Google Webmaster Tools
Just a week ago, I wrote an article about Googlebots and how my site hadn’t been indexed by Google recently. Since then, I’ve continued to add content and research my Google problem. I stumbled upon something that cleared up a lot for me.
Early on I found Google Analytics, which is a cool free tool by Google that maintains the statistics for your website traffic (The details of that are for a future post). Having a Google Analytics account adds a few more options to your Google account, including Google Webmaster Tools. If you have a Google account, you must login and click on “My Account”. You’ll see a lot of options, like Google Analytics and Google AdSense. But late last night, for some strange reason, I scrolled down further to see what else was in my account. Since Google lists things alphabetically, I never saw the link to “Webmaster Tools”. I’m sure happy I found it though.
The first time you enter Google Webmaster Tools you can add your URL. Once you do that, Google gives you two ways to verify that you are the owner of the site. First, you can add an HTML page with a long random name that Google generates. This option was giving me problems. I kept getting errors, so I went to option two - add a META tag to the index page. This META tag had another randomized code that Google generated. Once I added the META tag to the header, Google verified that I was the webmaster to my site and they directed me to the answer I’ve been looking for… On the Overview page I quote, “Home page crawl: Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jul 24, 2008.” So there it is, the exact same day that I wrote an article saying that my site hasn’t been indexed in a while, Google indexes it later that day. Talk about service! Just kidding.
Now it has been six days since those Google spiders have crawled my site. Hopefully, they’ll visit again soon because I’ve been updating daily. So if you want to know when Google last indexed your page, sign-up for Google Analytics and click on Google Webmaster Tools. The answer is just a few clicks away.
I’ll write more about Google Analytics all the features of Webmaster Tools as I discover them. Best of luck.