Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Google Webmaster Tools Update

There’s been a few updates to the Google webmaster tools:

• Googlebot activity reports – view nice visualizations of when Googlebot crawled your served.
• Crawl rate control – slow down the Googlebot if it’s costing you too much bandwidth.
• “Enhanced” image search – Opt into enhanced image search features, which enables tools like the Google Image Labeler game to use your images. Google says this will “improve indexing and search quality of those images.”

Now, I think there’s a fine line between offering tools that help webmasters, and forcing webmasters who want to have optimized sites to do a whole lot of additional stuff they don’t care about. For example, I think it’s a nice feature to see the Googlebot crawls visualized for those who care, but it’s just annoying that you’d have to opt-in to enhanced image search features. Can’t they just go ahead and do the stuff that makes most sense to users, and only burden webmasters when absolutely necessary (e.g. the image labeler game is fair use to begin with as it just shows thumbnails, so there’s no need to opt-in)? And do they expect webmasters to configure every individual search engine manually?

[Thanks Mambo in the forum.]

Google Webmaster Tools Up ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (10)

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