Photoblog performance tips: Day 11 – Google Webmaster Tools on Phill Price | Photography

Photoblog performance tips: Day 11 – Google Webmaster Tools

The kilobytes downloaded indexing the site have dropped hugely since I implemented the work.

Yesterday we looked into the content part of the site in a more SEO way, looking at the reports from HubSpot’s Website Grader and Blog Grader. Today we’re visiting the mothership: Google Webmaster Tools.

Hopefully in the past 11 days, Google has begun collecting data about your site since you first authorised it. We’re going to go through a quick guide into what they mean.

Site Configuration > Sitemaps

You should really have a sitemap for your site, an indexable file that tells search engines where pages are, when they were last midified, and how often they change. If you’re really geeky you can read the protocol guidelines, otherwise you should have a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. Make sure you submit it here, and Google will know the structure of the site and how often to update the index.

Site Configuration > Settings

Here, you can if you wish, target a particular geographic area over and above another, for instance the UK. More importantly, you should set up a canonical domain for the site i.e. www.phillprice.com or phillprice.com. Additionally, you can set up rules in your .htaccess file to push all traffic to one of these two. I prefer the www, but its up to you. Remember to match this choice throughout your site though, in links and the WordPress settings.

Diagnostics > Malware

This should hopefully be empty, however if you’ve been languishing on older versions of wordpress or there are any other security problems you may find problems here. Google have advice if you do have some unwanted attention.

Diagnostics > Crawl Errors

As you might expect, Google is a giant link-checking service. As such it can give you a list (albeit not one that can update as quickly as using Integrity or Xenu), but it is rather explicit in all of the pages. However, as with all of the items on this list, it’s not quick at updating changes. I’ve got problem links fixed from October 2010, and it’s still trying to find them in January!

Diagnostics > Crawl Stats

This is a nice indicator of the work we’ve done in the past 11 days. I did the work involved in late november and the chart showing the amount of content downloaded (in the chart above) shows a dramatic improvement!

Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions

This really delves back into yesterday’s work in that Google doesn’t like different pages with the same title or meta description. Make them relevant and different from each other, that’s all I can say!

Labs > Site performance

As stated earlier in the series, Google is now using performance as part of its algorithm into when and where you appear in results, to prove that they’ve been running page speed against it themselves! However, yours may be blank. Mine hasn’t updated since I’ve done the work which is fairly irritating.

We’re close to the end of the series now. Tomorrow we’ll look into future performance work and general maintenance that can be undertaken. If you’ve got any ideas, please Contact Me!