Monday 21 May 2012

Google webmaster spring cleaning and alternatives of all three


On April 24 Google announced about closing three features of Google Webmaster tools; Subscriber States, robots.txt file generator and Site Performance. Google said that these three features are less used compare to others and hence we are closing. Google analyze the usage of different features make changes according to that. Google has named this process Google Webmaster spring cleaning. Here I am going to discuss all these features and its alternative tools which can work for you.

Subscriber States

Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site’s RSS or Atom feeds. If you want to gather subscriber states then you have many options. First one is Google’s own product Feedburner is available with more features. You can find everything regarding Feedburner and its features you can click here. Second option to track subscriber states is Google analytics’ event tracker. You can visit this post for complete guide, Tracking New RSS Subscribers With Google Analytics. If you are using WordPress blog then it is too easy for you. There are so many plugins available for WordPress to track the subscriber states. A great post about the plugins is available on Mashable.

Robots.txt Generator

Robots.txt file offers a way to instruct search engine crawler which part of website is to crawl and index and which is not. Rightly that robots.txt file generator is less useful feature. You can create robots.txt file using a simple text editor. Though, if you are new and need help to generate robots.txt file then I can suggest few which are free to use. First one is available for free from SEOBOOK. It is simple and has same user interface. The other two available for free are from SEOCHAT and Mcanerin International

Site Performance

Site Performance feature was basically for the information regarding the website’s speed and average load time. Site speed is one of the 200 factors that Google considers to generate Search Engine Ranking Pages. It is also closed because of low usage. Google provides alternative of this feature as PageSpeed Online. In fact this tool provide some great information to reduce the site’s average load speed. It points the areas where you can optimize the site to reduce the site speed. The other useful website is http://www.webpagetest.org. This website provides you more attributes like test location and browser to get more specific data. There is one more way you can get these data using an add-on provided by Yslow. You can download the add-on for Google chrome from yslow.org.

So that is it, these are the best alternative tools which I know. I really would love to know the other alternatives which you know in the comments.

1 comment:

  1. Google cache checker instantly checks upto 10 websites at a time and also to find if the webpage is included in google’s search index.
    Google Cache Checker Tool

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