10 Insightful & Lesser Known Uses of the Google Webmasters Tool

Have you been using Google Webmasters Tool ?

If you’re serious about your site’s general health, I very much recommend using it. But its also a fact that its an “ignorable tool”, you could check the main dashboard and get away with it. But digging more into the tools available can reveal some very interesting info. Here are a few examples.

1. Find out the best traffic yielding & converting landing pages on your website

Webmasters tool helps find the pages from your website that gets the maximum traffic from Google. This is not just ranks, but pages which people think are relevant on your site by judging you from the SERPs. This necessarily doesn’t mean the top ranks. Sometimes, the best converting pages are way below the top ranks, but because your meta description/page title is compelling they gather much traffic.

This can be found at >

Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)

2. What top keywords does your site rank on Google for ?

Google Webmasters tool also shows those keywords for which your site ranks on top of Google SERPs.

Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)

3.  Find all the top ranking keywords that gave you traffic from Mobile devices/ Blog Search & Google Image Search

Your site on the web > Top Search Queries (here)

4.  Find Links Pointing to a particular URL (along with the Page Rank Value)

Go here, first. Then copy paste the URL in to the box, for which you need to find the backlinks frolm around the web. The backlinks keep “popping” with the Page Rank details of the source page (In my case, the PR links were broken most of the time).

5. Submit your RSS Feeds as Sitemap to Google via Google Webmasters

If you go here (Your site on the web > Subscriber stats), Google webmasters tool will list down the feeds it detected from your site, and you could submit anyone of those as a valid sitemap, by a single click.

6.  Find out possible problems with Meta Descriptions from the entire pages on your site

Google Webmasters also gives you a lot of clarity on which pages on your site has short meta descriptions/ long meta descriptions/ duplicate meta descriptions etc. Pretty much a consolidated approach to trouble shooting meta description errors. Clicking on the link, whichever is available, lists down the entire list of URLs the problem were detected on. Very effective!

(You can also find errors with Title tags there)

Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions >

7.  Create a custom Robots.txt file with Google’s help

If you’re unsure how to create a Robots file and what to include in it, Google Webmasters Tool has a neat wizard that does the job well, it creates a custom robots file, according to your preferences. (Find it at Site Configuration > Crawler Access > Generate Robots.txt)

8.  Promote your site to a particular Geographic location / Country

If your site targets users in a particular location, you can suggest Google which country you’d like to get exposure from. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org.

Find it at – Site Configuration > Settings

9. Find out pages not indexed in Google from your site

Go to Site Configuration > Sitemaps and it will show you a small summary of number of URLs indexed and number of URLs submitted. Although this is most of the times ignored, you could find out if any pages are not indexed on Google by calculating the difference. If there is an alarming number of pages not indexed, then it might need your attention.

10. Find out the pages with highest Page Rank from the site

Why ? You could then try and leverage on it with some clever internal linking strategy.

Go to > Diagnostics > Crawl Stats

Have you found anything interesting with Google Webmasters ?

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