Google has a rather large suite of tools wemasters can use to check their site for problems, access issues, search engine optimization, and so on. This article is a brief overview of some of those tools, how you can use them to help your site, and what the tools do.

Firstly, you must have an account with Google. If you have Gmail, you already have an account and can just login. If not, register one (it's free). After you login and continue to the webmaster tools, the first thing you must do is enter in a URL. Go ahead and enter in the URL to your site's home page.

When you do this, you'll be asked to Verify your site. Google let's you either upload a file it specifies or add a meta tag to your index page. Pick one of the methods, do it, and verify your site to unlock more advanced statistics.

The Webmaster Tools homepage shows an overview of some information about your site in Google's eyes.

Summary - Gives a quick summary of information about your site

Crawl Errors -> Web Crawl - Allows you to see if Google logged any errors while trying to crawl your site. This is extremely useful in determining if there are links to files that no longer exist (if so, you can use an .htaccess file to 301 redirect to some place else, for example) or if there are other issues you need to address.

Crawl Errors -> Mobile Web - An overview of any errors related to visiting your site as a mobile user. If you are not interested in attracting users from mobile devices (cell phones, PDA's, etc.) this isn't too important, but the less errors your site generates, the better.

Tools -> robots.txt analysis - Google will display any errors from your robots.txt file, as well as allow you to test it using multiple user agents, and against multiple sites.

Tools -> Crawl Rate - Allows you to indicate to Google how often to crawl your site. If you set it too high, Google may start overloading your server by making many requests to it throughout the day. Setting it too low will reduce Google's ability to effectively crawl your entire site. Unless there is a good reason to change this, it is recommended to leave this alone. The 'Faster' option won't even unlock, unless the crawl speed is a factor in how much of your site is indexed.

Tools -> Preferred Domain - You can actually tell google whether to use www.site.com or site.com. Pick one, and ensure all your urls setup on your site use this domain, for best crawl/page rank results. 50 links to pointing to one domain is better than 25 pointing to 2 (even if the two domains are ultimately the same location/page).

Tools -> Enhanced Image Search - Allows you to let Google better index your images for the Google Image Results page. Unless you own a Gallery, or other image management software, this option will be of little use or importance to you. If indexing your images IS important for your site, then enable this and follow up on the options it provides.

Statistics Tab -> Crawl Stats - Shows you statistics about Google's indexing of your site
Statistics Tab -> Query Stats - Shows you statistics about search queries that commonly pull results from your site
Statistics Tab -> Page Analysis - Shows you how Google sees your site
Statistics Tab -> Index Stats - Shows you some statistics about Google's index of your site. There are some quick links to find all sites Google sees linking to you, all pages on your site it has indexed, and so on.

Note - it can take some time after signing up for Webmaster Tools and verifying your site before all of the statistics are available

Links Tab -> External Links - Shows pages from other sites linking to your site, with some statistics available
Links Tab -> Internal Links - Shows links to your site from within your site, including from within subdomains

Sitemaps

This is arguably one of the most important tools Google offers. Google supports sitemap files following specific formats. CommunitySEO has built in support for generating Google sitemap files for your forums. You can manually create sitemap files for the rest of your site should you wish, however that is outside the scope of this document.

By submitting the sitemap file to Google, you tell Google a quick and easy reference to all of the pages on your site. CSEO for IPB can automatically index forum and topic pages, user profiles, miscellaneous pages (i.e. help, calendar, memberlist, etc.), Blog component pages (if installed), Gallery component pages (if installed) and Download Manager pages (if installed). By submitting the sitemap to Google (which is regenerated regularly by a task on your forums) you give Google an up-to-date link list to all pages on your site.

Note - if your forums are in a subdirectory, you need to add the link to your forums as a separate 'site' in Google's webmaster tools in order to submit your forum's sitemap file.

Submit your sitemap to Google from this page, and then give Google some time to index your forums. You should find that your pages are being picked up much quicker now that Google has this constantly up to date reference.

Your sitemap filename should be either "sitemap_index.xml.gz" or "sitemap_index.xml" (depending upon your configuration in the Admin CP).


While this may not seem like an excessive number of Tools, they are very useful tools for checking your site from Google's eyes. Sign up for an account and look through the tools to see what Google sees. Without this information, your SEO efforts are mostly done without any knowledge of where you stand presently.