JLH Design Blog

Google announced the expansion of the functionality of the Webmaster tools. As they stated in the opening sentence, “You asked, and we listened…”

I’ve logged in and checked out the feature and am pretty impressed so far. It’s very organized and an easy interface. I have several observations on the setup, the concept, and the future of this and other tools.

They clearly state that they still don’t show all known links, I’m sure many will miss this salient point and still complain.

Links are shown that clearly don’t effect page rank as many of my own links are from forums and blog comments that are “nofollow“.

I find the expanded information which is only available to a verified and logged in site owner as a benefit to the site owner. No longer will your competition be able to see where you are getting your links and thus page value from. They of course can still use the more public information such as on Yahoo! and MSN, but with those links you really don’t know what Google sees.

The competitive webmaster will find it harder to target niches and the competition as it won’t be as easy to target the links of sites that out rank you.

To bring the process full circle Google needs to completely disable the Link command in the standard engine. Meanwhile I’d welcome a link to the webmaster console sign-up page a long with a disclaimer that the function is purposely disabled and that they don’t show ALL known links.

This renewed attempt at communication between Google and Webmasters has benefits for all involved beyond the information exchanged. I believe it’s breeding a culture of mutual exchange that will further evolve to help clean up spam in the index. You cannot institute a standard over night and have to build up to it, but I can see a future where all sites need to be registered, verified, and in compliance with all webmaster guidelines to be indexed. It will be so commonplace that it will be mutually accepted as a process required to be listed, like submission services were in the 90s.

Another step that will probably need to be taken further is the Webmaster Identification process. Currently is a fairly anonymous procedure that really only involves being able to supply an email address and the ability to drop a file on the server. Connecting webmaster tools with other services such as AdWords, AdSense, Analytics, and Gmail will help contain webmasters to one account. As it is I’m sure a certain percentage of webmasters have multiple accounts for various reasons such as an organizational element, but also much more nefarious intents like trying to hide your own link network. The day all sites have be registered with the REAL identity of the owner or organization is the day that many link networks will come crashing down.

There is still more work to be done, notification of bad links that point to 404 pages would be a huge help, crawl schedule for pages would be another. We all know that some pages are relegated to the supplemental index for whatever magic soup reason, but it would be benificial to Google, the Webmasters, and its users if we had that information. My pages that are only going to be crawled quarterly would not get nearly as much attention as the ones I know are displaying fresh search results.

And finally, they’ve come a long way since the inception of the original sitemaps program, and aren’s showing any sign of slowing down.