Webmaster Tools - RSS subscribers - Not all it could be.

The Webmaster Tools group has added subscriber counts to the set of tools. 

This will give you a count of how people are using Google Reader to subscribe to you sites RSS Feeds.  Would seem pretty cool, but not super inclusive.

Two big problems.

Only shows Google Reader subscriptions.
If you user FeedBurner, which Google owns, you feeds loose their association to your site. 

Oh well, nice try needs some work.  I would suggest to use FeedBurner and their stats are pretty inclusive. 

Maybe version 2 will be a little more accurate.

Duplicates! I don't want no stinking duplicates!

Duplicate content bad. But the Webmaster team has given the content developers of the world a few guidelines.

Nothing new of shocking here, or at least not me.  Having worked on a few commerce sites this has bitten me before and made think. 

So listen to warnings, watch your Query Strings and code away.

Enjoy and have a good day.

Google Webmaster Tools improved robots.txt testing

 

The great folks over at Google have given us webmasters an improved Robots.txt validation tool.  The tool now understands the sitemap: directive and informs you of syntax errors. 

I also discovered it informs you that one exists.  Which is way cool.  I decided to check all my sites while I was there.  I discovered that one of the larger community sites I manage didn't have the sitemaps: directive in the robots.txt file. 

Of course I quickly corrected that problem.  The tool is there, use it.  It might just get you some more traffic.

Google will tell us if we are victims of Malware, Cool!

It seems Google will be notifying webmaster's if they are the victims of Malware, via the Webmsters Tools  As well we can requests a review.  At the time of writing my Webmasters Tools site didn't seem to include the new features. 

In my opinion this is great.  Google sends an awful lot of time looking at our sites.  If then can warn us when it appears we are victims of Malware than all the better.  Obviously not a solution to safe hosting, but at least it tells when something went wrong.  An once of prevention is still worth a pound of cure, but even Google can't change that. 

Hopefully they will show up shortly and I will report back on them then.  Thanks Google,