Google Enhances Webmaster Central's Robots.txt Analysis Tool

Google Enhances Webmaster Central’s Robots.txt Analysis Tool

Aug 16, 2007 at 8:58am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced improvements they have made to the robots.txt analysis tool.

The tool now recognizes all sitemap declarations and relative URLs. So now the tool will report the validity of all sitemaps URLs plus show data for relative URLs. In addition, Google has expanded the reporting to include data for not just the first problem encountered, like they did in the past. Now they also show all problems encountered, on multiple lines and itemized by line number.

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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Sam I Am

That’s good news, although unfortunately they have not done anything about the clear contrasting information they are spreading either through their webmaster help area or the robots.txt tool. I’ve documented this quite well over at the google groups but no feedback so far. Quite frankly I’m surprised no one has noticed this before considering you can seriously mess up a sites ranking based on the information google is giving out in these two places (one which directly contradicts the other).

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/181ea5d12a78b721/2f2fb41d38de199f