Webmaster Central gets a new look

Thursday, September 06, 2007

We launched Webmaster Central back in August 2006, with a goal of creating a place for you to learn more about Google's crawling and indexing of websites, and to offer tools for submitting sitemaps and other content. Given all of your requests and recommendations, we've also been busy working behind the scenes to roll out exciting new features for Webmaster Tools, like internal/external links data and the Message Center, over the past year.

And so today, we're unveiling a new look on the Webmaster Central landing page at https://www.google.com/webmasters. You'll still find all of the tools and resources you've come to love like our Webmaster Blog and discussion group — but now, in addition to these, we've added a few more you might enjoy and find useful. We hope that the new layout will make it easier to discover some additional resources that will help you learn even more about how to improve traffic to your site, submit content to Google, and enhance your site's functionality.

Here's a brief look at some of the new additions:

  • Analyze your visitors. Google Analytics is a tool for webmasters to better understand their visitor traffic in order to improve site content. With metrics including the amount of time spent on each page and the percentage of new vs. returning visits to a page, webmasters can tailor their site's content around pages that resonate most with visitors.
  • Add custom search to your pages. Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) is a great way for webmasters to incorporate search into their site and help their site visitors find what they're looking for. CSE gives webmasters access to a XML API, allowing greater control over the search results look and feel, so you can keep visitors on your site focused only on your content.
  • Leverage Google's Developer Tools. Google Code has tons of Google APIs and developer tools to help webmasters put technologies like Google Maps and AJAX Search on their websites.
  • Add gadgets to your webpage. Google Gadgets for your Webpage are a quick and easy way for webmasters to enhance their sites with content-rich gadgets, from the Google Gadget directory. Adding gadgets to your webpage can make your site more interactive and useful to visitors, making sure they keep coming back.

We'd love to get your feedback on the new site. You can join our discussion group.

Written by David Sha, Webmaster Tools Team