Tag: Webmaster Tools

The section in Google Webmaster Tools that works most closely with our WordPress SEO Premium plugin, is the Crawl section. In our premium plugin, you’ll find a Webmaster Tools section, that lists all pages Google somehow did not find on your website. You can easily import these into the plugin and redirect the ones that need redirecting, so the crawl error is resolved.

But there is more in that fourth ‘chapter’ in Google Webmaster Tools. Following our posts on Search Appearance, Search Traffic and Google Index, this article digs into for instance crawl errors and stats, finding out how Google sees your website and your XML sitemaps.

Crawl Errors

This section lists two types of errors, being site errors and URL errors. Site errors simply lists whether your DNS works, the server can easily be reached (no timeouts, for instance) and if Google can access your robots.txt file.

Google provides background information on the error (when did it occur, how often in the last 90 days). If things like this happen too much (as in more than once or twice a year without advance warning), be sure to contact your hosting company or switch hosts altogether.

The URL error section is divided into multiple sections and subsections. First, you can check for errors that Google gets when acting a number of different devices. On for instance the desktop tab, we find the number of server errors, access denied errors and page not found errors.

Please monitor these errors, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google. A 404 can be redirected, like mentioned for instance in our WordPress SEO Premium plugin, or with a bit more work straight in your .htaccess file. After that, check the checkbox in front of the URL and click Mark As Fixed (this will just make sure the list is cleaned up, it won’t do much besides that).

We have found in our reviews, that a lot of people either ignore the errors here, or forget to mark errors as fixed. This will only lead to a very long list of errors. Clean that list up now and then. If you want to check if any of these URLs are already fixed, click the link to find more information on the error and use Fetch as Google to see if the URL is now accessible for Google (or click Marked as fixed, of course).

Soft 404s

These tabs can also show Soft 404s. A soft 404 occurs, when a page as such exists, but has an empty ‘content area’. Let me elaborate on that. Google does a fine job on locating content on a page. It understands your header, sidebar, footer and content area. That also means that you can have a fully packed sidebar and footer, Google will still return a Soft 404 when the content area is empty. And by empty we also mean a category page with no posts, or any other page stating there is no content available. Or a page that just says 404 Not Found and returns a 200 OK server response anyway (happens more often than you think). This also occurs when you would for instance link an internal search page that just doesn’t return any results. There is no page, but an almost empty page is returned anyway.

Although the server will return a 200 OK message for that page, Google will consider it a (Soft) 404. You don’t want these pages on your website for a number of reasons. For one, these pages are obviously not very user-friendly. But besides that, Googlebot will have to go over all these pages for no reason at all (as they lack content), which will prevent your site from being crawled in an efficient way. After all, you don’t want Googlebot to spend time trying to see what’s on all these non-existing pages. Either add content to these pages or noindex them completely. In case of an empty category or tag page, consider removing the category or tag. You’re not using it anyway.

Smartphone visits

For your smartphone visits, Google also tests for faulty redirects and blocked URLs. A blocked URL is a page that is blocked for Googlebot-mobile for smartphones in robots.txt. Simply check if these are intentionally blocked and otherwise change robots.txt to allow access.

Faulty redirects occur when a page redirects to “an irrelevant landing page instead of the equivalent, smartphone-optimized version of the desktop page”. That could for instance be a redirect to your homepage instead of a redirect to the exact same page on your mobile site. Check the question mark next to labels in Google Webmaster Tools for more information on the terminology in Google Webmaster Tools, by the way. These explanations really come in handy, sometimes :)

Lastly, there can also be a tab for News at URL sections. That shows crawl errors for Google News content. Of course that is only for News sites. See the Google News requirements to see if your website qualifies at all for Google News, otherwise don’t bother looking for this tab.

In the end, you’ll just want this to be the only text in the Crawl Error section:

Crawl Stats

This is your handy overview of Googlebot activity on your website. It shows you the pages it crawled per day, the number of bytes downloaded per day and the time spent downloading a page. Depending on the number of pages of your website, this might be handy information.

We think this is great for trend watching. If you have made changes to your site structure, robots.txt or for instance added XML sitemaps for the very first time, that should show in the provided graphs.

In case these stats show a drastically declining line, of even a flat line at zero, there’s probably something really wrong with either the website (robots.txt might be blocking Googlebot), or your server (it could be down, for instance). Again, monitor this.

