When you plan to do something, are you a minimalist, or are you prepared for every potential scenario? For example, would you hike out into the Alaskan wilderness during inclement weather with only a wool overcoat and a sandwich in your pocket - like the naturalist John Muir (and you thought Steve McQueen was tough)?

Or are you more the type of person where even on a day hike, you bring a few changes of clothes, 3 dehydrated meals, a couple of kitchen appliances, a power inverter, and a foot- powered generator, because, well, you never know when the urge will arise to make toast?

The Webmaster Tools team strives to serve all types of webmasters, from the minimalist to those who use every tool they can find. If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably had the opportunity to use the current version of Webmaster Tools, which offers as many features as possible just shy of the kitchen sink. Now there’s something for those of you who would prefer to access only the features of Webmaster Tools that you need: we’ve just released Webmaster Tools Gadgets for iGoogle.

Here’s the simple process to start using these Gadgets right away. (Note: this assumes you’ve already got a Webmaster Tools account and have verified at least one site.)

1. Visit Webmaster Tools and select any site that you’ve validated from the dashboard.
2. Click on the Tools section.
3. Click on Gadgets sub-section.
4. Click on the big “Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools homepage” button.
5. Click the “Add to Google” button on the following confirm page to add the new tab to iGoogle.
6. Now you’re in iGoogle, where you should see your new Google Webmaster Tools tab with a number of Gadgets. Enjoy!

You’ll notice that each Gadget has a drop down menu at the top which lets you select from all the sites you have validated to see that Gadget’s information for the particular site you select. A few of the Gadgets that we’re currently offering are:

Crawl errors - Does Googlebot encounter issues when crawling your site?

Top search queries - What are people searching for to find your site?

External links - What websites are linking to yours?

We plan to add more Gadgets in the future and improve their quality, so if there’s a feature that you’d really like to see which is not included in one of the Gadgets currently available, let us know. As you can see, it’s a cinch to get started.

It looks like rain clouds are forming over here in Seattle, so I’m off for a hike.

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Today’s the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, so now is a perfect time to start your spring cleaning. But as a webmaster, your chores don’t end after you’ve cleaned the garage — you’ll probably also want to do some cleaning on your server as well.

Exterior
Before we get to the interior, step outside, and see how your site looks from the street — or in Google search results. Just head on over to your nearest Google search box, and do a site search on your site using the query format [site:example.com]. Just like you keep your street number visible on your house, and maybe even your name on the mailbox, check to see that your visitors can easily identify your site and its contents from the title and snippet listed in Google. If you’d like to improve your current appearance, try out the content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, and read up on how to influence your snippets.

Speaking of making your address visible, how are you listed? My name is Michael, but I’ll also answer to Mike or even Wysz. However, I only expect to be listed once in the phone book. Similarly, your site may have pages that can be accessed from multiple URLs: for instance, www.example.com and example.com. To consolidate your site’s listings in Google, use 301 redirects to tell Google (and other search engines) how you’d prefer your pages to be listed. You can also easily let Google know about your preferred domain via Webmaster Tools. And just like I’d want my bank to understand that deposits to Mike and Michael should route to the same account, those redirects can help Google appropriately consolidate link properties (like PageRank) to the destination page.

Interior
No matter how clean your home is, all that work may go unnoticed if your visitors can’t get in the door or find their way around. Review your site’s appearance and functionality on multiple browsers to make sure that all of your visitors get the experience you’ve worked so hard to design. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, so it’s a good idea to test using browsers representing different layout engines. Firefox, Safari, and Opera all see things differently, and these three browsers likely control how at least 20% of your users are experiencing the web. For some sites it can be dramatically higher — The New York Times recently reported that around 38% of their online readers used either Firefox or Safari.

If your site requires the use of plug-ins, check to see how this additional content behaves across different operating systems. Keep in mind that many people only update their operating system with the purchase of a new computer, so go back a version or two and see how your site works on yesterday’s OS. And to make sure you’re not completely shutting out visitors with limited capabilities, try to navigate your site without using images, Flash or JavaScript. If you want to see where Google may be having trouble getting in, check Webmaster Tools to see if there have been any crawl errors reported for your site.

Taking out the trash
Unfortunately, many of us have hosted unwelcome guests. If they left a mess behind, do your future visitors a favor and get rid of the garbage. Tear out spammed guestbook pages. Pull out those weeds in your forum that were planted by an off-topic advertiser. And while you’re throwing stuff away, look out for any blank or abandoned pages. We’ve all had projects in the basement that never got finished. If your site still shows URLs with one of those circa-1997 “under construction” graphics or templates showing “Products > Shirts > Graphic T’s: There are no graphic t’s at this time” and they’re just gathering dust, it’s probably safe to say you’ll never get around to finishing it. After you’ve collected the junk and corrected any broken links on your site, make sure you let everyone know it’s really gone by using the 404 HTTP status code. You can check to see which code your server is returning by using the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox.

Security and preventive maintenance
To prevent problems with future visitors, especially those who may try to come in your back door at night, go through our checklist to verify you’ve covered security basics.

If your site’s maintenance tasks, such as upgrading software packages, make your content temporarily unavailable, let your visitors know to “pardon the dust” by using the 503 HTTP status code. This will let Google know to check back later, and not index your error page as part of your site’s content. If you’re using WordPress, you can easily set up your message along with the status code using the Maintenance Mode plug-in.

And speaking of intruders and software updates, you just never know when something will go wrong. Before something does happen, now is a great time to evaluate your backup strategy. Like insurance for your home, the effort and expense put into it is well worth the peace of mind alone, not to mention if you ever actually need it. A good backup system archives your backups in a different location than the working site, and happens automatically to avoid the problems of forgetfulness. It’s a great idea to make a backup of your site (including databases) right before running any software updates or making a major change.

