Google Adds Sitelinks Control To Webmaster Tools & Much More

Google has informed us that today they are releasing a new update to Google Webmaster Central’s tools. The new features include a way to manage your Google Sitelinks, more historical query statistics, an extension of sitemaps to support code search, an improved message center and a warning that may help notify you of possible duplicate content problems.

Google is releasing a way to manage your sitelinks. Under the “links” section, you will soon be able to see a “Sitelinks” option. Choose that, and you will see this:

It is on that screen where you can block unwanted Sitelinks from showing under your Google listing.

As a reminder, normally it’s only five sitelinks that show for any site. However, Danny and I recently wrote about noticing ten sitelinks under some search results in Google. We’re checking to see if more than five links showing up is somehow related to this new control being offered. [NOTE: Confirmed: Google Sitelinks Grow To Eight Links covers how it is now eight].

Google has also extended their query stats to give you a breakdown by date range. You can view data from the past 7 days, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 4 months, 5 months and 6 months. Here is a screen capture of that page in action:

Another feature is that the Google Webmaster Central message center will now send you receipts for any spam reports, paid link reports, reconsideration requests, and crawl rate change requests you’ve filed.

Finally, Google has also added a form of a duplicate content warning. Google said they will now notify you of “high URL counts.” High URL counts are often caused by duplicate content issues, such as calendars. Google says these types of pages “could result in Googlebot consuming more of a site’s bandwidth than necessary.”

Postscript: The Google Webmaster Central blog just posted on this announcement, saying the feature is live. So I logged into a site that I know has sitelinks, and I get the message that says, “Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site.”

But I do have Sitelinks for seroundtable.com, see for yourself:

I guess this is a temporary issue.

Postscript 2: And now it appears to be working properly:

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 SEM topics.