Interview with Vanessa Fox on Google’s Webmaster Central

WebProNews interviewed Vanessa again where she talks about her blogging experience, her personal blog (Vanessa Fox Nude) as well as new progressions with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you want to hear/watch the interview, go to SES: Vanessa Fox On Blogging and Google’s Webmaster Central.

For the purposes of this post I want to focus on the comments Vanessa made regarding Google’s Webmaster Tools new progressions.

Users of GWT want to know how to look back at data and according to Vanessa, the summary page in GWT updates every time your site’s home page is accessed, which basically means that it updates constantly (depending on how busy your site is obviously). She says that the summary page shows updates regarding your home page so that, if a problem arises in accessing it, the error will show up on the summary page. She continues to say that, usually, if there is a problem with the home page, then there is also a problem with the entire site.

Vanessa also clears up the question on how often the GW tool updates some of the data you see. For instance, “Web Crawl” refreshes daily and show the last two week’s worth of data. “Query stats” is another, and they show the previous week’s worth of data. (Webmasters sometimes get confused because they forget that query stats doesn’t show the current week’s data.) Backlink data updates once a month. The newest data refresher is anchor phrases.

OK, I hope that’s clear, let’s move on.

Fox also mentions that “Google’s Webmaster Central is pushing to enhance communication between the webmasters and Google”. Google has incorporated discussion groups where webmasters and Googlers can give input and receive information back. Up to now, only international versions of discussion groups were available. Google hopes to strengthen the discussion groups and encourage more international posts.

More ways to increase communication, is to look at further avenues of communication other than just with groups. As a result, Google hired a webmaster trans-analyst that will look at feedback, examine growing trends, and see what the main priorities are.

Fox did not comment on any specifics, but did say that 2007 would bring more exciting things to Webmaster Central and Google.

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