Fetch as Google

As mentioned, in case of any crawl errors, you should look into what happened and why. One of the tools Google Webmaster Tools provides, is a way to view your website as Google does. You can fetch a page as Google. You could either click the link at Crawl Errors and click the Fetch as Google link in the pop-up, or go to the Fetch as Google section in Google Webmaster Tools to enter an URL manually:

Note that in the image above, all rendered pages have been rendered quite a while ago – perhaps these already can be fetched the right way – so visit them to check this and perhaps even do a refetch. In the image, we see three different kinds of statuses (these go for both Fetch and Fetch and Render commands):

• Partial: The page can be partially rendered, as some elements are probably not displayed as intended or not at all, for instance because you are blocking CSS or JS in your robots.txt file. If you click the line with the partial status in the overview, you’ll actually be taken to a snapshot of how Google rendered your page. On that page, Webmaster Tools will also tell you which resources it could not get, so you’ll be able to fix this.
• Not Found: The page can’t be found. This might be because a redirect isn’t set yet in case of an URL / structure change, or perhaps you simply deleted the page (server returns a 404 error).
• Unreachable: Googlebot didn’t have the patience to wait for your website to load (make it faster), or your server simply replied that it could not allow the request for the URL.

Of course there are more. Other statuses you might find here are:

• Complete: That’s the one you want. Google managed to crawl the entire page.
• Redirected: Either the server or your website itself (HTML/JS) told Google to visit another URL.
• Not authorized: Your server tells Google that URL access is restricted or has been blocked from crawling (server returns a 403 error).
• DNS not found: Perhaps you entered the wrong URL? The domain name seems incorrect.
• Blocked: Your robots.txt tells Google to bugger off.
• Unreachable robots.txt: Google can’t reach your robots.txt at all. More on testing the robots.txt below.
• Temporarily unreachable: Either the server took too long to reply or too many consecutive requests were made to the server for different URLs.
• Error: An error occurred when trying to complete the fetch (contact Webmaster Tools product support in this case).

By clicking the URL, you can see the rendered page as seen by both Googlebot and a visitor, so you can make an judgement on the impact of the blocked file:

In this case, the impact is clearly low.

Robots.txt Tester

Last week, Joost explained a lot about the Partial status at Fetch as Google in his post WordPress robots.txt Example. You really need to make sure your robots.txt is in order.

By the way, you might be wondering if you really need that robots.txt file. Actually, you don’t. If you think Google should crawl all sections on your server, you could leave it out. The Robots.txt tester will return this message in that case:

In the Robots.txt tester, Google will show the robots.txt you are using and tell you any and all issues Google finds:

That’s a warning: Googlebot ignores that crawl delay. If for some reason you do want to set a crawl delay, please do so using the gear icon in the upper right in Google Webmaster Tools (at Site Settings > Crawl Rate – new crawl rates are valid for 90 days). Please note that this is not how often Google visits your site, it’s the speed of Googlebot’s requests during the crawl of your website.

Hm. And what do you want Google to do with /wordpress/wp-includes/? By the way, like in this example, we see a lot of webmasters adding a link to the sitemap to their robots.txt. No problem, but why not simply add that in Google Webmaster Tools instead? More on that later.

This is another syntax not understood. Comments in robots.txt can be done using hashtags instead:

Works like a charm.

Ouch. The horror. Google could not find a user-agent in this robots.txt – but it’s there, right? It’s actually preceded by a space, and that immediately triggers a ‘syntax not understood’ for the robots.txt test.
It doesn’t mean all 20 restrictions in that robots.txt will be ignored, by the way. This seems to be a strict test, but Google is very capable of filtering that space. Google actually encourages whitespace for readability. But strictly speaking, it shouldn’t be in there.

Visit Webmaster Tools for even more information on the robots.txt syntax.

Test allowed / disallowed

One more thing. When you want to test whether a page or directory on your site can or can not be reached by Googlebot, or for instance Googlebot-News or Googlebot-Mobile, you can test that as well in this section, right below the robots.txt code.

If we take the last example above, and test the /Tests/ part of it, you’ll see that that indeed can be indexed if we follow the strict rules of the Robots.txt tester:

Although the text ‘Allowed’ is green, it’s not a good thing that this directory can be indexed. As mentioned, the space isn’t allowing Googlebot in this case, according to the Google search result pages:

Feel free to add any insights on this particular issue in the comments below.

