Google webmaster account new features
Today I logged in to my webmaster account as I do regularly to keep up to date on some of the operations of the websites we host and manage and I noticed yet another great tool. The google webmaster account is an excellent way of monitoring your website and managing how internet users find your site.
So this new feature they have added has been a long time coming and finally it is here. I personally think that this is the best feature they have added yet since the ability to manage sitemaps. You can now request that specific url’s be removed from the google index with a simple little form. You may not think this is a big deal but imagine this scenario.
You hired a freelance programmer to make some updates to your website. After three weeks of thinking everything is just fine and all looks well you go to google and query your site address and oh boy what you find is ugly. Hopefully all you find is a few error messages that are not overly revealing but even worse you find that this programmer left a file displaying private security related info to the world and guess who has it. Yep google has indexed it. In order to remove this entry from google’s index before you could attempt to contact them but they are very busy people over there so that could take a very long time. The other option, one that we have favored but is not something just anyone can or would even know how to do and that would be .htaccess and mod_rewrite. This of coarse can be time consuming and is not even supported by a mass amount of the hosting providers. Now just fill out the form and thats it.
Well I think it almost goes without saying but if you did find information in a search engine query related to your site that could be used to compromise I would suggest not only getting rid of the search engines entry but change all the passwords and user names or whatever other revealing information that was compromised and this time take better care to make sure that tpye of thing does not happen again. If you have a website and need custom programming, management or any other related services stop over to Nuts N Bytes and see what we have to offer.