Webmaster Tools Help

Webmaster Tools provides information and data about the sites you have added to your account. You can use this data to improve how search engines crawl and index your site's content.

Your site on the web

This section provides details about how users reach your site, and how it appears to search engines and humans.

• The Search queries page lists the top search queries for which your site appeared in search results, as well as queries for which users actually clicked through to your site.
• The Links to your site page provides details about pages on your site linked to from other sites.
• The Keywords page lists the most significant terms Google found on your site. It provides insight into how the content of your site is perceived.
• The Internal links page lists URLs on your site that are linked to from other URLs on the same site.
• The Subscriber stats page provides data about the number of users subscribed to your site using Google services such as Google Reader.

Diagnostics

This section provides information about potential problems Google may have encountered when crawling and indexing your site.

• The Malware page helps you identify any potential problems with hacking and malicious software on your site.
• The Crawl errors page lists any pages on your site that Google was unable to access, and why we couldn’t crawl them. Addressing these issues can help ensure that all the content on your site can be successfully crawled by search engines.
• The Crawl stats page lists recent Googlebot activity on your site.
• The HTML suggestions page lists ways in which you can improve the HTML on your site.

Sitemap data

The Sitemaps page lists details about any Sitemaps submitted for your site, including Sitemaps submitted by others.

When you add your site to Webmaster Tools, it may take some time before diagnostic and other data is available. This is normal; it can take some time for Webmaster Tools to gather and process data for your site.

Do a site: search for your domain without the www (e.g. [site:example.com]). This should return pages from your domain and any of your indexed subdomains (www.example.com, rollergirl.example.com, etc.). You should be able to tell from the results whether your site is mainly indexed with or without the www subdomain. The version that's indexed is likely to be the version that shows the most data in your Webmaster Tools account.

You can tell us whether you prefer for your site to be indexed with or without the www by setting your preferred domain. You can also let everyone else know which version you prefer by doing a site-wide 301 redirect. More information about specifying the canonical version of a page.

We're always working to increase the update frequency for your verified sites' data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site, and is a close approximation of the status of your site. Our internal systems are always changing, and the web itself is an ever-shifting ecosystem. In addition, there may be a lag between when the numbers are calculated and when they are visible to webmasters - although data gets published in intervals, we are continually collecting it. If your content doesn't change very often, or if you're not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools provides data based on site visits and links to your pages. You need to get the word out about your web site to get more people visiting and naturally linking to it - that is, of course, after you've built a web site that people will want to visit and link to. The more links to your site on the web, the more likely it is that Googlebot will stop by for a visit. Once Google starts crawling your site more often, you'll notice that Webmaster Tools will begin to show more detailed data, and that this data is updated more often.

The data displayed in Webmaster Tools may differ from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics. Possible reasons for this include:

• We may not have crawled your site since the changes were last made.
• Webmaster Tools does some additional data processing - for example, to eliminate duplicates and visits from robots - that may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources.
• Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.