Google Webmaster Tools | New Features | Malware details & Fetch as Googlebot

As announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, two new features have been rolled out in a special ‘labs’ section of Google Webmaster Tools. The two new features are Malware details and Fetch as Googlebot.

Malware details

Finding out whether your site had been maliciously injected or modified with Malware has been fairly difficult to determine in the past. Now it’s a whole lot easier. Google has announced the an option within its webmaster tools that will show you segments of code(injected HTML tags, JavaScript, or embedded Flash files) within your site that it considers Malware. This will help you get rid of any nasty Malware issues affecting your site and prevent any possible ranking penalties. This tool is based on automatic Malware scanners that Google developed to clean up their index. If possible Google will also provide details about the particular Malware that is afflicting your site. Below is a screenshot of the new feature (The Bruce Clay Australia site doesn’t have any Malware, awesome).

Fetch as Googlebot

The fetch as Googlebot feature allows you to see a specific page on your site pretty much exactly as Googlebot sees it. On first viewing it looks remarkably similar to the source code of any given page however it also includes other information such as the HTTP headers information. This tool is useful for a couple of reasons; first of all it may give you an insight as to how Googlebot views complicated and advanced JavaScript functions on your site. It’s also handy as it will quickly highlight any issues you may be having with your robots.txt or .HTACCESS file. On the Google Webmaster Central Blog some users seem to be limited to receiving only 585 lines of code or a file that it’s limited to 100kb, however these maybe isolated incidences.

These two new features may not be revolutionary or have massive SEO benefit but are a nice incremental improvement to Google Webmaster Tools.

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