SEO 101

Google Webmaster Tools Redesigned Part 1

Ross and John discusses the changes made in the redesign of the Google Webmaster Tools new interface, including crawl stats and sitemaps as they overview the dashboard. Our Sponsors: * Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Duration:: 35m
Broadcast on:: 01 Jun 2009
Audio Format:: other

Ross and John discusses the changes made in the redesign of the Google Webmaster Tools new interface, including crawl stats and sitemaps as they overview the dashboard.

Our Sponsors:
* Producer Brasco: As digital professionals and business owners, we understand the critical importance of a secure and high-performing website. That's why I want to talk to you about Kinsta, a managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers exceptional speed, security, and reliability. Kinsta's infrastructure is optimized for WordPress, ensuring your site loads lightning-fast and ranks well in search results. They utilize Google Cloud's premium tier network and C3D virtual machines, which significantly boost performance. In fact, Kinsta customers often experience up to a 200% increase in site speed just by migrating to their platform. Security is paramount, and Kinsta provides enterprise-grade measures to protect your valuable data. They are one of the few WordPress hosting providers with SOC2 certification, guaranteeing the highest level of security for your website. Kinsta's MyKinsta dashboard offers a user-friendly interface with a comprehensive suite of tools to manage your site efficiently. From cache control and debugging to redirects and CDN setup, MyKinsta simplifies website administration. For SEO 101 listeners, Kinsta offers specific advantages. Their platform is optimized for speed, a crucial ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Their security measures protect your site from malware and hacking attempts that could damage your online presence. And their expert support team is available 24/7 to assist with any technical issues that may arise. If you're serious about your online presence and want a hosting provider that prioritizes performance, security, and support, I highly recommend Kinsta. Visit kinsta.com today to learn more and take advantage of their limited-time offer for new customers. That's k-i-n-s-t-a dot com.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Welcome to SEO 101, your introductory course on search engine optimization. So, turn on your computers, open your minds, grab your mouse and get ready to get back to the basis. SEO 101 on webmaster-radio.fm is now in session. Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on webmaster-radio.fm. This is Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my new co-host today is John Carcutt, the SEO manager of MediaWiz. How are you doing, John? Feeling good, Ross. It's if the media was the hard word to say sometimes, you know. Is it shortened for, or is it, what's the full name of the company? It is, media is holdings. Most people won't know us by that. So, where the company, the company that owns, text links, ads and reviewme.com and a number of sites like that. Well, I've known you a long time, John, but at least it seems like it, but maybe some of the people online have just heard of your name and don't know much about you. So, why don't we do a quick interview and just introduce you? So, how long have you even known this web marketing? I've been doing web marketing since forever. It's been 11, 12 years now, started out in-house SEO for a number of companies and moved over to agencies with the director of advanced search for more visibility for a while before I moved over to the media with this. Been here forever. It's been doing this, doing it and loving it for a long time. Awesome. So, what do you like most about marketing online? The challenge is actually, because it changes so often. I love the fact that you never learn everything. There's always new stuff to learn, but you know, just this week, Microsoft launches a new search engine. There's a whole bunch of new things to learn it if coming months. So, it's challenging and you never get bored. Yes, true. I've got a series. I think we're all short attention spans, all the people in the web marketing industry. We just can't handle it if there's not something going on. So, it just totally makes sense. Like, I get bored silly when there's no new search engines. I've been bored forever since Google took over. I think there's another way to say ADD. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, actually, that thing is going to be intriguing. I hope it actually is something worth watching and learning. So, it's definitely going to be something to keep an eye on and see how it affects things, for sure. Yeah. So, what do you specialize in in web marketing? Obviously, it's a big field. You know, we've both been doing mine 11 and a half years now, too, and I think we've both gone in various tangents over the years. What are you focusing on these days, or do you have a focus? Is it just everything? You do, actually. You know, being in-house for so many years, you do everything. I mean, at one point, I was not only the SEO, I was the PPC manager, the affiliate manager. You name it, and I was doing everything. Oh, geez. Yeah. But as I went into the agencies' field and started working on lots of clients, I really found myself gravitating towards strategy and really looking at the big picture of how SEO fits into business practices and how you can, you know, use it to increase the bottom line for a company, and the strategies were what I really love to do now. I'm with you. That's exactly how we've structured, or not sure, our new website, too, stepforce.com. We've got the focus is the six steps