While watching Matt Cutt’s videos for SEOs and Webmasters, I learned that Google Sitemaps has now been renamed Google Webmaster Tools. More importantly, from our perspective, is that Google has continued to invest in adding new features to the product. It has some great stuff in it, including a Robots.txt checker, reporting on crawl errors such as broken links, and a SPAM Penalty checker.
For those of you who have had your site banned from Google, it also has a built-in Reinclusion Request. In fact, this is the method now recommended by Matt for filing Reinclusion Requests.
One of the newest features is the ability to tell Google whether or not you prefer your site to be accessed through http://www.yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com. Why does this matter? Well if some people link to your site without “www” and some people link to you with the “www” it causes a loss of the value of some of these links to your site.
This is because search engines naturally view http://www.yourdomain.com and http://yourdomain.com as different sites. They actually can contain different content. So which one people link to matters. To make matters worse, if you show the same content in both places, the search engine sees this as duplicate content.
The classic way of dealing with this is to use a 301 redirect from the http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com. This type of 301 redirect does, in fact, address the problem. But now Google Webmaster Tools allows you to do this in another way.
According to Matt, you first need to prove that you are in control of both the “www” and “non-www” versions of your sites. Then within a few weeks, Google will consistently credit all related links to your preferred version of your site and show all search results using the preferred version of your site. Matt also indicated that this is not yet something that webmasters should exclusively rely on. It’s important to keep those 301 redirects in place.
I think the whole notion of Google Webmaster Tools is great. We have used it for a long time now. Having search engines offer useful tools to our community is a great idea. Keep it coming!
Technorati Tags: Google Webmaster Tools, Matt Cutts
