SEO FAQ Answered by Google Webmaster Tools
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If you own a website, having an account with Google Webmaster Tools is invaluable. It can provide you with a wide variety of information about your site, its traffic, and how Google perceives it. In particular, webmasters just starting to learn SEO have many questions, and Google Webmaster Tools has the answers.
Webmasters just starting to learn search engine optimization often asked a lot of repetitive questions in SEO forums that can often be answered accurately and precisely by Google Webmaster Tools.
More often, webmasters or bloggers who do not have a Google Webmaster Tools account for their own website or blog end up asking a lot of questions or become confused when diagnosing technical website/SEO-related issues. This free tool created by Google can provide more information -- more than you can imagine -- and can often answer both basic and advanced frequently-asked questions (FAQ) in SEO.
This article covers some advanced and new Google Webmaster Tools features that were not discussed in a previous article about the five most important things you can do with Google Webmaster Tools. If you are ready, let's get started.
Google has not indexed my website. Why?
You need to log in to your Google Webmaster tools account for your website. You need to confirm these following items:
Step 1: Look on the Google Dashboard front page. Did you see the message “Googlebot has successfully accessed your home page”? If yes, then your home page is indexable. Proceed to the next item to check for further troubleshooting. See sample screen shot below:
Step 2: Go to Dashboard -> Diagnostics ->? Crawl Errors and then click the “Web” tab. Under “Show URLs:” click “Restricted by robots.txt.” Does it include pages in your website that should be crawled and indexed? If yes, then you may have accidentally blocked those URLs. In addition, you can also see “unreachable,” “not followed” or “not found” for details. Some pages are not crawled because all links pointing to that page might have the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
Step 3: Did you submit an XML sitemap? If yes, you can go to Site configuration -> Sitemaps and find a column labeled“URLs Submitted.” If the number of “Indexed URLs” are substantially less than “URLs Submitted,” then you may have problems with your internal navigation menu and site crawlability. You can use the data provided in Step 2 to help you further troubleshoot crawling error-related issues.
Step 4: There are some websites with inconsistent navigation menus; for example, they have 30 links in the home page navigation menu pointing to category pages, but the category pages lack a substantial amount of links pointing to other, deep product pages, which can affect the number of pages indexed on your website. Remember that links are one of the ways used by Googlebot to find new pages on your site.
To diagnose, go to Dashboard -> Your site on the web -> Internal links, and you will see the list of URLs in your website vs the number of internal links found pointing to that page. If you have a fairly consistent navigation menu, you will observe that the number of links are about the same. If you see some pages which do not receive internal links or are not listed there at all (because there is no internal link pointing to it), you can click and examine the actual page, to see if rel=”nofollow” has been implemented on the pages. As noted earlier, that can affect crawling. Other things to check include pages with a meta noindex tag.
Next: Does my site appear relevant to Google for my targeted terms or niche? >>
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