14 DAY TRIAL // Google has announced an update to its Webmaster Tools service aimed at website owners and developers. The service now sports a new interface and some features that have been added or changed after user feedback. Google's Webmaster Tools is a free service, which enables website owners to better keep track of how their site is indexed, while offering a set of tools to optimize the site's visibility.
The most important new feature introduced is called 'change of address' and will allow webmasters to change the domain names for their sites without losing their rankings. Not being able to change the domain name gave webmasters and SEOs faced with this issue a lot of headaches and this solution was widely requested. With the new tool, they will be able to verify two domain names and then instruct Google to change them from one to the other.
The other great feature in the update is the redesigned dashboard, which Google hopes will become a “One-stop Dashboard,” placing all the data you are most likely to need, Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps and Crawl errors, in one place.
The new Google Webmaster Tools also come with a bunch of other changes, as highlighted by Google on the webmaster central blog:
“- Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself. - Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently. - Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. - Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt, which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.”