Google Webmaster Tools Notifications For Faulty Redirects & New Color-Coded Fetch As Google

Google Webmaster Tools has added two new features today, one for notifying webmasters of faulty redirects and the second to show color-coded- HTML syntax within the fetch as Google feature.

Stop Redirecting Smartphone Users To Your Home Page Notification

Google is now sending notifications to webmasters who are sending their mobile users to their home page, as opposed to the destination URL they would expect.

Back in June, Google launched a feature in the search results that warned mobile searchers before they clicked that they would not be taken to the page they expected, but rather be redirected to the site’s home page.

Two months later, Google is now notifying the webmaster of the site that this error is coming up for their mobile users in the Google search results. This notification is aimed at convincing the webmaster to not use a redirect and send the user to a mobile friendly version of the specific page the user is looking for.

The searcher’s notification looks like this:

The webmaster notification being sent via email, as captured by @Marie_Haynes, looks like this:

Fetch As GoogleBot Now With Color-Coded Syntax

Having your HTML markup and code color-coded is a tremendous help for developers and webmasters when debugging issues. Now Google has added color-coded syntax directly in the Fetch as Google feature within Google Webmaster Tools!

Here is a screen shot:

This should help webmasters more rapidly debug problems with their sites.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.