Google Updates Webmaster Tools Alerts

Google recently responded to Bing’s addition of the “Disavow Links” tool for Webmasters by announcing new notifications in its version of Webmasters tools about un-trusted (“spammy” or artificial links) links to a website.

Previously, Google sent out a broad alert to Webmasters in severe cases, when it believed a site had been engaging in a widespread pattern of link spam over a long period of time. This notified the Webmaster that their trust in the entire site had been reduced due to these unnatural links and that they should be removed before submitting a reconsideration request for the site with Google.

The new version of the alert service tries to alleviate concerns amongst site owners by making it clear that for a specific incident, Google will take targeted action on the unnatural links, instead of the site as a whole. So anyone that gets the new message can tell what type of action has occurred. The new alerts also lack the yellow exclamation mark that older messages have, which tries to convey that they’re addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.

So although Google have made a good effort to alert Webmasters that their site may have a potential issue – one that’s worth some investigation – without overly stressing them, this isn’t quite as an effective approach to the un-trusted link issue that Bing has provided, that actually allows those links to be disavowed.

Google also recently announced the addition of search query alerts. Webmaster tools processes the data for a website and tries to detect events that are the most interesting for site owners. So alerts forsearch query data have been added into that category, with the existing ones about crawl errors.

The search queries feature in Webmaster Tools shows, among other things, the search result impressions and clicks for your top pages over time. For most sites, these numbers follow regular patterns, so when sudden spikes or drops occur, it makes sense to alert the Webmaster to look into what caused them. This is a very useful addition to the alerts provided by Google, although wisely, they’re still working on the “sensitivity threshold” of the messages, in response to feedback they receive.

Contact us now if you’d like more information about how the Google Webmaster tools alerts can improve the performance of your website on search engines.

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