If not then The advanced section in Webmaster tools will show not only totals of indexed pages, but also the cumulative number of pages crawled, the number of pages which are not crawled because they are blocked by robots.txt, and also the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in results. To find out more you can read the original blog here.
Introducing the Structured Data Dashboard
Structured data is becoming an ever increasingly important part of the online ecosystem. Google makes use of structured data in a number of ways including rich snippets which are a few lines of text that appear in every Google search result which allow websites to highlight specific types of content. Websites participate by marking their content using industry formats.
This month Google has introduced a new feature in Webmaster Tools – the Structured Data Dashboard. This provides webmasters with greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for their website, The Structured Data Dashboard has three views:
-
Site view
- Item type view
- Page-level view