If you’ve logged into your Google Webmaster Tools lately, you’ll notice at the top of the page an option to “check out our new look.” Why re-do the look? According to Google:
“we’ve constantly been adding and updating new features. The result was a set of tools we’re pretty proud of—but also a site that had become pretty unwieldy and often difficult to navigate. That’s why we decided to redesign Webmaster Tools from the ground up.”
Here’s a quick preview from Google’s post about the new look:
My Thoughts on the New Look
I’ve only spent a little time kicking around, but the new site is pretty good. The first thing you’ll notice is a different home page showing all the sites you have verified in your account. The Sitemaps link and the verify columns have been removed. Instead there’s a “details” link on the right that takes you to your verification page and also has some helpful information about verifying your site for yourself, for multiple users, and what verification means. This is helpful because just a few weeks ago I had to dig around Googls help docs to find out how to allow a site in more than one account. (the answer: upload a verification file for each user you want verified and that site will be accessible from that persons account.) If your site is not verified, the details link is not there, but shows a “verify my site” link instead.
The best enhancement is the Dashboard, which has replaced the Overview, for each individual site. Following suit with the redesigns of AdWords and Analytics last year, Google provides a dashboard of some common data, specifically the Top Search Queries, Crawl errors, Links to your site, and Sitemaps reports.
The navigation has been redesigned from six top menu items to three collapsable menues. That immediately speeds up navigation because you don’t have to reload a page to get to a report from a submenu. Nice.
Most of the reports remain unchanged, although they have been cleaned up or enhanced a little bit. Still, you’ll recognize most of the same information. For example, the Keyword report shows the top 200 most common keywords, where previously you could only see the top 100 keywords, and the external links is easier to read and shows more pages at a time.
One item I’m still not sure with is the dropdown menu that switches between websites. Previously, all websites were shown except the one you were currently viewing, and only a few were shown at a time. The old menu made it a little weird to quickly know where you currently were and if you wanted to move up or down. This new menu, though, does not contain all of the sites. Instead, the new menu only shows up to the last six site profiles you have visited, and a “View All” link that takes you back to the home page. I’ve got 21 sites in my account, so this requires me to go back to the home page if I’m reviewing more that the most recent sites. And I do so at least on a weekly basis. But for the most part I stick to only four or five sites. That’s why the verdict isn’t in on this feature for me yet. I’ll have to spend some more time with it befoce coming to a final decision – not that I could change it at this point anyway.
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