to web marketing success, you know? What is it that you need to do from the beginning, all the way to the end, and then keep it up and build it, you know? It's not just SEO anymore, and I guess it never really was, but it was put out that way for so long, and I think it's funny when we get- I don't know. Is it a stage we're in, is it the older stage of big SEO? Is this like enough of just one thing we really want some of the big picture, getting that client, the ultimate result? Not that we haven't been doing that two degree anyway, but now it's like a focus. Yeah. I think all of a sudden we're like partners. Yeah. I think it's kind of like the growth of the SEO path, the growth path for an SEO, as you start out, you know, you're doing link building, and you're really engaged in the tactical aspects of link building, or you're doing content optimization, and then as you grow, and you do all these little pieces, you start seeing how they fit together better and better, and then you see how those pieces fit together with the overall business structure and the business plans, and you start just thinking more tactically, because you have so much more experience with a wide variety of different aspects of the whole industry. Yeah, and you've been- have you done some speaking recently? I think you were at the Florida convention in Waback, weren't you? Yes, let's speak into a scary SEO that was last October, I think. Okay. No, I take that back. I did an event in Miami, refresh Miami not too long ago. And what were you speaking on? Oddly enough, it was WordPress, not SEO, so. Oh, well, there's one SEO built into that, too. We had three hosts, a while back, and that was pretty cool, as much as you had, actually. Oh, he's great, got. Yeah. Definitely. Well, John's a buddy of mine, everyone, and I'm just so, so happy to have him on board, and we're going to kick ass and take this place we never even thought we could. We've already got a few shows lined up, and it's going to be pretty cool, so. Before we start on the next bit here, we're going to start- we're going to- today we're going to be doing a review of the Google Webmaster Tools, but before we start, we're going to take a quick break. SEO 101 will be back right after recess. Are you happy with your landing page performance? Discover how to improve your landing page performance with conversioncredit.com, brought to you by EngineReady. 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The answer is simple, markethealth.com, where health and wealth connect. Established in 1998, the markethealth.com affiliate network allows you to market and promote the world's leading health and beauty offers on the net. Start making recurring income and the highest payouts in our industry. Choose from over 50 of the hottest selling offers, ranging from herbal supplements, skincare, vitamins, beauty products, weight loss, and much more. Sign up for free at markethealth.com and start making money today. Such engine marketing formulated for Web 2.0, SEM synergy. Live broadcast Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Eastern noon Pacific or on demand anytime inside the Search Engine Optimization Channel. On webmasterradio.fm. Okay, class, take your seats and no talking. Recess is over and SEO 101 is back in session, only on webmasterradio.fm. Welcome back to SEO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Karka, SEO Manager for MediaWiz, and Ross Dunn, myself, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc. For the break, I was just introducing you to John, and I'm very happy to have him on the show, and it's going to be great to have a good partner on for the long term here. And today, we're going to get into a couple of webmaster tools. I know a lot of people out there have heard of it. Some people may have gotten it freely at it. I've noticed a lot of hosting and design companies at it as sort of a bonus now because it's free when you sign up. But I don't know how many people actually use it and get a lot of benefit from it. So, John, what are your thoughts on Google Webmaster tools? Use a lot? Yeah, Google Webmaster tools are essential. There's so many things that you can just monitor and check, you know, excuse me, when you're optimizing, specifically for Google, of course. The great thing is they provide so much information there to help you do that. It's gotten better and better over the years, and they keep updating and keep changing and keep making it better. So, I expect within the next year or so it'll be even completely different than it is now and much more useful. Yeah, and actually, apparently I think it was May 12th. They brought out a new version of it with a whole bunch of new stuff, and I'm still in Hawaii at the time. I went away for three weeks. So, sorry, listeners. That's why it's been a bit of a hiatus here. Hawaii. But, yeah, you know, I was roughing it to a tough time, but I'm back, and apparently I missed a couple of things, and that was one of them to launch. So, I'm really looking forward to doing a little more exploring in it. So why don't we get started, John? How do you get on Google Webmaster tools? Let's assume someone here doesn't even have any knowledge of it and doesn't know how to even log in. Real quick for you that if you've heard that there's change and you haven't looked at it yet, don't panic. You can still look at the old version still, and you can switch back and forth between the two. Eventually, it'll be just the one, but now you still have your old version if you just got scared. So, don't worry, they're both there still. If you haven't used Google Webmaster's tools before, to get it set up on your site, it's very similar to something you do with analytics. You have to verify your