Tuesday, May 12, 2009
We've been listening to you at conferences, user studies, forums and blogs and we decided to start from the ground up with a brand new Webmaster Tools design! It was much needed, and the end result is beautiful in our eyes:
Highlights
- One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
- More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and clickthrough! In addition, we've substantially improved data quality in this area.
- Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
- Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
- Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
- Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we've streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
- Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
- Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We're always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.
Go ahead, get started
The new user interface is available at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/new. The old user interface will continue to be available for a couple of weeks to give you guys time to adjust and provide feedback.
We did our best to get the product localized; however, you may notice a few missing translations in some areas of the user interface. We apologize for the inconvenience and when we switch everyone over in a couple of weeks, we'll fully support 40 languages. The one exception will be our Help Center, which will be available in 21 languages going forward.
We're really excited about this launch, and hope you are as well. Tell us what you think and stay tuned for more updates!