What do you want to see the
Webmaster Central team do next? About 10 months ago, Google Blogoscoped asked
what people wanted next. It’s time to ask that question again, because the team has made great progress. From the original thread:
- See the backlinks for my site:
DONE. Site owners can now
see their own backlinks.
- Verify an IP address is really Googlebot:
DONE, not in the webmaster tool, but by
using a reverse+forward DNS lookup.
- An option to easily remove URLs from the index:
DONE. Google’s URL removal tool has been
ported into the webmaster console, and it allows site owners to see and revoke their self-removals.
- Show how many people are subscribed to my website’s feeds in Google Reader:
DONE, but not in the console. Google Reader now
reports these numbers when fetching feeds.
Feedburner will give you even more stats for free.
- Communicate with webmasters in an authenticated way:
DONE. Just last week, Google added a
webmaster message center to provide authenticated communication with site owners. The Webmaster Central team has done of ton of other stuff in the last few months as well.
So let’s ask the question again. I’m going to try doing a poll (it might not work with Google Reader, so you might have to visit my actual blog page). I sat down and thought of a few features that might be cool, then added some suggestions from the
original Blogoscoped thread. Vote for your favorite feature below, or leave a comment if you have a different idea. Please note: I’m sure the Webmaster Central team will be interested to see what people like, but remember that these are just suggestions. Even if something is #1 in the poll, it’s still only a suggestion. The Webmaster Central team has to be free to pursue whatever they think is the most important.
What should the webmaster central team do next? - Tell Google the correct country or language for a site
- Show causes of 404 errors
- Show links on your site that are broken
- Tool to help move from one domain to a new domain
- More documentation and examples
- Diagnostic wizard for common site problems
- Tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content
- Score the crawlability or accessibility of pages
- More information about penalties or other scoring issues
- Ability to show/download all pages from a site (e.g. if your server crashed)
- Some type of rank checking
- Show PageRank numbers instead of none/low/medium/high
- Show pages that don't validate
- Tell Google a parameter doesn't matter
- A way to list supplemental result pages
- Integrate "Add URL" feature
- Option to "disavow" backlinks from or to a site
- Fetch a page as Googlebot to verify correct behavior
View Results 
Webmaster console features? - Read More...
