Google Webmaster Central: New SEO Tools
It's always good to pay attention to what Matt Cutts is saying. Google has created Webmaster Central, a “one-stop shop” for webmasters (that's you) looking to submit their sites to Google, find out why they're not being indexed, and so on. Most of the resources available from Webmaster Central are not new, but now they're conveniently located in one spot. You can also subscribe to the Webmaster Central Blog to keep abreast of new tools and resources.
As part of this reorg, Google Sitemaps is now known as Google webmaster tools. I like the new name better, because “Google Sitemaps” always had an ambiguity to it, either referring to a Google “sitemap” (an XML file listing all the crawlable URLs on a site) or else the special webmaster “console” where you could check to see if your site was being indexed, etc.
If you don't already have a webmaster tools account, now's the time to go grab one. One of the things you can do now is tell Google what the preferred domain is for each of your sites, i.e. do you prefer the “www” version of your domain name or the non-”www” version? You should definitely set your preference. Note that this is no excuse for not redirecting one version to another: if all was good in the world, Google wouldn't even need to add a “preferred domain” option, they would just handle the redirections correctly (see The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog, Part 1 for details on how to do the redirection) and not force you to specify a preference. But they have problems with identifying multiple versions of the same site, so this feature is a little hack to avoid the problem. But you still want to redirect things on your end so that incoming links go to the right spot.
I'm sure more tools will be coming down the pipe in the next few months. Of course, if you're paranoid or a black hat type then giving all this information to Google about your sites is probably not a good idea. There are tools out there like SEO Elite that can help you get better rankings without Google's help.
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?
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