Google Gets a Little Blue and Furry

It’s official that Google is a bit more blue and furry today as we have now been approved to be a Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider. BlueFurÂ joins a small select group of fellow web hosting companies that are approved to create and verify Google Webmaster accounts. We are feverishly working on building a GUI to the Google API so that we can get everything started.

What is Google Webmaster Tools?
The Google Webmaster Tools is a collection of tools that help you diagnose and create search engine friendly sites. It includes the following tools…

Tool	Â	Description
Web Crawl	Â	See errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site.
Content Analysis	Â	See potential problems with site metadata, such as title and meta description information.
Mobile Crawl Errors	Â	See errors and problems encountered by Google’s crawlers while accessing pages on your site created specifically for viewing on mobile cell phones.
Top Search Queries	Â	See which search queries most often returned pages from your site, and which of them were clicked.
Crawl Stats	Â	See your distribution info for your site, including the current PageRank for pages on your site.
Subscriber Stats	Â	If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut.
What Googlebot sees	Â	See details about how the Googlebot sees your site.
Index Stats	Â	Learn how your site is indexed by Google, including which pages are indexed, and which other sites point to your site.
External Links	Â	See which pages on your site have links pointing to them from other sites.
Internal Links	Â	See which pages on your site have links pointing to them internally from elsewhere on your site.
Site Links	Â	See which links on your site have been identified as candidates for appearing directly in Google search results.
Sitemaps	Â	Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.
Analyze robots.txt	Â	See whether your robots.txt file blocks specific URLs as is, or with modifications you make. Test against various Google user-agents, too.
Generate robots.txt	Â	Interactively create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled.
Enhance 404 pages	Â	Help users who receive a Page Not Found error find the information they need.
Geographical Target	Â	Associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area.
Enhanced Image Search	Â	Enable Google’s enhanced search for images on your site, including advanced labeling techniques for images hosted by Google.
Set Crawl Rate	Â	See statistics about how often Google crawls your site, and optionally adjust that speed if desired.
Set Preferred Domain	Â	Associate a preferred domain with this site, to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.
Remove URLs	Â	Remove content from the Google index, including expediting that removal

What is the Plan?
Once the GUI is done newÂ BlueFurÂ customers will have an option during sign-up to have aÂ Google Webmaster ToolsÂ account automatically created for their domain. We will then work on integrating verification and sitemap tools into each account to make it easier for customers to get started. If you are an existing customer and want to use these tools you can manually signup.

Have any questions or suggestions? Post them in the comments.