Google updates the Webmaster Tools (for the sake of SEO)

Google Webmaster Tools is a very popular solution for website managers and it is highly recommended to anyone wishing to verify the ownership of a site.

It will help you with Search Engine Optimisation, as you will be able to use it for frequent analysis and for checking the statistics of your website. Google Webmaster Tools provides the following (very useful) information for all previously verified websites:

1. Submit/check the sitemap for your website.
2. Generate/check the robots.txt file for your website.
3. List the internal and external pages that link to your website.
4. Check what keyword searches led the site to being displayed in the Google search engine results pages and click-through rates for them.
5. Check statistics about how Google has indexed your website and whether it has found any issues while doing so.
6. Set a preferred domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com over www.yourdomain.com or vice versa) which will determine how the site URL will be displayed in search engine results pages.

It is worth remembering that Google Webmaster Tools is not a real-time tool, therefore the insights it provides are delayed. From my experience, the delay is approximately one week, but it is likely to be longer for low-traffic sites.

Google Webmaster Tools is certainly not new, and was originally designed by Vanessa Fox (when she was still working at Google, of course).

GWT, as most professionals love to call it, has matured quite a lot over the past years, and from time to time the guys in Mountain View release some changes.

And that has been the case in the past couple of days.

I guess one change occurred just last night, in the verification process you can now use to verify your site. Just two days ago, in fact, I was able to verify the ownership of a site with the old interface, where all the methods were presented as a single group.

As of this morning, the interface appears to have been changed into something more web 2.0, and it now proposes DNS verification as the default method.

What does this mean for SEO?

Most probably not much, but it is worth considering that something is changing at Google, and it is fair to say that at a certain point DNS will probably be the only available verification method.

The second change that I noticed regards sitelinks. It looks like Google is now able to further break down the details and show an introductory page where you can see all the URIs for which Google has already assigned sitelinks.

Nothing has changed in terms of blocking the pages you don’t really want to display, but this again denotes that something is moving forward on our (SEO) end as well.