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Universal search and personalized search were two of the hot topics at SMX West last month. Many webmasters wanted to know how these evolutions in search influence the way their content appears in search results, and how they can use these features to gain more relevant search traffic. We posted several recommendations on how to take advantage of universal search last year. Here are a few additional tips:

1. Local search: Help nearby searchers find your business.
   Of the various search verticals, local search was the one we heard the most questions about. Here are a few tips to help business owners get the most out of local search:
   • Add your business to our Local Business Center
   • Make sure your business is listed under the appropriate categories
   • Make sure your business name, address and phone number appear on your website, and that they’re accessible to search engines
   • Add your business hours, images, coupons, or additional information to help searchers determine whether your business meets their needs
2. Video search: Enhance your video results.
   Several site owners asked whether they could specify a preferred thumbnail image for videos when they appear in search results. Good news: our Video Sitemaps protocol lets you suggest a thumbnail for each video.
3. Personalized search basics
   A few observations from Googler Phil McDonnell:
   • Personalization of search results is usually accomplished through subtle ranking changes, rather than a drastic rearrangement of results. You shouldn’t worry about personalization radically altering your site’s ranking for a particular query.
   • Targeting a niche, or filling a very specific need, may be a good way to stand out in personalized results. For example, rather than creating a site about “music,” you could create a site about the musical history of Haiti. Or about musicians who recorded with Elton John between 1969-1979.
   • Some personalization is based on the geographic location of the searcher; for example, a user searching for [needle] in Seattle is more likely to get search results about the Space Needle than, say, a searcher in Florida. Take advantage of features like Local Business Center and geographic targeting to let us know whether your website is especially relevant to searchers in a particular location.
   • As always, create interesting, unique and compelling content or tools.
4. Image search: Increase your visibility.
   One panelist presented a case study in which a client’s images were being filtered out of search results by SafeSearch because they had been classified as explicit. If you find yourself in this situation and believe your site should not be filtered by SafeSearch, use this contact form to let us know. Select the Report a problem > Inappropriate or irrelevant search results option and describe your situation.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have other tips to share!

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We all know how friendly Googlebot is. And like all benevolent robots, he listens to us and respects our wishes about parts of our site that we don’t want crawled. We can just give him a robots.txt file explaining what we want, and he’ll happily comply. But what if you’re intimidated by the idea of communicating directly with Googlebot? After all, not all of us are fluent in the language of robots.txt. This is why we’re pleased to introduce you to your personal robot translator: the Robots.txt Generator in Webmaster Tools. It’s designed to give you an easy and interactive way to build a robots.txt file. It can be as simple as entering the files and directories you don’t want crawled by any robots.

Or, if you need to, you can create fine-grained rules for specific robots and areas of your site.

Once you’re finished with the generator, feel free to test the effects of your new robots.txt file with our robots.txt analysis tool. When you’re done, just save the generated file to the top level (root) directory of your site, and you’re good to go. There are a couple of important things to keep in mind about robots.txt files:

• Not every search engine will support every extension to robots.txt files

The Robots.txt Generator creates files that Googlebot will understand, and most other major robots will understand them too. But it’s possible that some robots won’t understand all of the robots.txt features that the generator uses.

• Robots.txt is simply a request

Although it’s highly unlikely from a major search engine, there are some unscrupulous robots that may ignore the contents of robots.txt and crawl blocked areas anyway. If you have sensitive content that you need to protect completely, you should put it behind password protection rather than relying on robots.txt.
We hope this new tool helps you communicate your wishes to Googlebot and other robots that visit your site. If you want to learn more about robots.txt files, check out our Help Center.

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Occasionally in the discussion group, webmasters ask, “Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?” Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools.

1. Make the most of your impressions
One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries. The data from the Top Search Queries allows you to quickly pinpoint what searches your site appears for and which of those searches are resulting in clicks. Let’s look at last week’s data for www.google.com/webmasters as an example.

As you can see, Google Webmaster Central is receiving a great number of impressions for the query [gadgets] but may not be fully capitalizing on these impressions with user clicks. Click on [gadgets] to see how your site appears in our search results. Does your title and snippet look appealing to users? As my colleague Michael recently wrote, it might be time to do some “housekeeping” on your website — it’s a great, low-to-no-cost way to catch the attention of your users. For example, we could work to improve our snippet from:

To something more readable such as “Use gadgets to easily add cool, dynamic content to your site…” by adding a meta description to the URL.

And what are users doing when they visit your site? Are they browsing your content or bouncing off your site quickly? To find out, Google Analytics will calculate your site’s “bounce rate,” or the percentage of single-page visits (e.g. someone just visiting your homepage and then leaving). This can be a helpful measure of the quality of your site’s landing page and the traffic your site receives. After all, once you’ve worked hard to get your users to visit your site, you want to keep them there! Check out the Analytics blog for further information about “bounce rate.”

2. Perform smart geo-targeting
Let’s imagine you have a .com that you want to target at a Japanese market. Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target for your site, where you would probably pick Japan. But, doing so is not an immediate solution. You can confirm the location of your visitors using the map overlay of Analytics, right up to the city level. You can also discover what types of users are accessing your site - including their browser and connection speed. If users cannot access your website due to an incompatible browser or slower connection speeds, you may need to rethink your website’s design. Doing so can go a long way toward achieving the level of relevant traffic you would like.

3. Control access to sensitive content
One day, you log into Analytics and look at your “Content by Title” data. You shockingly discover that users are visiting your /privatedata pages. Have no fear! Go into Webmaster Tools and use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from Google’s search results. Modifying your robots.txt file will also block Googlebot from crawling that section of your site in the future.

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