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Tools for Webmasters

Google have pulled together quite a decent set of indicators to help webmasters check how their site is working with Googlebot and the indexing system.

For example a regular reader might recall that we set up a sitemap file for Google's benefit using a website offering a free solution. This included submission to Google - what we didn't know until last week was that that submission didn't appear to have worked. So we used the Google facility to submit the file which had been sitting in the appropriate directory for months without being looked at by its intended audience.

More reassuring was sight of the Google reading of our Robots file which has been there for much longer.

The listings of frequently used keywords seem to be a bit at odds with our Google analytics results but we have yet to dig into that - it could easily be a timing issue because there is a constant churn in the popularity stakes for this site.

It has now joined my daily checklist.

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