If you test a page or directory and find that it is blocked like this:

the test tool will also tell you what line in your robots.txt is causing this:

All in all, if you are using your robots.txt actively, make sure your robots.txt will do what you intended it to do. The Robots.txt tester will help you a lot.

Sitemaps

It doesn’t matter if you are setting up a new WordPress site, or have just installed our WordPress SEO plugin: activate XML sitemaps and remove any other plugin that does this as well. Don’t forget to redirect the old XML sitemap, probably at /sitemap.xml, to ours at /sitemap_index.xml. If you experience any issues, check our knowledge base.

Having said that, if you have a proper XML sitemap, go to Google Webmaster Tools and test and add it at Sitemaps. Unfortunately Google doesn’t allow you to add a tested sitemap immediately after testing. Yes, this is my feature request, Google ;)

These sitemaps can be added manually, but perhaps Google already found some. These are listed on the All tab:

We often get questions about image XML sitemaps. Images are actually already inserted by our plugin in for instance post-sitemap.xml and page-sitemap.xml:

Back to Google Webmaster Tools. First you want to make sure /sitemap_index.xml contains all the content types you want Google to index. Please check the XML sitemap section in our plugin and see if you can exclude any post types or taxonomies from the XML sitemaps; this usually already fixes a lot of warnings and errors. Especially on shops, where sitemaps can be created for shipping classes and cloth sizes, for instance, that would be my first advice.

Second, you add the /sitemap_index.xml, which will be added immediately, along with any sitemaps listed on that sitemap. If for some reason that sitemap still contains content you’d rather not have indexed, simply change that in our plugin and resubmit it in Google Webmaster Tools. Note that you can manually add and delete sitemaps, but the ones that are automatically added for instance by an index sitemap, can only be deleted by a resubmit.

I thought about adding a list of possible errors and warnings to this article as well. Seriously. But when I found that Webmaster Tools actually added internal navigation on their Sitemap Errors page, it seemed to make sense to simply link that page.

Common warnings are warnings about Google not being able to reach a page, due to a long response time or for instance an URL included in an XML sitemap, but excluded in robots.txt.

Errors vary from invalid date formats to sitemaps not being found (a 404 on your sitemap is never a good idea). A sitemap can also be empty, or a required tag can be missing.

Indexed versus submitted content

Another thing you might wonder about is the difference between index and submitted content types (pages, video, images). These are the red and blue bars in this section. The red bar (indexed types) is usually a bit lower, as Google isn’t crawling your entire site at once. Time is precious, so Google spiders a (large) number of pages at a time, but if your site structure goes a gazillion levels deep, chances are Googlebot isn’t getting to these deepest pages in a crawl. It’s not that Google bookmarks where they end up and start from there the next time it crawls your website. This emphasizes the need for a good internal link structure, well formatted sitemaps and things like that.

URL Parameters

Let’s start with Google’s warning here:

Use this feature only if you’re sure how parameters work. Incorrectly excluding URLs could result in many pages disappearing from search.

If you are using URL parameters, like the default s for WordPress search, please check this section. When discussing this post with Joost, he told from experience that f.i. in case of a site migrations, things might go terribly wrong if this isn’t done properly.

In this section, you can tell Google how to handle your parameters. When clicking Add a Parameter, you’ll get a pop-up with these options:

I entered the ‘s’ for search, and have to decide on that parameter to affect page content or just change the way content is displayed on the page. Google respectively calls this passive and active URL parameters. Active parameters can for instance be used for sorting, pagination and sometimes even translations or categorization. Passive parameters are usually for tracking or referrals, like Magento’s SID (session ID) and Google’s own utm_source.

Now if you feel the parameter “changes, reorders or narrows page content”, and pick Yes in the above select box, you’ll be presented with four more options. You can set here how you want Google to handle the parameter:

1. Let Googlebot decide: a general option if you’re not sure what to choose here.
2. Every URL: Every URL using this parameter is an entirely new page or product.
3. Only URLs with specified value: This will indicate to Google that you only want URLs crawled with a specific value for this parameter and forget the rest, for instance to avoid duplicate content due to sorting options.
4. No URLs: Don’t crawl pages with this parameter at all. Avoiding duplicate content is a reason to use this one as well.

Note that instead of using URL parameters for option 3 and 4, you could also set the right canonical on all of these pages.

