Those information previously were only available after clicking on a site in Google Webmaster Tools which was not a issue for webmasters with one or two domains listed there, but could very well have been a deal-breaker for webmasters with dozens or even hundreds of verified domains. Imagine having to click on each domain to check their health status.

Google yesterday made the announcement that they have redesigned the Webmaster Tools start page. Instead of just displaying a list of domains there, the page is now showing site health for every domain right on the homepage.

Webmasters now see on first glance if something’s wrong with one of their websites. Sites with health problems are listed at the top of the list. Warnings may include that malware has been detected on the site, that important pages have been removed or that the robots.txt file is blocking important pages.

Each site is displayed with a thumbnail screenshot and link to manage the site in Webmaster Tools. A click on a problem opens additional information about the problem detected on the site.

Susan Moskwa, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, notes that Google is using the display currently only for accounts with less than 100 sites listed. Webmasters with more than 100 sites will see site health at the top of the Dashboard for each site. While I’m not 100% certain it seems to suggest that accounts with more than 100 domains still have to use the old way of verifying that everything’s all right with their websites.

Google plans to expand the site health notifications in the future to include additional issues (currently only malware, removed urls, blocked urls are reported).

I personally like the new layout, as it speeds up the process of making sure that no potential issues are missed when using Webmaster Tools.

One of the options in Google Webmaster Tools is to set a preferred domain. Most domains can be accessed with and without the www subdomain in front of the domain name. This means that you can type in ghacks.net and www.ghacks.net to reach the same property. This does not have to be the way and one mistake that new webmasters often do is to miss selecting a preferred domain.

Domains with and without www are two different sites in the eyes of the search engines unless the site owner tells them that they are the same.

It can happen that search engines list results for domains with www, without www or both. The main disadvantage of this is that the link juice that flows to a domain is divided among the two different domains weakening the domain.

If you add one of your sites to Google Webmaster Tools and want to set a preferred domain you will likely run into the error message:

Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://www.example.com/. Please verify http://www.example.com/.

The above example is shown to a webmaster who registered the site without www in Google Webmaster Tools. This will be shown to the webmaster even if the domain was verified before.

Why is it appearing? Because Google thinks www and non-www are two different domains. To get rid of the error the webmaster needs to add the www.example.com domain to the webmaster tools as well and verify it before making the default selection in the Site configuration > Settings menu.

The added domain can be deleted afterwards in the Webmaster Tools, it is only required to be there and verified to set the preferred domain.

The message itself is not clickable and there are no links on the page or on other pages in the Webmaster Tools that would allow the user to verify the email address.

The email address shown on top and in the notification area is email@googlemail.com.

Several webmasters have noticed the issue and posted a support request in the Google forums. John Mu, a Google employee has forwarded the issue to the Google Webmaster team.

We guess that it has something to do with the internal switching of email addresses from google.com to googlemail.com for those users. There is no confirmation yet from Google other than the message from the Google employee that the team was informed about the issue.

No negative side effect seems to be visible at this point in time.

The following list is a collection of webmaster tools that should help most webmasters. Many would consider them basic tools that every webmaster should know and use. Most of the tools are accessible from all operating systems and web browsers.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Webmaster Tools

Each of the three major search engines provides access to webmaster tools. These tools might require an account but will display all kind of information about the website that is related to the specific search engine. This includes crawling errors, statistics about indexed pages, sitemaps and troubleshooting help.

Google Webmaster Tools
Live
Yahoo Site Explorer

Markup Validation Service

The W3C Markup Validation services checks the syntax of webpages. It will report syntax errors which the webmaster should fix as soon as possible as invalid markup can lead to all sorts of problems including browser crashes, broken design or missing elements. It is a good idea to check the source check box on the page which will display the source code of the webpage which makes it way easier to locate the erroneous syntax.

W3C Markup Validation Service

Web Browsers

Testing websites in different web browsers is a must for every webmaster. What displays fine in Internet Explorer can throw up error messages in Opera or Firefox.

Firefox
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer
Opera
Safari

Web Statistics

Web Statistics are tools that record and analyze traffic that is arriving at a website. These tools provide extensive information about visitors (where do they come from, which pages did they access, how long did they stay), referring websites, errors and additional information. Webmasters have the choice to install a third party tracking code or run a web statistics script on their server directly. Running a third party tool will decrease the load on the server as no processing power is needed to crawl and analyze the access logs. Their disadvantage is that a piece of JavaScript has to be loaded on every user request which increases page loading times. It also means that data about the traffic is available at a third party site.

AWStats (Server)
Google Analytics (Third Party)
Sitemeter (Third Party)

Resources:

Robots.txt

Robots.txt files can be used to guide search engine bots on a website. They can allow or prevent access to certain files and directories.

Robots.txt

.htaccess

Htacess is a very powerful configuration option included in Apache web servers. It can be used to do various things like password protecting directories or redirecting 404 pages to another page.

.htaccess

Firebug

If there was one Firefox add-on that webmasters could use they would certainly pick Firebug. The add-on can be used to display realtime information about the active website in the web browser. Webmasters can select elements on the website to be taken directly to the code that is creating that element including its CSS properties. It can also be used to monitor network activity and to debug JavaScript. Several extensions are available for the add-on to increase the functionality further.

Firebug (requires Firefox)

Selenium

Selenium is a web application testing system for the Firefox web browser that can be configured to perform clicks, typing and other actions on the website which can be played back at a later time using variables like different web browsers or languages.

Selenium (requires Firefox)

If you can think of any other resources that are missing in this list let us know.

Websites with thousands of pages make it impossible to manually check links on each and every page. That’s where software programs like Xenu’s Link Sleuth come into play. The software is able to check all links on all pages of a website for broken links and reports them accordingly.

It naturally takes time to check thousands of pages and all the links that point from the to internal and external pages. The software takes good care of everything and offers enough options to configure the link checking process.

The webmaster can enter one or more urls that should get checked for broken links. Those are the starting points and the bot follows all internal links and level 1 external links he can find and reports on their status.

The report can be sorted by status which is also indicated by a color. Green usually means that the link is working while red indicates a broken link.

It is possible to get the properties of every broken link to be able to fix it by either removing it or replacing it with the correct one in case the website the link is pointing to has been moved.