Robert Farrelly's Checking Your Search Engine Ranking Post got me thinking about additional ways to monitor your standing in the search engines and how the engines view your site. When I started my career in SEO and SEM the search engines did not provide any useful information short of the standard search operators to check for links and indexed pages and a few others. It was something but not really worth a whole lot. Part of the reason was that the engines were fearful of spammers taking advantage of the feedback they provided and using it to game the engines. While that is still a fear the major engines have really begun to open up some of their information. While MSN is working in a beta webmaster tools interface and I am not sure about ASK, Yahoo and Google provide good information to webmasters. I want to go over these two engines offerings and I encourage anyone not using them to do so. They are free and provide invaluable information.
Google's interface is the most extensive and they continue to add features and improvements. Without verifying your site you have access to some good tools and reports such as.
- Sitemaps
- Robots.txt analysis
- Some diagnostic reports
To get all of the reporting features you need to verify your site but that is very simple to do. You can either validate using a meta tag they provide or simply drop an HTML file on your server. The instructions are easy to follow and I think it is well worth the minimal effort to get the additional reporting functionality.
When you verify your site you get the standard reports mentioned above as well as the following.
- Much more robust link reports for both internal and external links.
- Subscriber Stats for your blog
- Crawl Stats
- Top search queries
- What Googlebot Sees
- Much more robust diagnostic reports
- Error and unreachable URL reports
- Advanced tools including the ability to set crawl rates, remove URL's, enhanced image searches, and more.
The standard version is OK but when you verify you get a whole bunch of new and useful tools and reports that are very useful in tracking how your site is doing and how Google is seeing it.
Now I will admit that I find Google's tools much more useful and robust but I don't utilize Yahoo Site Explorer as much as I do Google. I have not verified my site there and I am sure that if you do it provides additional benefits and tools. I need to do that but I have not had the time and believe that the standard information they provide coupled with Google's gets me what I need right now. If I start dropping in Yahoo I will explore their features. Basically with the non-verified reports you get detailed information about links and indexed pages in Yahoo.
I keep an eye on the number of indexed pages I have but the big winner in Yahoo's tool is their link information. IMO (and most others) Yahoo provides the best and most up to date backlink information. Not only do they show the most up to date links they tend to order them with the most important links showing up first and the least important links are pushed to the back of the results. This is great information as it gives you an idea of what links are really helping you and which ones are not doing much. (It can also help with some competitive analysis too) Google is improving their Links reports in Webmaster Tools but it is still not always up to date and they admit that they do not necessarily show all of the links they know about. There is also no real order to the links so you can't necessarily tell which are providing good link juice and which are not (although you can usually get an idea on your own).
MSN has launched a service but it is still in Beta. I just received an email to fill out a form to possibly be included in the next stage of their beta testing. If I get accepted I will try to post some information on their tool here as well. Until then please take a look at the information I provided and do some research. If you have any questions please ask away and I will try to help when I can.
UPDATE
Apparently some people are seeing different results for link counts in Yahoo Site Explorer when they are logged into their account and checking an authenticates site vs when they are checking a non-authenticated site. Barry Schartz at Search Engine Land wrote about it today and you can check out the article here.
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