Google Webmaster Tools is a very popular solution for a website managers and it is highly recommended to those wishing to verify the ownership of site.
It will help you with the Search Engine Optimization as you will be able to use it for a frequent analysis and for checking the statistics of your website.Google Webmaster Tools provides the following (and very useful) information for all the website previously verified:
- Submit/check the sitemap for your website.
- Generate/check the robots.txt file for your website.
- List the internal and external pages that link to your website.
- Check what keyword searches led the site to being displayed in the Google search engine results pages and click-through rates for them.
- Check statistics about how Google has indexed your website and whether it has found any issues while doing so.
- Set a preferred domain name (e.g. yourdomain.com over www.yourdomain.com or vice versa) which will determine how the site URL will be displayed in search engine results pages.
It is worth remembering that Google Webmaster Tools is not a real-time tool, therefore the insights it proposes are delayed. From my experience, the delay is approximately one week, but it is likely to me more for low-level traffic sites.
Google Webmaster Tool is not certainly new, and was originally designed by Vanessa Fox (when she was still working in Google of course).
GWT, as most of the professional love to call it, has matured quite a lot in the past years, and from time to time the guys in Mountain View release some changes.
And that is the case in the past couple of days.
I guess that one change has occurred just last night, with the verification process you can now use to verify your site. Just two days ago, in fact I was able to verify the ownership of a site with the old interface, where all the methods were proposed in a common group.
As of this morning, the interface appears to have been changed into something more web 2.0 and it proposed by default the DNS verification as a default method.
What does this mean for SEO?
Most probably not, but it is worth considering that something is changing in Google, and it is fair to say that at a certain point the DNS will probably be the only available verification method.
The second change that I noticed regards sitelinks. It looks like now Google is able to further breakdown the details and show an introductory page where you can see all the URI for which Google has already assigned sitelinks.
Anything has changed in terms of blocking the pages that you don’t really want to display, but again this denotes that something is moving forward also on our (SEO) end.