I am a big fan of Google Webmaster Tools,
and one of the messages on the Daily Blog Tips newsletter is about why
you should use this tool, and how you can use it efficiently.
Then a couple of days ago I received the following email in response
to my advice (I’ll keep the identity of person anonymous for obvious
reasons):
I have built many, many websites, and over the last couple of years of testing and re-testing, I have come to find out that my websites do better by NOT letting big G* have complete access to them.
I started out by doing exactly that. Submitting all my websites to big G’s Webmaster tools. Why? Because all the people “In the know” recommended it. Well, guess what? I could never figure out why I could never get my websites higher than the 2nd page.
Then, I read an article by a not so very well known Internet marketer who was making millions. Everyone blew him off and called him crazy. I was fortunate enough to be able to talk to him personally and what he revealed to me was simply amazing.
I decided to give it a try with some of my sites that were not doing very well. I took them out of G* Webmaster tools (there are many other ways of tracking you know) and low and behold. Most of them were on page 3 or worse before. After taking them off G tools, within 2 to 3 weeks, they were on the first page and making money.
The way I see it now, it’s like letting the government into your life. The more they know about you, the worse they make it!
As you can imagine I don’t agree with this argument, and here is why.
When you create an account on Google Webmasters Tools and submit your
sites there you are not, by any means, giving Google more or less
access to your website. You are not giving them any more information
than what they already have by crawling and indexing your site over
time.
The only thing they ask is that you confirm the ownership over your
site (either by plating a meta tag on the header of your template, or by
uploading an HTML file to your server) so that they can show you the
information they have about your site, and give you advice to solve
problems, should there be any.
In other words, signing up for Google Webmaster Tools won’t affect
the information Google has about your site. It will, however, give you
the opportunity to discover how Google sees your site, and this
information can be very valuable.
Here is a personal example to illustrate the point. A couple of years
ago I noticed that most of the pages of this blog started losing its
search rankings. I couldn’t figure what was wrong, since I was not doing
anything wrong or shady. After a couple of weeks I finally remember to
log into the Webmaster Tools, and I found that I had a huge number of
“Unreachable” crawling errors. This basically meant that the Google bot
was not being able to crawl my pages for some reason. I then discovered
there is a wrong setup on my server blocking the bot, and once I fixed
that the rankings came right back.
There are many other valuable features and diagnosis tools offered by
Google inside the Webmaster Tools. Now does Google offer all of this to
webmasters because it is an altruistic company? Not all. Google is just
doing what is sound for its business interests. If they help webmasters
make their sites as good as possible, it will be easier for Google to
crawl them and to sort the information around the web more efficiently
(not to mention that better websites will get more traffic, and if they
are AdSense users they will make more money both for Google and for
themselves).
That is why I don’t buy the “Google is out there to get webmasters” theory.
What the person mentions in the email could even be true, but it
would be just a coincidence. Adding or removing your site from the
Webmaster Tools should have no effect on its search rankings. It is the
same thing when people add or remove AdSense from their websites and
search rankings go up or down. People think things are related, but it
is just a coincidence.
Anyway this is just my opinion, and given that everyone is entitled
to one, feel free to write a comment below with your thoughts on the
issue.
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