Boost Your Site’s traffic with Updated Google Webmaster Tools

by Glenn Paul - 10/23/2008 9273 Views

New 404 reporting in Google Webmaster tools

Little history about ‘404’
Everyone knows that inbound links are links from external websites or blogs linking back to your site. These inbound links have the capability to bring new users to your site. However, these inbound links will be useful to you only if the users land on the right page of your website. The prevailing problem with the inbound links is that there will be some links directed to a non existing pages of your website. When someone clicks on the links to the non-existing pages, they will be taken to a 404 page stating that “Page not found”. This will be an irksome experience for the visitor to land on such useless pages.

The new addition to Google webmaster tools

Google Webmaster tools which allow users to diagnose their website, added a new error report feature earlier this week. Running this report will allow the site owners and the SEO professionals to improve their site traffic through inbound links. Once you run this report you will be able to see the backlink sources with the error details. You can follow the links back to the sources that are marked with “404 (Not found)” and clean them up by either contacting the sites and getting them to change the links to the right pages, or doing 301 redirects. Google's Matt Cutts says “You can also download this data as a convenient CSV file. Just click on Diagnostics, then Web crawl, and then click on ‘Download all sources of errors on this site.’” While a few links may not worth the time spent in correcting them, but the majority links can give a major boost in your site’s traffic.

Bottom line
Today most of the SEO professionals and website owners make site analysis reports to find number of inbound links, page errors on the site and internal 404 navigation errors. However, many of the authority sites (Government websites for example) have no clue about SEO and are struggling with the problems associated with inbound links. Now this simple webmaster tool from Google will be of great use to them to clear the cesspool. I hope this update in Google Webmaster tools will become a must have report element in all site analysis reports. This new tool from Google gets thumbs up from me!

Category :

Google

Tags :

Google, SEO, search engine

About Glenn Paul

The Author is a Search Engine Optimization researcher with more than 5 years of expertise in the .... more info about the author