New and Improved Navigation for Google Webmaster Tools

Published to Technology, Tools on by .

Google webmaster tools team have just rolled out new and improved navigation. The new organization separates features according to the search stages which are crawling, indexing and serving:

  • Crawl section containing information about how Google crawls and discovers data. There you can find information about crawl errors, stats, blocked URLs, sitemaps and URL Parameters. Under this section you can also use the “Fetch as Google”
  • Google Index section contains information about index status, content keywords and has option to remove URLs
  • Search Traffic section lists searched queries, backlinks and internal links.

There is also new “Search Appearance” section with a nice popup showing search appearance overview with detailed explanation of each element:

webmasters tools search appearance overview popup

Under Search Appearance section you can also find information pretending to the popup such as structured data of your content, data highlighter, HTML improvements and sitelinks.

The Labs section has been left untouched but I think that “Author stats” will probably be moved under search appearance when out of beta.

Overall these are welcome changes to the Google webmaster tools navigation making the user experience a little better.