Why should a small business take advantage of a new Google tool like Site Health
Is your website is in good health? How would you know? Unless you are alerted of a problem, you may never really know until something catastrophic happens. As a small business owner, the health of your website is vital to your online presence as a whole, so having a viable way to diagnosis it is very important. Site Health looks as if it could be the right tool for the job.
In an effort to give webmasters an even closer look at site performance, Google recently introduced Site Health, a new feature that has been added to its popular website optimization suite Google Webmaster Tools. The feature can be extremely useful to a small business by alerting them of the following:
– The detection of spyware, viruses, Trojans and other malware.
– Notification of important pages removed by Google’s URL removal feature.
– Notification of important pages blocked by the robots.txt file
Small businesses can and should use this information to address the trouble issues associated with their site. However, it is important to note that these notifications may be present in Google Webmaster Tools days after they have actually been fixed. As far as what deems a page as “important”, that determination is made by the number of clicks a page receives, though other factors may weigh into the equation later down the road, according to Google.
Checking Up on All Your Domains in One Place
Google Webmaster Tools is a valuable resource more small businesses need to know about. Among other things, it provides site owners with deep insight into the visibility of their pages in the Google SERPs. The program is known for not only allowing users to actually see how the search engine spiders crawl and index those pages, but the exact problems that are preventing them from being accessed. This tool has always been useful for evaluating health, but it is the added convenience that really makes Site Health so attractive.
Prior to the recent update, webmasters could only view information regarding health one domain at a time. This was never a big deal for users only running one or two websites, but it was a major headache for those with five or more domains, which is not all that uncommon with small businesses. The more websites you have, the more hectic Google Webmaster Tools is to use from this standpoint. Thanks to the new Site Health tool, you can now check the health of each and every one of your domains right on the main page. If problems are reported, investigating the matter is as simple as clicking the thumbnail associated with the domain in question.
Conclusion
All in all, the inclusion of Site Health is a nice addition to Google Webmaster Tools. Although it may not be a huge update, it introduces the type of convenience that ensures no errors are missed when it comes to detecting problems on your site and its pages. We see small business owners embracing this one with open arms.
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