Die, Humans!

...their improvements and functionality for public testing before releasing them properly into the Webmaster Area.

So what are these 2 new tools?

"Create your Sidewiki page owner entry"

Sidewiki was a web page annotation service that Google launched last year. It allows users to make notes against pages on the web. These notes can also be made public so that other users who are using the Google Searchwiki can see other users thoughts/ideas.

"After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly? With the feature that were introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own."

As a website owner " its important for you to claim your site in Sidewiki. That way " you can at least have your say before every one else comments on your webpages.

Im still a believer that eventually (if not already), Google will use these social web elements to help rank listings in the future. So claiming and optimizing via sidewiki could be a further element in your future SEO plan.

"Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile".

As webmaster or site owner " its important to see how your website is seen from Googlebots point of view. At the end of the day " that determines how your site is going to be indexed.

Now for the mobile savvy webmasters " you can request to see how your mobile site is seen by the Googlebot.

"After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML."

While this wont seem important to many of you now " just think about how many people you know that have smart phones and surf the web on them. When you consider the number of people surfing the web on mobiles " it suddenly becomes far more important.

So pop over to your webmaster account and check out the new features. Let us know what you think and whether you will find them useful.

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Tag: GoogleBot, Sidewiki

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View All Articles by Rene LeMerle