Monday, December 8, 2008

All-in-one Webmaster Settings for Google (Like Allowing a Higher Crawl Rate)

Google reorganized their Webmaster Tools site a bit and grouped several configurations within a single Settings section. There you can toggle and adjust things like:

• your site’s geographic target, if any
• your preferred URL display, like example.com vs www.example.com
• whether or not you’d like your site to be part of the Google Image Labeler game
• what your preferred crawl rate is, from slower (“May reduce freshness and number of crawled pages”) to faster than Google’s default (“May increase Googlebot traffic on your server”)

(For trial purposes, I’ve set the crawl rates for some of my sites to the highest possible settings.)

Often for settings like these it would be nicer if there was some settings file to drop on one’s server, as this would allow potentially any search engine to access the same settings... similarly to how we use a single robots.txt file for all search engines instead of telling every search engine separately which folders are crawlable and which aren’t (which would mean extra work for the webmaster).

[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]

All-in-one Webmaster Sett ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1+2)

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