Google has made some major changes to its Webmaster Tools that affect who and how you can view data for your site.
Firstly, Google has added a highly requested feature that allows you to grant other users different levels of access to your Webmaster tools account.
Initially, there was only one option and anyone that needed access had to be given owner level access which allowed them to change properties without your permission. But now, with Google’s new User Administration page you can grant up to 100 new users access to your account and then decide what level of authority they have, either Full or Restricted.
Full access allows a user to view all your data, and take actions like change site settings and demote sitelinks, while a Restricted user will only be able to view most data and perform some actions like Fetch as GoogleBot and change message forwarding for their account. A list of differences between user access levels can be seen here.
Next, Google has completely modified its Crawl Errors feature. The data is now divided as: Site Errors and URL Errors.
Site Errors, of course, affect your entire site – like DNS errors, server connectivity issues and problems fetching the robots.txt file.
URL Errors affects only a specific page on your site. These errors happen after Google has resolved your DNS, connected to your server, and fetched your robots.txt, but then encountered an error after it requested the URL. The errors are even broken down into different categories to help you organize the data presented to you.
Moving further, when you click on an individual error, a detailed window pops up to show you additional information like: an explanation of the error, when the problem initially showed up, and the last time Google tried to crawl the URL.
From this detail window, you can click the link to the URL to see the problem yourself, have Googlebot fetch the URL, and several other things to help you understand the error better.
Additionally, instead of having 100,000 bits of information, Google has trimmed the info down into 1000 errors ranked and prioritized by how important they might be.
The best part about the list is that after you’ve fixed the issue, you can check the “Fixed” box and tell Google it’s been addressed. Make sure to have Googlebot fetch the URL immediately to verify that the issue is resolved.