TL;DR?

Sorry to disappoint you. There is no Too Long; Didn’t Read in this. In the previous posts on Google Webmaster Tools, we have already emphasized the importance of checking your site now and then, or monitoring it actively. Google Webmaster Tools helps a lot with that, and this is one of the longest (and in my opinion most interesting) sections in Google Webmaster Tools.

Feel free to drop any addition or question related to this section in the comments. Looking forward to it!

This post first appeared as Google Webmaster Tools: Crawl on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

This is already the third post in our Google Webmaster Tools series. Last week we’ve written about the Search Appearance section and the Search Traffic section of Google Webmaster Tools. So if you jumped in here, and want to start at the beginning, please read those posts first.

Today we’ll be going into the Google Index section, which obviously gives you some insight into how your website is being indexed in Google.

Index Status

The Index Status shows you how many URLs of your website have been found and added to Google’s index:

This can give you a good idea of how your site is doing in the index. If you see this line dropping, for instance, you’d know there’s an issue. Basically any major and unexpected change to this graph should be something you look into.

Actually, the “Advanced” tab gives you just a bit more insight into how all your indexed pages are divided:

As you can see, this shows you how many of your pages are being blocked by your robots.txt as well. And you can also see how many of your pages have been removed from the index, but more on that in the next chapter.

There’s something else this graph makes clear. As of March 9th of last year (at the “update” line) Google Webmaster Tools shows the data separately for both HTTP and HTTPS websites. This means that if you moved your site from HTTP to HTTPS since then, you’ll need to add your site again, using the red “Add a site” button. Then, fill in the entire URL, including the HTTP or HTTPS part:

Interpretation of the Index Status

There’s a few things you should always look for when checking out your Index Status:

• Your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content;
• Sudden drops in the graph. This means Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something is blocking Google out, whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it! This could also have to do with the separate HTTP and HTTPS tracking I mentioned above;
• Sudden (and unexpected) spikes in the graph. This could be an issue with duplicate content (such as both www and non-www, wrong canonicals, etc.), automatically generated pages, or even hacks.

Content Keywords

The Content Keywords area gives you a pretty good idea of what keywords are important for your website. When you click on the Content Keywords menu item, it’ll give you a nice list of keywords right away:

These keywords are found on your website by Google. This does not mean you’re ranking for these keywords, it just means they’re the most relevant keywords for your site according to Google. You can also extend this list to 200 items, so it’ll give you a pretty broad idea.

This actually tells us a few things about your site. It shows you what Google thinks is most important for your website. Does this align with your own ideas of what your website’s about? For instance, if you find any keywords here that you didn’t expect, such as “Viagra” or “payday loan”, this could mean that your site has been hacked. And next to that, if you’d expect any keywords that you can’t find in this list, there’s a few things you can check:

• Your robots.txt might be blocking the page(s) that contain the keyword(s) you’re expecting;
• The page containing the keyword might not be old enough yet for Google to have crawled it;
• Google excludes keywords they consider boilerplate or common words from this list. What they’d consider boilerplate or common differs per site.

Blocked Resources

A new addition (March 11, 2015) to the Google Index section is Blocked Resources. This report shows you how many of your resources are blocked for Google:

The report will show where these resources are hosted. Clicking the host will take you to a second page showing all the blocked files per host. Again, that report will show how many pages are affected per file. These files could be images used on your site, but also CSS or JavaScript files. In that detailed report, you can click on a file and see all the pages it is listed on, as well as the last date Google detected these.

After you have found the blocked files, you can use the Fetch and Render option to view the page as Google and decide on whether you need to fix this right away or not. Depending on the impact of the blocked file, of course. Google Webmaster Tools will guide you in fixing the robots.txt block for files hosted on your own sites. For blocked resources with a larger impact that are hosted on a third party site, you’ll have to contact the owner of that host / website and ask them to remove the block. Always ask yourself if you really need that file first!

Remove URLs

This section of Google Webmaster Tools gives you the power you’d expect: to remove URLs from Google’s search results altogether. You can actually also block those pages from coming up in the search results by disallowing the page in your robots.txt. Or you can make it a password protected page, if that suits you better.

However, you can also do this from Google Webmaster Tools quite easily:

Just type in your URL and hit “Continue”. The next window will give you three options to removing a URL from the search results.

