Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 3:52 PM
Webmaster level: All
Webmaster Tools added lots of new functionality over the past year, such as improvements to Sitemaps and Crawl errors, as well as the new User Administration feature. In recent weeks, we also updated the look & feel of our user interface to match Google's new style. In order to keep bringing you improvements, we occasionally review each of our features to see if they’re still useful in comparison to the maintenance and support they require. As a result of our latest round of spring cleaning, we'll be removing the Subscriber stats feature, the Create robots.txt tool, and the Site performance feature in the next two weeks.
Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site’s RSS or Atom feeds. This functionality is currently provided in Feedburner, another Google product which offers its own subscriber stats as well as other cool features specifically geared for feeds of all types. If you are looking for a replacement to Subscriber stats in Webmaster Tools, check out Feedburner.
The Create robots.txt tool provides a way to generate robots.txt files for the purpose of blocking specific parts of a site from being crawled by Googlebot. This feature has very low usage, so we've decided to remove it from Webmaster Tools. While many websites don't even need a robots.txt file, if you feel that you do need one, it's easy to make one yourself in a text editor or use one of the many other tools available on the web for generating robots.txt files.
Site performance is a Webmaster Tools Labs feature that provides information about the average load time of your site's pages. This feature is also being removed due to low usage. Now you might have heard our announcement from a couple of years ago that the latency of a site's pages is a factor in our search ranking algorithms. This is still true, and you can analyze your site's performance using the Site Speed feature in Google Analytics or using Google's PageSpeed online. There are also many other site performance analysis tools available like WebPageTest and the YSlow browser plugin.
If you have questions or comments about these changes please post them in our Help Forum.
Webmaster Tools added lots of new functionality over the past year, such as improvements to Sitemaps and Crawl errors, as well as the new User Administration feature. In recent weeks, we also updated the look & feel of our user interface to match Google's new style. In order to keep bringing you improvements, we occasionally review each of our features to see if they’re still useful in comparison to the maintenance and support they require. As a result of our latest round of spring cleaning, we'll be removing the Subscriber stats feature, the Create robots.txt tool, and the Site performance feature in the next two weeks.
Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site’s RSS or Atom feeds. This functionality is currently provided in Feedburner, another Google product which offers its own subscriber stats as well as other cool features specifically geared for feeds of all types. If you are looking for a replacement to Subscriber stats in Webmaster Tools, check out Feedburner.
The Create robots.txt tool provides a way to generate robots.txt files for the purpose of blocking specific parts of a site from being crawled by Googlebot. This feature has very low usage, so we've decided to remove it from Webmaster Tools. While many websites don't even need a robots.txt file, if you feel that you do need one, it's easy to make one yourself in a text editor or use one of the many other tools available on the web for generating robots.txt files.
Site performance is a Webmaster Tools Labs feature that provides information about the average load time of your site's pages. This feature is also being removed due to low usage. Now you might have heard our announcement from a couple of years ago that the latency of a site's pages is a factor in our search ranking algorithms. This is still true, and you can analyze your site's performance using the Site Speed feature in Google Analytics or using Google's PageSpeed online. There are also many other site performance analysis tools available like WebPageTest and the YSlow browser plugin.
If you have questions or comments about these changes please post them in our Help Forum.
14 comments:
Feedburner is the alternative? That's rediculous..
What happened to the New Beta Feedburner Dashboard? It disappeared without a trace in December 2011. See here
https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/feedburner-statistics/3qz8QQyWx0U
The last blog post from the official Google Feedburner Blog was in 2010!
Feedburner is has obviously been left to die by Google.
That's good. I think that all of this tools have no more used and should be cleaned. AS we can see subscribers stats from feedburner and measure site speed by YSlow and other tools, I am sure that have to be removed.
Please delete from main menu:
Help with:
Search queries
About Sitemaps
Additional support
Keywords
Crawl errors
Help center
Very often I make a mistake and I click - and then I am angry. I don´t need help every time I visit Google Webmaster Tools. Help - can be nicer - like in Gmail.
I'll miss a lot 'Site performance'. No other tool can show historical data of site's speed.
Big loss.
You mentioned several tools that will be disappearing. Are there any new goodies we can look forward to ?
Hey guys, now
That keyword "Make Money Online". Now that blank blog was removed.
I think, Google officials adjusting keywords results by our comments and hot reviews!
Really Shame on World Biggest Company!
When search updates occur I often see our images display on other websites. It would be nice to see google do better on image ownership. Dmca is such a waste of time
what about author statistics?
I hate your recent algorithm changes but I love the new "fixed" feature in the crawl errors section of webmaster tools.
I'm really irritated that WE have to file DMCA notices when someone copies our content. I hate it more that we have to do it because google often penalizes us when others copy our content.
Geee. Get it right :(
Please don't remove the "site performance" tab - it's a great tool for being able to see site performance at a glance, especially for clients without Google Analytics.
It would be better if Google gave the power in GWT to account administrators to devalue / disassociate links they found linking to their site that they had not done or authorized.
That in itself would take out any question of the potential to harm others with negativeseo.As for having to take out links that have caused spikes in the link profile just because of an offline promotion or a viral marketing success - this is where it gets ridiculous. Still - the baove suggestion would at least EMPOWER the webmaster back to do SOMETHING.
Why not arm business owners with such a feature in GWT?
You can use the GWT API to download 100,000 backlinks and you could utilize this to let Google know about links to your website you want it to ignore.For small business owners webmasters it would be even helpful just to have something basic on the GWT interface under Links to Your Website.
I had over 1300 google subscribers... feed burner shows only 380... where did they go?
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