website that you're the owner of the website. If you go to, I think it's google.com/webmasters, you can get links to the tools, or if that's not it, you just search Google Webmaster tools, and it's usually the first link right there, and you'll have to log in with a Google account. It can be your Gmail account or an account you set up with some of your email address, but that will be the account. I would recommend using one Google account for all the sites you might want to monitor with Google Webmaster tools, because you can put them all in the same interface and switch back and forth between them. Once you log in, it's going to ask you to verify a site, ask you for your site URL. It'll give you some very basic information about that URL before you verify it, but once you verify it, it'll give you tons more information. Verification process is fairly simple, just like with analytics. It'll give you a little code to put a text file on your site at the root, and then you go back in and say, "Yes, I put it there, verify me," and seconds later, you're verified and you have a lot more information. Yeah, and it's obvious proof then that you are the owner, because you were able to upload that file to your website, and it makes a lot of sense. So the dashboard, once you're logged in, what kind of stuff are they going to see, John, like right off the bat? I mean, I'm looking at the new interface, and I'm going, "Whoa, okay, things are a little different." To everyone else who may be just new to this, so this is enough new about this. This is the interface they're first going to be introduced to. I guess the first thing we see is the dashboard, right? Yeah, I'm going to the older face, I'm going to switch over to the new one too, so we're looking at the same thing. So the main difference between the older and the new one is really user interface. It's a lot cleaner in the new interface. There's a little bit more information available, easier to get to. But the dashboard, you're right, when you first log in, there's the dashboard. If you have multiple websites, you'll have the list of your websites, right there in front of you, you can click in to go into the webmaster tools for each one through your dashboard. They also have a messaging system. At times, Google will actually send you messages if there's issues with your website. They don't do it all the time, but occasionally, if you get a penalty, they'll send you a message and say, "Hey, we noticed this on your site, and it's causing an issue, please fix it," type of thing. Actually, I've got some to add to that. I thought that was the only thing they did, but that's one of the new additions they made. Finally, you can actually add your own email address so that anything, absolutely, anything that's added to that messages thing is sent to you, even if it isn't about something major, which they would have actually decided to email you directly. Apparently, before they had it, I didn't use this function, but they had an inbox where they could notify you of any issues. But it would just sit there. The only way you'd ever know is by logging into Google Webmaster tools, so I had to tell clients when I did any kind of speaking that Google Webmaster tools is great, but you have to use it and check it regularly to see if there's anything wrong this way. You can actually enter your email address, and it will forward any post whatsoever, any kind of change or anything to your personal email or wherever you'd like it to send. All the notifications and messages, and that's great. That's a wonderful issue. I agree. That helps tremendously. Totally, especially one of the things that I use a lot for is to monitor a site transition. If we're going to, we've got a new client, and they've decided that they're going to merge a couple of sites, and one of the site has its own URLs and links, and it's pretty established. Well, we're going to have to 301 redirect. In other words, permanently redirect all of their old URLs to the new ones. When you do that, you can always end up with a few broken links here and there, because there's often a lot of pages yet to redirect. This is a wonderful tool to check in on the process and see whether or not Google's found any errors. Definitely, but I'm probably going to get ahead of myself here, all right. I'll tell you what, if anybody from Google was listening, I would love it if they would take that messaging system and allow us to put custom flags. Let's say, I could write a custom flag saying if the Google bot hasn't visited my site in the past 48 hours, please send me a message so I can go see what's going on. If they could do that, that would be wonderful. So if you're listening, Google, jump on that, please. Yeah, totally agree, and the dashboard, well, for example, the main dashboard where you see all your websites, I would love to have a bit of a abbreviated review of what's going on in each site. So I just go there. It's like a dashboard of all my sites. A true dashboard. I'm actually going to tell me, are there any errors, check this out? But no, right now, it just says, is it verified? Right. That's pretty weak. And the one thing I've been reading about the new interface is some people are having problems with this dashboard. People that have many, many websites under the same Google account, apparently it's difficult for them to find the sites in what there's no search feature here to look for a site if you have hundreds and hundreds of sites, you have to just scroll and scroll and scroll. Apparently, it was much easier with the last dashboard to do that. So people have been complaining about that, so hopefully Google's listening there too. Well, you know what, and the one thing I got to give Google credit