How often do you look at Google webmaster tools data about your sites?

[MichaelCorfman]

Over the past few months I have begun to pay a lot more attention to the information provided by Google webmaster tools available at www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

Google provides lots of good information and you can find out a lot about how Google views your website. There are over twenty reports currently provided. Examples include

• A report that shows search queries where you site was shown in the results including your average position, how it has changed, clicks through to your site, and click through percentage.
  
• The most common keywords Google found while crawling your site.
  
• Whether any malware was detected on your site.
  
• Various reports about errors encountered while crawling your site.
  
• A whole variety of suggestions for improving the html on your site - things like missing and duplicate title tags and missing and duplicate meta descriptions.

Besides sharing how often you look at the information provided by Google webmaster tools, be sure to share what information you have found most useful and why.

Michael

[TheGooner]

Ha! After your post I visited it for the first time in months ...

It's still the same old generic robot generated stuff.
Somewhat interesting - but less than actually useful IMO.

[hakank]

I think webmaster tools is interesting but not as accurate as it could be.

• A report that shows search queries where you site was shown in the results including your average position, how it has changed, clicks through to your site, and click through percentage. Yes, but click through is better shown in analytics

• The most common keywords Google found while crawling your site. Well, if I should trust that I'm a "casino bonus" spammer LOL

• Whether any malware was detected on your site. I don't offer downloads or have any weird scripts on my sites so I can't give an opinion on that one.
• Various reports about errors encountered while crawling your site. It seems like it put all the weight in "robot.txt" and complains about my blocked /goto/ dir which only contains php redirects to casinos, if that's an error.. then ok..
• A whole variety of suggestions for improving the html on your site - things like missing and duplicate title tags and missing and duplicate meta descriptions. I feel sorry for those who don't know how to use Wordpress and ends up with the same descriptions and titles all over the site.. A lot of duplicates there.. But, it's pretty useless info imo.
  

[MichaelCorfman]

Ha! After your post I visited it for the first time in months ...

It's still the same old generic robot generated stuff.
Somewhat interesting - but less than actually useful IMO.

Well, of course it is only really useful if you use it to influence work that you do on your website. Lately I've been finding lots of projects to do based on information gleaned from the way Google looks at our sites.

One common situation I've found on some of our sites is slight variations in the way the url for a page is constructed in different places that results in the same page appearing to be two or more different pages to Google based on the variants in referencing urls. In such cases we're now adding canonical tags to the target page to let Google know they are the same page going forward and also changing the pages that were not using the canonical form of the url to reference the target page to use the canonical form for the url now.

With huge numbers of pages on some of our sites, and cross-links between different sites being generated by programs to related material, small inconsistencies make a big difference. An upper case character in one place and a lowercase character in another, a trailing slash at the end of a url in one case and not in another. Such issues can cause Google to see multiple duplicate pages on the target site each with one external link rather than multiple external links from other sites to one page on the target site. The duplicate title tag report makes that type of issue quite visible.

Michael

[gillamano]

Its not something thats top of my agenda. I only use it when it randomly pops in my head you havn't checked that in a while.

[UltimatePokerBonus]

I try to look at it about once per week. I like to see which sitelinks have been generated and look at the internal links to see which pages Google seems to be giving more "weight".

[Simmo!]

I use it for finding errors, duplicate titles and general crawl stats plus for uploading sitemaps. Not too worried about keyword usage as I use Statcounter but it can be useful when re-developing a site for directing old pages that generate traffic to new ones.

I don't use it on every site as I am still not sure I really trust Google 100% but if you have an underperforming site and want to understand fully how Google views it, I'd say it's essential - more often than not it gives good clues as to where there might be problems I find.

Google Analytics on the other hand - yuk

[casinobonusguy]

I check it for crawl errors ,duplicate titles etc .Not so much the keywords as we know them from other tools. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks .

[LiveCasinoPartners]

I've always appreciated webmaster tools and check it at least every three days. I use a database driven site and add new features every once in a while. Sometimes I catch an error in the htaccess file or other crawling errors are exposed.

[bonusbeast]

Not as often as I should, I usually check them out about once every 2 months.

[TheCanadianGambler]

I'm in there every day, but my site is still quite new (4 months now) so I like to see what changes day-to-day, such as the impressions and average position on various keywords. Also nice to see any issues google has with your site and be able to fix them.