Google Webmaster Tools Fails To Provide Accurate Information, Sometimes

Google’s Webmaster Tools has awesome potential, and I’ve been pleased with the intermittent service, sort of. The site works when it wants to, or just when I’m not using it I guess. Here’s some of the problems I’ve ran into or noticed while using the service, which may eventually be required to use if you’d like your site to be included in Google’s index.

Site Verification, NOT VERIFIED, again?!

So I’ve added my sites to the webmaster tools, verified them, or so I thought. At random times, webmaster tools will inform me that my site isn’t verified, which tells them I’m not the owner, which prevents me from viewing stats offered by the service. I’d understand their updating or working on the system, but even google should know the difference between a development server and a production server, right? Why wouldn’t anyone make changes to a site being used by thousands, if not millions of webmasters worldwide? This shouldn’t even surprise me because the server team at my job loves to apply patches to all 16,000+ computers without testing them first.

No pages are indexed? That’s a lie…

I logged into webmaster tools this morning to check up on a few of my sites, and this is what I see for jruck.

That’s not true, google. I performed the “site:www.jruck.com” to see two of my pages in jruck are indexed, even though webmaster tools indicates otherwise…
Then I performed the exact same query, “site:jruck.com” on another google server, and I get 70 results.
What the hell is that? It’s three different answers, that’s what. I have no idea what to think of this - should I be upset, concerned, understanding? Sounds like webmaster tools is more trouble than it’s worth.While searching for answers, I came across several discussions explaining a wide range of problems/issues other webmasters have run into. One guy blogged about his entire site being removed from google’s index (130+ thousand pages), but google promptly responded with an answer, and their answer was surprisingly comforting. Google informed the webmaster that his site had been hax0red and that the cracker had placed several hidden links at the bottom of the hacked page, all pointing to pr0n & viagra sites. When was the last time yahoo ever let a webmaster know their site had been defaced?Google has a method to their madness, and I hope the little kinks and quirks I and other webmaster’s are mentioning do get ironed out. It seems google has a habit of setting trends that yahoo and msn love to follow.

Published July 25th, 2007 by Guy Patterson | Google | No comments

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