The Google Webmaster Tools is a no-charge service that allows webmasters to optimize visibility 
of their sites and check their indexing status. Using this service, webmasters can also check and set the crawl rate, get information about errors on their pages, as well as statistics or reports about how Google indexed their website. It’s clearly a powerful tool that every webmaster should use. But if you want to optimize your website by relying on this service, you need to be very careful about the way you use it, especially when it comes to the advanced features. If you’re not using them properly, they could really affect your SEO efforts and also affect the way Google evaluates your website. So if you want to avoid harming your site while using the advanced features of Google Webmaster Tools, check this list of mistakes that others did before so that you won’t “fall into their trap”:
- Sitelinks
If you don’t know what sitelinks are, don’t worry, they are just those links under some search results that attract visitor’s attention and help them navigate the website. These sitelinks depend on the link structure and anchor texts of the website. I know you now wonder how Google’s tools can help you with these sitelinks. Well, using its advanced features will help you block irrelevant or useless sitelinks for your visitors. But be careful, if you remove the wrong sitelinks, you can heavily affect your SEO efforts.
- Geographic Targeting
This feature is great for those websites which target users from a specific country, because it lets them geo target their website to that specific location. However, it’s not recommended to use this feature if you own a neutral domain (eg .com), as setting it to a specific location could boost your rankings on that region/country (eg. Google.it.), but in the same time, it will also lower your rankings on other regional domains (eg. Google.co.uk). Just don’t use it if your websites isn’t really targeting a particular country.
- Crawler Access Tab
The Crawler Access Tab can seriously damage your SEO efforts if it’s not used properly, and to be honest, many webmasters recommend to not use it unless you really know what you’re doing. With the crawler access tab you can set just some parts of your site to allow crawling by the Google bots. But although you can request URL removals and generate robots.txt files, it’s better to let Google crawl all of your pages.
- Sitemap Submissions
This feature is really appreciated by most of the webmaster because using it you can actually speed up the indexing of your webpages. But although you just have to submit your sitemaps, you can face really dangerous problems. You must make sure that you gzip them and always send the .gz version to Google. Also, never ever try to index thousands of pages at once. Be careful and only use a reasonable number of sitemaps because you could be considered a spammer and face penalties.
- Crawl rate
By setting your crawl rate you decide how fast or how slow you allow the Googlebot to crawl and index your site’s content. Although you can set a custom crawl rate, it’s not always a good decision. Few people realize that this feature does not include only the crawl rate, it also affects how many pages get indexed every day. For your own good, don’t try to change the default settings, Google knows better, let him decide the crawl rate. You can get in trouble and inflict damage on your website, you could even reduce the number of crawled pages, and I bet you really don’t want that to happen.
Always keep these tips in mind and remember that in spite all these warnings, the Google Webmaster Tools is a service made for you. However, you’ll only benefit from it as long as you know how to use it. See you soon!
