Google's Webmaster Central is out of BETA today, so we thought now would be a good time to offer a quick guide to making the most of their Webmaster Tools: 1) Firstly, check out Google's Webmaster Help, featuring tonnes of invaluable information about how Google crawls and ranks your site - pay special attention to the Webmaster Guidelines & PageRank Explained. 2) Google Webmaster Tools provides basic information about your site: details of the last time Googlebot successfully accessed your home page, which pages from your site are included in Google's Index and information on sites linking to your site. You can also submit details of your site's XML sitemap - see How do I submit a sitemap? - and analyze your site's robots.txt - see robotstxt.org for more information on robots.txt. 3) You need to verify your site to gain full access to all the Tools - either by adding a meta tag or uploading a blank .html file to your site with a unique code. 4) Now you can discover if Google is having any problems indexing your site via Diagnostics, find out the Top Search Queries that return your site in the results, see current PageRank details, see Linking information, manage how your site is index, and much more...
