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Feb. 28, 2008 at 1:48pm Eastern by Vanessa Fox
Google Webmaster Tools: Now On Your iGoogle Homepage
Google's Webmaster Central is giving you a new way to access the diagnostics and stats for your sites. Rather than log into your Webmaster Tools account, you can add the Webmaster Tools gadget to your iGoogle page and access information from there. You can choose what components to display on your iGoogle page.
Below are details about what components are available and when each was initially launched as part of webmaster tools.
Available Webmaster Tools Components for iGoogle
- Crawl errors: the number of each type of crawl error Google found on the site (with links to the individual URLs with errors). Google has been sharing diagnostic information such as this since August 2005.
- Top search queries: the top searches that bring visitors to the site from Google. Google has been providing this information since November 2005.
- What Googlebot sees: the words used most often in the site. Google began providing this information in February 2006.
- External links: list of pages on your site with external links to them, along with the number of links to each page. You can click through to see the list of external URLs. Google first made link information available in webmaster tools last February.
- Internal links: alphabetical list of links from the site to other pages within the site. Google first made this information available at the same time it launched external linking data.
- Subscriber stats: the number of subscribers to each feed on your site via Google Reader and iGoogle. When Google launched this feature in September, we covered why these numbers may not match those reported by Feedburner.
- Sitelinks: the list of links and titles that Google has generated for the site. Google began providing this information in October.
- Content problems: any issues with missing, duplicate, or short titles or meta descriptions. Google began supplying this information as part of webmaster tools in December.
To add any of these components:
- Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account, then click on a verified site.
- From the Tools menu, click Gadgets.
- Click Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools Homepage.
- Choose the components you want to add.
This gadget provides information on all sites in your account (not just the site you navigated to in order to add the gadget). A useful future feature would be the ability to show stats for different sites as different components of the iGoogle page or the ability to choose which site shows as default. Right now, the first site listed in your account appears initially, and you can view information for different sites via a drop-down menu. If an unverified site is the first site in your account (they are ordered alphabetically), then your iGoogle page simply shows a verification message by default.
Google tells me that you must be logged into your iGoogle page using the same account you've used to verify your sites in Webmaster Tools in order to see this information. Otherwise, you'll simply see a link prompting you to verify.
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By Vanessa Fox
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