for is they do listen and I expect these, a lot of these changes will be coming into play pretty soon. They even said that there's more updates to come. I actually just cheated before the episode watched a little bit of a YouTube video they put out on the actual changes and I'm like, oh, good, you should have sent that to me. Yes, sorry buddy, I just listened to it like maybe before I was going to get on the phone here. But, well, let's keep in some progression here. Otherwise, we're going to jump over the map, we've got too much of our heads here, I think. So persons clicked on, say, their website and now they're on the actual website dashboard. There's two dashboards. One, which is where they show all your sites if you have more than one and you can just click on it and on your site, then you go to the site dashboard where they give you an overview of all your details. In there, I'll take the first one here, the top search queries is shown, which is pretty cool. It shows you what are the top searches that are on Google to your website and then it shows you what position you're in. So it's kind of nice. It's a ranking report without any of the pain assets of actually running one on your own computer or having any issues related to that. It's already done for you, it's in Google Webmaster Tools and you can click on more to get more details on the other positions, but they give you the top 10 and you can click on that to actually see the search and what kind of detail, like for example, what description was used for your ranking. Every day, thousands of hackers try to steal your crypto, but Oculus uses air-gapped technology by forming a protective barrier that insulates you from hackers and secures your crypto. Order yours at getarculus.com. So you can determine whether or not that's exactly what you wanted and how you might be able to improve it from there when you take the next one there. Well, I was going to say when you click on more on that as well, Russ, it not only shows you the top 100 impressions, but it also has a whole other column for click through. Right. The top 100 impressions, these are where you're showing up and this is where your listing shows. But the other column says this is where your listing showed and people actually clicked it. And this is the key where they actually clicked. So you can actually go in and use that to say, okay, well I'm getting really good clicks through on this one. But I'm getting a lot of impressions here and no click through and you can go look at maybe your meta tags and see maybe you can make them a little more click friendly, try to get, you know, change your title to draw in some clicks as long as you don't screw up your rankings by changing your title, be careful there. But that's a good way to go in and look and see, you know, once your ad shows, if people aren't clicking on it, it's not really helping you or once you're listing shows. Yeah, it's true. And I actually found when I first saw it on the August ages ago now, but I was very impressed that I really get it, you know, because having the two columns side by side is so cool. Yeah, this is where I've got a top ranking, but this is where people are actually clicking on. And they're often quite a bit different. And you know, in our case, our website's fairly new, but you know, a lot of stuff we want to get rankings for aren't there yet. But you know, that's what this is all about. But it's very handy. I can look at that and really see where we're getting this stuff. First thing I like is you can show all searches or you can actually go down into all the various types of searches, blog search. So if you click on that, it'll tell you what search queries are being sent to you by through, I guess it's Google blog search and what kind of rankings are getting for that. You can actually specify, let's say I wanted to know, let's say, how many from web search. So that's the standard one with the most info generally. How many impressions am I getting from Australia? You can actually click on that and choose only Australian traffic through Google. And then you can also specify timeline, it's very impressive. And I find this interface a lot better on this area anyway. I don't recall all this detail before. Yeah, it's definitely improved. The one thing I'm still waiting for to add though is the new search. So they've got blog search and image search and web search and mobile versus standard but they still don't have new search building to that. So I'm waiting on that still. Yeah, that's kind of weird, isn't it? Yeah. Do you need hypothesis why they wouldn't have that? No, I'm not sure why they wouldn't put that in there. Unless it's just, I know that the new search results are handled a lot differently than standard web results. So maybe it's just the two systems aren't really as compatible as they should be. It is interesting, I didn't pick that up. Okay, so that was the top search queries. And why don't you head away into the crawl stats there? Sure, sure. So on your dashboard, when you log into your site, there's two columns at the top of the right-hand column is your crawl errors. So this is really telling you what the crawlers are doing on your site, what they're able to pick up and what they're not able to pick up. If there's an error in your dashboard, it basically just lists the different types of crawlers, HTTP, site map, you know, not followed, not founds 404s, things that are restricted by your robots and so on. But it just tells you that and the number, no real detail. If you click into the each individual one, so let's click into restricted by robots.txt for instance, it'll give you each individual URL that's restricted the last time or what's restricting it and the last time