Site Performance, Subscriber Stats & Robots.txt Tool Removed From Google Webmaster Tools

Google announced they are removing three features from Google Webmaster Tools. Google made the announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog saying the three features going away include the site performance report, the subscriber stats and the robots.txt creation tool.
Google placed reversed the order of these features when they wrote about it, trying to mitigate the importance of removing some of these features. Site Performance going away is going to be frustrating for a lot of Google Webmaster Tools users. Subscriber stats is not as important and robots.txt is really not a big deal for most webmasters.

Site Performance:

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.

Subscriber Stats:

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.

Robots.txt Tool:

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.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (formerly adCenter Add-in for Excel ^Beta) is a keyword research and optimization tool that operates in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and now 2010. It provides keyword expansion, research, pricing and KPI data, allowing you to maximize marketing ROI for your paid search and content ad campaigns. The Microsoft Advertising Intelligence tool lets you:

• Quickly and easily build out lists of suggested keywords and develop informed keyword strategies based on actual Bing and Yahoo! network data, including: relevance, volume, cost history, demographic and geographic.
• Leverage actual historic and forecasted monthly query and content data to optimize your keyword campaigns based on what potential customers are actually doing, and spend more on what works and less on what doesn’t.
• Tailor your bidding strategy based on pricing data for keyword-specific metrics such as clicks, impressions, position, click-through rate and cost per click.
• Gather pricing KPIs for specific businesses to determine the monetization potential of a vertical and how well it is performing.

Download Microsoft Advertising Intelligence today to create more effective paid search and content campaigns. Also make sure to check out our helpful MAI overview tutorial to get the most out of our tool.

Ready to get started?

• Make sure you have Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or 2010 installed and closed.
• If you don’t have Microsoft Office Excel 2010, visit Office Online for a free 60-day trial version.
• Uninstall any previous version of Microsoft adCenter Add-in for Excel.
• For Microsoft Office Excel 2007 users you will need to download Visual Studio 2010 Tools before installing the Microsoft Advertising Tool.

Source: http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/adcenter-downloads/microsoft-advertising-intelligence

Google Panda Updates between November, 2011 - March, 2012

Panda 3.1  -   18th November   2011 - Minor Panda algorithm data refresh (affects <1% of all searches).

o   References:- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

·         Panda 3.2  -   15th January 2012 - algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result

o   This algorithmic change affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.

o   References : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

·         Panda 3.3  -  27th February 2012 - 40 changes reported including related searches, sitelinks, indexing, SafeSearch, site query update, link evaluation, improved local results  and more

o   References:- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/02/search-quality-highlights-40-changes.html

·         Panda 3.4   -  23rd March 2012 – 50 changes reported for March including Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing, Sitelinks data refresh, Better indexing of profile pages, Improvements to results for navigational queries, +1 button in search for more countries and domains

o  References:- http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-50-changes.html