webmasters-tool

Charts and More Data Available: WebMaster Tool

If you havn’t logged into your webmaster tool account recently, then you do it now: there are some very useful features added to it recently.

Log into your webmaster tool account and click on the “Top search queries” link.

New Features:
1. Addition of Charts to visualize your Top search queries, click throughs, impressions etc. You can filter the results by date, location and the medium used to access your website.
2. You can now see the keywords to which your pages ranked and also the position of your website in the search result pages.
3. You can see and analyze more data: Now webmasters tool shows more than 100 keywords, to which your website ranked in the search result page.
4. In the “labs”, Sidewiki has been added. It is a service offered by Google that lets users contribute helpful entries about the current webpage.
5. Now you can also configure Google Services at your hosting panel.

Using all these useful data you can clearly analyze what topics you are ranking high and what you need to do to retain the position. One of the trick is to write more of what people want and to which you are already ranking high in the search engine. This way, you can increase your organic traffic.

Moving Your Website and Worried About Google! ? – Don’t Worry

If you are moving your old website to a new domain or from blogger to your own domain name. Make sure you follow these steps.

It’s very simple. (This helps only for webmasters who have submitted their previous website to webmasters tool.)

1. Setup your new domain.
2. Apply 301 redirect(from your old site to the new one). 301 redirect tells search engines that, the site have moved permanently.
To make the 301 redirects you can refer Apache Tutorial, if you are using apache server. It would be a safe thing to contact your web host before making any changes to your htaccess file.

3. Add your new domain to the WEBMASTERS Tool. Verify it.
4. Now in webmasters tool, select the old website and see the details.
5. In the left-side side bar, click on the “Site Configuration” and in the sub menu, you can see a link “Change of Address“. Click on it.
6. From here, every thing is self explanatory. Make sure you have followed all the steps mentioned there.
7. Now click on the drop down menu, in “Tell us the URL of your new domain” and select the new domain name. If your new domain name does not appear here, then you have forgot to add your new domain to Webmasters tool. Just add it and verify and again do as directed above.

8. Keep checking for the data regarding your new website. You can submit sitemap of the new website and keep watching for the indexing of the content.

New Look for Webmasters Tool

In 2006, Webmaster Tool began as a way for webmasters to submit Sitemaps.

webmasters-tool-redesign — Webmasters Tool Re-designed

The important aspects in this redesign are:
1. Faster loading.
2. Easier navigation.
3. More search query list, to which our site appeared in search engines.
4. Display thinks in the form of table. Looks very clean and readable.

Over all the redesign is impressive. And there is no major feature added or removed from the previous version.

Problem with Pingback and Title tag of all my articles – Its Solution

Problems:
1. Search results showing only the Title of the blog, instead of article title/heading.
2. Trackback also Displaying Blog Title and not Headline of Post.

Keep these problems in mind, while reading this article, as you may get confused in the middle, as you might not have come across such a problem.

TrackBack:
TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

Pingback:
For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

Quick Solution: If you have similar problem as told above, just goto All-in-one SEO plugin settings page and uncheck “Rewrite Titles:” option and save the changes. Now test your blog using spider-test(for more info regarding the use of this tool, read the full article) tool. The changes made will not be reflected immediately in search results page. So resubmit your site map using Webmasters tool and wait for some time.

Effects of the problem: Creates more problem!
1. Google Search Ranking decreased significantly.
2. Webmasters tool started showing hundreds of duplicate titles in the “title tag issue” section.
3. Organic traffic almost declined, as the users didn’t find the title to be meeting their search criteria.
4. The pings sent by our blog seemed to be spammy. As it showed our blog title instead. It seemed to be like, I am trying to promote my blog or just linking to grab the attention.

Detecting the problem:-
First conclusion: Problem was with our blog
If we had problem with only search engine indexing, we might have thought about changing the XML file(that we had submitted to search engines). And to look into Webmasters tool etc. But the second problem confirmed us that, the problem was 100% with our blog and not with search engine indexing.

Second conclusion: Problem was with our theme
Preliminarily everyone thinks that the problem will be caused by the plugins. We removed all the less useful plugins and retained only the must and best once. But the problem still persisted!
We changed the theme, linked to one of our article(inter linking) and published it. Now when we saw the Trackback, it was showing the heading/title of the article. That means the problem was with the theme.

Started hunting for the code responsible for the problem, inside the theme:
We started building the theme again from the scratch. Built-it. Installed it. With full relaxation, published an article, with an linkback to one of our article. To our surprise the same problem started appearing again. i.e., the title of the trackback was showing the blog title(“Technotip.org”), instead of showing the article title/heading!

Tool that came to our rescue:
The tool is spider-test, which shows the source code of a page, all outbound links on the page, and common words and phrases found in the page copy. In simple words, it shows how the search engines see a webpage.

When I saw one of the article of our blog using the tool, it showed “Technotip.org” as in the title tag, while the original source code was still showing the article title in the title tag.

The final Solution found:
Now I started changing things one by one and saw the title tag using the above tool. At one point of the test, the title tag showed the tite of the article. That is when we unchecked the “Rewrite Titles:” option is All-in-One SEO plugin. After the problem was solved we resubmitted the sitemap in webmasters tool. And every article of our blog got re-indexed and now the ranking for different keywords are restored.
We had previously asked other bloggers who are using WordPress and All-in-One SEO plugin, for All-in-One SEO plugin settings. They have checked the “Rewrite Titles:” option and everything is working fine for them. And we are using minimum number of plugins and non related to title tag, so I don’t think any other plugin was conflicting with All-in-One SEO plugin.

Many people with similar problem:
While searching solution for this problem, I came across many forum posts and saw that many people have and still have the same problem with their blog. So I decided to write about it. Hope this article and the tool mentioned above will surly help them detect and solve the problem.

All-in-one SEO plugin is a wonderful tool and we highly recommend this tool to every blogger using WordPress. The new version also comes with the canonical link option, just with a click. Canonical link option with SEO plugin makes sense, as it helps improve the SEO.
Eventhough I could somehow detect the problem and even its solution, I am not sure about the reason why “Rewrite Titles:” option in All-In-One SEO plugin causing problem to some themes! If anyone knows about this, then please please share it with us.