it was detected. So it gives you very detailed information about what's happening there on those crawlers. Also, notice they made it a little easier, yeah. Under when you click on, say, the robots.txt, they actually, they offer you a little mini menu at the top, so you don't have to go back and jump around. Exactly. It's actually two layers of menu. They have the web, they can break it up by web, mobile, and there they have news, wow. Weird. Yeah, but they also have a secondary menu that goes into each individual type of error. So those ones you read off before, the site maps, the 404s, the robots, you can scroll through those or tab through those as well from each page. Yeah, and in this instance too, in case people don't know, robots.txt is used to tell the search engines where not to go in your site and where they can go essentially. And if you by chance you've made a mistake, and I have seen this happen, and by chance you've blocked a directory you really want to Google to see, you're going to see that information here and go, oh, an expletive, I'm going to go and change that now. It's actually more commonly to think, especially when people are doing redesigns on a site because as a developer will redesign a site, they'll usually block out the robots.txt, they'll block out the whole site while it's being redesigned, so it doesn't get picked up in many cases, and they go, they might be on a dev server, and then they go publish it to the live site, and they forget to change the robots.txt to open it back up. So now they're blocking the whole site from the engines, and then you log in to go work with master tools, and you're saying, why are 3,000 pages of my site being restricted, and you look in and tell you, oh, it's just restricting everything, so you go fix it. Yeah, it's nice to earn your pay that quickly, isn't it? Well, we're going to get right back onto this in a second here, but for right now we're going to take a quick break. SEO 101 will be back, right after recess. 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Welcome back to SCO 101 on webmasterradio.fm with John Carcutt, SCO manager for MediaWiz and myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing Inc. We're doing a tour today of Google webmaster tools, a bit of a new interface and it's pretty cool. Every time I look at it, I see something new and right now we're in the crawl stat section. Pretty much finished it, except I did want to mention that I thought it was neat that they've this mobile edition and I'm going to probably look stupid here but I don't think they had that there before, is they? I don't believe so, they didn't have as many varieties as mobile if they did. In other words, they have both types of CHTML and HTML as well as WML so I know they've expanded it. Actually, I cracked myself, I did have mobile before I think because I remember I could submit a mobile site map so I must have had a crawl error issue there too. One more thing is we were talking about the crawl errors and you said site maps. As you drill down, we said they'd show you each and every page. In some of them, like site maps for example, they're like a 404 error in a site map, you can actually go into the 404s and click which pages, it'll tell you exactly which pages are linking to that page causing the 404 so it's even, you can drill down even deeper now to find out what's causing these issues with the crawl error section. Yeah and you know, some people may be wondering why is Google giving all this information away and what you've got to keep in mind is to Google, these are issues that should be fixed and if they're not fixed, well it just diminishes its own index which is what people find. They do their searches, they find this information, they get a broad bad URL that reflects poorly on Google so they're giving us this information to let us fix our website, it's make us look good, ultimately them. So it's a win-win situation, obviously where they don't want to show all their info, they are Google, they don't show at all but I would say by and large, a tool that should never be forgotten, I actually find I use it more often than not than any other tool I have now for doing site diagnostics, at least in the initial times when I switch over is done. When I've said that new clients, that's one of the first things we do, we say we want access to it, we don't have that so we set it up for them, that's one of the first things every client has it. And it's nice too, yeah, it's not like Google Analytics where when you do that, well all of a sudden you've got to start accruing data, it's already there, so as soon as you get access to it, Google's provides you all the history, they've been collecting this data and that's a big relief because it would suck if you had to wait for all this information to accrue. Yep, definitely. So links to your site, well we all know that links are important, more people linking to your website, at least from a relevant sample, your fellow colleague in the industry links back to perhaps your article and says, "Wow, this is a great article, that's a good link." Well that kind of information is what Google partly uses to determine how well your site is going to get ranked because they see just how, I guess, authoritative your website is. So links to your site is a pretty critical report. It'll actually show you where the most links are pointing to your different various pages in your site. In my case, I'm looking at our Step 4 site, the home page is where we have a majority of our links, it's pretty romantic actually. And I would say, yeah, it's two over 2,400 links to the home page, but only 22, or the next one down is, can't. We'll do a show on deep link trust, so you can, thank you. Yes, I