The first option will completely remove the URL you entered from the search results, along with the cache. You can find the cached version of your website here in Google:

So the first option would remove both that cached version and your entire result. The second option would only remove the cached version from the Google search results. The third option (Remove directory) would remove both of these things for not only that page, but also for every subpage. So removing the directory yoast.com/test/ would also remove yoast.com/test/test1/ and so on.

Be sure to only remove pages you don’t want to be showing up in the Google search results anymore. Don’t use this for crawl errors, 404s or anything like that. Those things should be fixed differently. Also, if the page is meant to stay out of the Google search results, be sure to remove the page from your site (404 or 410 error) or disallow Google from crawling the page in your robots.txt. Be sure to do this within 90 days of using this removal request! Otherwise, your page might get reindexed.

Conclusion

The Google Index section of your Google Webmaster Tools is a great section for monitoring how Google’s handling your site. Whether Google has suddenly stopped indexing your website, or has a different idea of what your site’s about, this is the section to find that out.

So be sure to keep an eye on this! And also keep an eye out for the next post on Google Webmaster Tools, which will be about the Crawl section. That post will go a long way in pinpointing how to find out where the issues you found in the Google Index section came from.

That’s it! Please let us know what you think in the comments!

This post first appeared as Google Webmaster Tools: Google Index on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!

Following Thijs’ article on Search Appearance in Google Webmaster Tools, I wanted to talk to you today about the second section: Search Traffic. Although the common thread is search traffic, the subsection deal with a lot of different topics like search queries and links.

In this article, we will explain all that can be found in these subsections.

Search Queries

Ever since Google started using SSL back in 2011, us webmasters find that annoying ‘keyword not provided’ in our Google Analytics stats. Google created an ‘alternative’ in an “aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools.” I’m under the impression this isn’t limited to the top 1,000 anymore (see screenshot below, which shows 9,142 queries) and it’s up to 90 days if I am not mistaken.

Google Webmaster Tools: Search Queries

The interesting thing is that if we click the ‘With Change’ button right above the bottom table, we can actually see how traffic changed, and perhaps more importantly, how clicks from Google to the pages listed at ‘Query’ changed over time. Depending on the time span you select in the upper right corner, you could actually use this to test meta descriptions and titles.

Note that a number of things can also be found in Google Analytics, but these results can be filtered on Image search, Mobile search, Image search and Video search. But also on location, which will come in handy for people targeting domestic or specific markets abroad. The mobile filter, with more and more traffic being from mobile devices, is of course very interesting to keep a keen eye on – what are these specific people looking for? And are these pages optimized for mobile?

Right below the title in that screenshot (Search Queries), we find a second tab, “Top Pages”. It is similar, but instead of the search keyword, this page shows the URLs of your most visited pages. Always ask yourself if the pages that top that list are also the pages you want to rank for. If not, it could be necessary to get back to the drawing board and create a new site structure around these pages. That way you can leverage the rankings of these pages for the rest of your website. As mentioned, there is overlap with Google Analytics. The main difference is the absence of ‘keyword not provided’ ;-)

Links to Your Site

This section in Google Webmaster Tools provides what the title says: information on links to your website. It’s divided into three sections:

Google Webmaster Tools: Links to Your Site

It’s a logical threesome: which websites links our content, what content is linked the most and what anchor / link texts are used the most.

Interesting to see Pinterest bringing in the most traffic, right. For our regular readers: yes, we used this example in our Social marketing post as well. But now Tumblr has even gone above Google traffic. In this case, social is the new Google.

For this site, it’s clear that the domain name is used the most as an anchor text, which is quite common. The second one is a general ‘visit site’, but in the top 25 of Anchor texts, 17 of the first 25 were along the lines of ‘the 50 best’, ’15 healthy ..’ and lists like that. For this specific site, that really seems to work and of course we would encourage them to create more lists like that. See for yourself what anchors are often used, it will probably give you a general idea of what kind of posts work / should be written for your website.

Of course this is also emphasized by the most linked content.

Google Webmaster Tools: Linked pages

This is also interesting: 30K+ links from 43 domains, that probably means some ‘site wide’ links (links on every page of a website). In that case, it might pay to do some further investigating in tools like MajesticSEO or OpenLinkProfiler (of course there are more tools like that). Find the side wide links and see if you can improve that backlink, for instance by being linked in articles as well, instead of just in a sidebar. That will improve the quality of the link (not the traffic, per se).

