When you do something, do you follow a minimalist approach, or you like yourself to be prepared for every potential instance? Consider the instance where you want to hike out into the wilderness of Alaska and the weather's not predictable. Do you follow a minimalist approach by trusting only a wool overcoat and a sandwich in your pocket? On the other hand are you the kind wherein you even for a day's hike, bring along a couple of changes of clothes, dehydrated meals, kitchen appliances, a power inverter, etc just as a precaution? You never know how the weather would turn out.
Till now Google's Webmaster Tools offer as many features as possible, quite befitting for the second personality type. But now as the webmaster central blog informs, Google's released Webmaster Tools Gadgets for iGoogle, for those users who would prefer to access only the features of Webmaster Tools that they need.
If you've already got a Webmaster Tools account and have verified at least one site, you can start using the Gadgets right away with the help of the following process:
You need to:
1. Visit Webmaster Tools and select any site that you've validated from the dashboard.Click on the Tools section.
2. Click on Gadgets sub-section.
3. Click on the big "Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools homepage" button.
4. Click the "Add to Google" button on the following confirm page to add the new tab to iGoogle.
Once done you'd find yourself in iGoogle, where you should see your new Google Webmaster Tools tab with a number of Gadgets.
Each Gadget comes with a drop down menu at the top and through it you can select from the list of sites that you've validated to see the Gadget's information for the selected site.
Some of Gadgets that are being offered at present are:
Crawl errors: Lets you know whether or not Googlebot faces issues while crawling your website
Top search queries: Lets you to know what do people search for to find your website?
External links: Lets you know which websites link to yours?
Google has plans to roll out more Gadgets in the future, with a promise to "improve their quality." Furthermore, if you think that there's a feature that isn't there and you'd like to get it included in Google, you may let them know.
Prior to this release, iGoogle has seen a couple of other tweaks this year, see: Google: iGoogle For iPhone Launched! and iGoogle Launches Themes Directory.
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I do have a tool master account with 1 verified site. Good to know we can use the tool just for what we want and need.
Thanks