Google webmaster tools - good effort but could do better
I really like Google webmaster tools, but they are so slow to release new features.
What I really want right now is an email alert system for each of the possible errors. Company I recently consulted for had dropped out of Google serps for a week. Took me about 5 minutes to find and fix the problem (500 internal server error being returned on every page, but site looked fine in browser), but if we had email alerts the company involved could have fixed the problem in hours instead of the week it took to notify me.
Another feature I would love to see, but doubt we will ever get, is to specify our target country. Google curnelty looks at the domain tld and where the site is hosted when deciding weighting for country specific Googles like google.co.uk – have a .co.uk hosted in the USA and rank ok in .co.uk, have .com hosted in the UK and rank ok in .co.uk – but have a .com hosted in the USA when u are trying to target UK customers, then things are not as rosy. So just get hosting in the right country? No always so simple. For legal reasons some companies have to host their sites in the country the company is registered in. So for some offshore companies this creates a bit of problem. Solution? Let me specify our chosen target country for the main domain and subdomains.
Nice feature I would also like to see, to save me having to whip our own code monkeys, is a history of linking data, what links have we lost/gained. Trend over time, quality of those links. This isn’t some black hat link spamming monitoring but i want to know if our promotional blitz is working and reaching the right places, or are we only being picked up by EarlGrey’s crapy scraper farms.
What webmaster tools features do you want to see?