focus on my clients, not our own site, and that's no excuse. So if we click on the links, let's say we click on the home page one, which has the most links in my case, you get a listing of all the links pointing to the page. It's fabulous. You start seeing where people, what sites perhaps are linking the most to your site. And in our case, I noticed that top SEOs has a ton of links to us. That's great. I'm not even sure why, it's fantastic though. And then I go through, and I can find out why. And perhaps I noticed that one of our old advertising campaigns works really well, and it gave us a whole bunch of links. Well, that's great. I take note of that. Make sure that we plan to do that same advertising campaign next year, or even sooner than later. And it also shows you the last time that link was found. So you see it's pretty current. That's great. Some of them may be older. In one case, my first one is April 23rd, it's the last time I found it. So maybe that's a bit old, I may want to, maybe that, when I get update, it gets updated, that particular link will drop. What else do you see on that, as John, it looks like it's good. Something to be aware about this, I'm sure, if you don't know, if you do the link command in Google to try to find out how many backlinks you have to a certain page or a certain domain, it only shows you a portion of the links it knows about. Most SEOs know that. If you don't, it does. It only shows you approximately 10% of the links it knows about, and it's random. It never shows you this. It doesn't always show you the same ones. This list shows you every link it knows about. However, the one thing to be aware of with this link is, or this list, is that just because it shows it to you, doesn't mean it's counting it. It will show you every link, but it doesn't actually mean it is going to count it. Yeah, and that's critical. I mean, when you look at all these links, some of them maybe from sites that obviously don't have anything to do with your site, you can pretty much discount those. I wouldn't say I would, I don't know, John, I actually use this more just to tour through. I don't use it as a foundation for any of my marketing, but I do find it interesting. I do occasionally find a good nugget of info in there. Definitely. And there is just one more thing. There is a download link at the very bottom of the list of you drilled into the homepage links where you can download all the links, because the one that I'm looking at is one of my clients, so I won't tell, but their homepage has 37,000 links, and there's no way I'm going to be able to just breeze through those. I'd have to download and analyze them outside of the tool. Slacker. That's how you do anything for a client, man. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. That's a lot of links to go through. Plus you have more control. You can sort of find out that 5,000 are from the same blog that's trying to spam you across the nation. Well, and you know what, I think that lists are good. You just don't want to get too overwhelmed with getting into the details, so it's probably just as well. Exactly. You know, we go wrap up in a couple of seconds. We're really just doing an overview. It turns out as a dashboard, it's funny how long things take. So we took to complete that then. We should just touch on site maps. Want to leave that away there, John? Yeah. Site maps is actually quite interesting. If you're not using site maps, you can go to sitemap.org, and it's an XML file that you feed out to the engines that will allow them. It really just replaces the crawler. So it allows them to know where all your pages are, I mean, give it a little bit more information about which pages are more important than others, how often they update that kind of thing. All the major engines use the site map files, Google, Yahoo, MSN, I believe, Altavist has used it. Oh, yeah. Ask me. I forgot. Yeah. Do you still use Altavist anyone? I don't think they do, but they tried to jump on the site map bandwagon. Fair enough. For Google, you can put your site map on your file. It usually lives at the root of your domain, you know.com/sitemap.xml or XML, excuse me. You tell Google about its placement here in Webmaster Tools, you can actually say, here's my site map, they'll go verify that it's okay and it'll start crawling it. There's a number of different types of site maps actually that you can submit through Google. They actually have launched a couple months ago, they actually have a news-specific site map format. So you can have a news site map and a regular site map, and you can submit all those through your Webmaster Tools. If you could. Cool. Well, I think we get a pretty good job of scouring this dashboard quickly. I don't know. I'm sure we've missed stuff, and I know there's a ton of interviews online. I think I'd like to touch on the rest of Google Webmaster Tools quickly, but are in the next episode. But at this point, we're going to have to sign off here. John, thanks for being on your first show, and you're awesome as I expected. Thanks for having me, Ross. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to many, many more shows. Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunce, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing Inc, and John Carca, SEO Manager for me, it was. Thank you for joining us today on SEO 101 on Webmaster Radio dot FM. Sure, you may be able to hear just how crispy the McDonald's crispy juicy tender chicken sandwiches, but that's just the beginning. The full crispy juicy tender experience comes after you take your first bite. But why stop there? Order ahead on the app and get medium fries and soft drink for free. Now that's a deal that tastes even better than it sounds.