Monday, October 12, 2009
The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of feature ideas. Going forward, we'll be launching some features under the "Labs" label so we can quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your feedback ASAP. With Labs releases, you have the opportunity to play with features and have your feedback heard much earlier in the development lifecycle. On the flip side, since these features are available early in the release cycle they're not as robust, and may break at times.
Today we're launching two cool features:
- Malware details
- Fetch as Googlebot
Malware details (developed by Lucas Ballard)
Before today, you may have been relying on manual testing, our safe browsing API, and malware notifications to determine which pages on your site may be distributing malware. Sometimes finding the malicious code is extremely difficult, even when you do know which pages it was found on. Today we are happy to announce that we'll be providing snippets of code that exist on some of those pages that we consider to be malicious. We hope this additional information enables you to eliminate the malware on your site very quickly, and reduces the number of iterations many webmasters go through during the review process.
More information on this cool feature is available at our Online Security Blog.
Fetch as Googlebot (developed by Javier Tordable)
"What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?" is a common question webmasters ask us on our forums and at conferences. Our keywords and HTML suggestions features help you understand the content we're extracting from your site, and any issues we may be running into at crawl and indexing time. However, we realized it was important to provide the ability for users to submit pages on their site and get real-time feedback on what Googlebot sees. This feature will help users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they're not ranking for specific keywords.
We're pretty excited about this launch, and hope you are too. Let us know what you think!