What is “Fetch as Google” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for Fetch as Google.
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Fetch as Google is probably one of the most important tools for a blogger or a website that releases new content every day. If you have new articles or pages on your site that were just published by you or your team of writers and needs to be indexed by Google immediately, use the Fetch as Google tool. Paste the link to article there and click “Fetch”.
When the status changes to “complete”, you’ll see a button by it called “Submit to index”.
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Click the “Submit to index” and you’ll have the option to make Googlebot crawl only that URL or crawl that URL and its direct links. Checkmark the one you think is suitable and click Go. In a few minutes, your page will be indexed on Google.
You want to be the first to have your news indexed by Google so that it can be listed at the top of the results. Sometimes when the news is a hot enough topic, you may find a big spike in organic visitors.

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What is “robots.txt Test” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for robots.txt Tester.
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Robots.txt Tester page displays whether you have errors or warnings in your robots.txt file. Sometimes a webmaster may add something to the robots.txt that may disallow Googlebot from accessing your site so your entire website may get de-indexed. It is good to check this page every once in a while.

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What is “Sitemaps” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for Sitemaps.
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Sitemaps helps search engine bots crawl and categorize your site better. If you have a sitemap or multiple sitemaps for your website, you can add them on the Sitemaps page of Google Webmaster Tools.
There is also the option to test your sitemap for errors.
On the Sitemaps page you’ll find the amount of webpages submitted from your sitemaps the the amount of webpages indexed by Googlebot.
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What is “URL Parameters” in GWT?

10 years ago

If you click on the Crawl tab on the side bar of GWT, you’ll see a link for URL Parameters.
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URL parameters helps Googlebot crawl your website more efficiently by removing duplicates and saves bandwidth. More than likely, you won’t need to do anything with URL Parameters. This is an advance feature that is described in the video below:

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What is “Security Issues” in GWT?

10 years ago

Click on the Security Issues tab on the side bar of GWT.

The Security Issues pages lets you know of any known security issues with your site. If you visit your website and get a malware warning from your browser, it is likely that your website is referencing code or content from another website that has malware.

If your site has been hacked or compromised, the search results of your website on Google will show up with “This site may harm your computer.” Or “This site may be hacked.” This will avoid people from visiting your website. It is important to check the Security Issues tab regularly to see whether Google has marked your site as being hacked.

There are numerous things that can cause your site to be compromised such as: server configuration, SQL injection, code injection, error template, binary malware, content injection and URL injection. One way to address these issues is by locating the problematic content and removing it.

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How to analyze my webpage using Google PageSpeed?

10 years ago

To analyze your webpage online using Google PageSpeed you can go to:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

You can also analyze your webpage from your Chrome browser by downloading the plugin:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pagespeed-insights-by-goo/gplegfbjlmmehdoakndmohflojccocli?hl=en

After installing the plugin, you can analyze a page by going to your browser’s customize and control dropdown menu. Go to “More tools” and click on “Developer tools”.
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Click on “Pagespeed” tab at the top of the developer tools and click on “Analyze” to analyze the page you’re on.
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Why you should avoid and minimize redirects

10 years ago

To increase your page speed, you should try your best to avoid or minimize redirects on your website. If a mobile user goes to example.com and it redirects them to www.example.com then redirects them to m.example.com, the user will experience slow page loads. Having a landing page that redirects multiple times to the final landing page will slow your page speed. Instead, you can design your website so that example.com uses a responsive design with different break points for desktops, tablets and mobile devices.

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Why you should enable compression

10 years ago

To increase your page speed, you should enable some sort of compression for your website. Most modern browsers support gzip compression. Enabling compression will reduce the size transferred response by up to 90%, reduce the client’s data usage and improve the time to render your pages.

It is recommended to enable text compression with GZIP on your web server.

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Why you should improve your server response time

10 years ago

There are many potential factors that may slow down the response time of your server. Some causes could be slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.
If you believe your slow response time is due to CPU or memory, you may think about upgrading your web server. It is important to reduce your server response time to less than 200ms.

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Why you should leverage browser caching

10 years ago

Fetching resources between the client and server can be very slow and expensive for the visitor. To increase your page speed, you should always consider using caching to help determine whether the browser can reuse a previously fetched resource.

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