Internal Links

On a lot of (WordPress) sites, most internal links will go to tag and (product) category pages. That seems to make sense. This section tells you if I am right about this. In one of the projects we worked on, we found this:

Google Webmaster Tools: Internal Links

Everything about it is odd :) Why is that one tag page getting excessive internal links? This might be the case when you have just started tagging your products and this is the first category you have used for this. That should mean this list looks a lot different in a few weeks.

The second odd thing is that Google tells us a .htm page is linked from 76 pages. Luckily, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to find that page using the search bar at the top of this page. It will tell you what pages link to it (you can also click the blue link in the table, by the way):

Google Webmaster Tools: Links to a specific page

Somewhere on that site, there seems to be a remainder of an old site (current pages don’t have that .htm extension). The page at hand actually returns a 404 page, unfortunately, so this is something that should be looked into. Another reason to make sure to check Google Webmaster Tools on a regular basis.

Manual Actions

Let’s hope this section is totally empty for you. The best message here is “No manual webspam actions found.”. Google uses this section in Google Webmaster Tools to tell you what ‘penalties’ your website has received from the friendly people at Google. This isn’t a bad thing. In our ongoing quest for better websites (did I mention our site reviews in this post already?), the quality of a website is very important. The goal of a website should always be to serve the visitor the best information or products in the best possible way, and preferably Google should be one of these visitors. The visitor comes first. If you find a manual webspam action here, Google found something that doesn’t serve your visitor. There are a number of flavors:

• Unnatural links
  Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers. Another unnatural link is a link that is from a detected link network.
• Hacked
  A message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.
• Hidden redirects
  Links to for instance affiliate sites that you have hidden using a redirect (f.i. cloaking) Cloaking and ‘sneaky’ redirects are a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
• Thin content
  If your website is flooded by low quality content, for instance duplicate content or pages with little to no text, Google will value your website lower.
• Hidden text
  Back in the days this worked very well: white text on a white background, stuffed with keywords you wanted to rank for. Well, Google got smarter and will find that text. Again: write for your visitor, not for Google.
• Plain Spam
  Again, you’re not following Google’s guidelines. Automatically generated content, scraped content and aggressive cloaking could be the reason Google considers your website pure spam.
• Spammy freehosts
  If the majority of the sites that are on the same server as yours are considered spammy, the entire server might be blacklisted. And yes, your site might non-intentionally suffer from this as well. Make sure to choose the right hosting company.
• Spammy structured markup
  If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.

All these things are unnatural optimization or a sign of low quality. Luckily Google provides information on recommended actions via Webmaster Tools. However, these might be lengthy processes and take some hard work from your site. But hey, you were impatient and wanted that quick win.

In conclusion: prevent any messages from turning up in this Manual Actions section.

International Targeting

If you are running an international company, chances are your website is available in multiple languages. Although there is more than one way to this, the best way is to set up different sites per top-level domain and link these websites using a hreflang tag. Alternatives would be telling Google this via a sitemap or your HTTP headers. In this section, Google Webmaster Tools tells you if the implementation is correct.

Besides that, and often overlooked, you can actually select a geographical target audience here, on the second tab Country:

Google Webmaster Tools: International Targeting

If your business solely focuses on one country, why not tell Google that, right?

Mobile Usability

I could go on and on about Mobile Usability / User Experience. Mobile traffic is really important for a lot of websites and Google does a nice job emphasizing that to us webmasters. In Google PageSpeed Insights, there is a mobile UX section, as there is in Google Webmaster Tools:

Google Webmaster Tools: Mobile Usability

Webmaster Tools won’t only tell you what is wrong, but also on how many and which pages these errors occur (just click the double arrow on the right next to the error).

In my opinion, most mobile errors that are highlighted here can be fixed with just a tad bit of knowledge of CSS.

Want to know more about Google Webmaster Tools?

As mentioned, we’ll be going over Webmaster Tools in a series of articles. This is only article number two, so please stay tuned and visit our website frequently to find out all there is to know.

If you have any additions to this section of Google Webmaster Tools, like alternative ways to look at this data, or combine it with other reports in Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics, we are very much looking forward to your thoughts. Any insightful additions might be used in future posts, of course! Thanks in advance.

This post first appeared as Google Webmaster Tools: Search Traffic on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!