Sometimes the CMS does not provide a 404-status-code, if a content in not available anymore. Now it is possible to check that with the Google-Webmaster-Tools. Take a look.

Today we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable "soft” or “crypto” 404s. A "soft 404" occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn't exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site's crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content. [more...]

Since we released the latest version of Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools we've gotten a bunch of feedback, most of which was overwhelmingly positive. Today, we're happy to bring even more improvements to Top Search Queries that we've implemented as a direct result of your feedback. First of all we've shortened "Top Search Queries" to be just "Search Queries" to better reflect all of the data provided by this feature. In addition to the name change you'll notice that Search Queries has several new updates. As requested by many of you, we're now showing an "Average position" column right on the main Search Queries page. This provides a quick at-a-glance way to see where your site is showing in the search results for specific queries. more...

Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It’s no wonder: the secret is out – as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn’t guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better [...]

Google supports now Sitemaps up to 50.000 entries, so enough for the most websites. Also the webmaster tools have been updated. Check out the sitemap-options. There are also links to resources for coders, to produce the sitemap-files with the right syntax.

Read the full article at: Google Webmaster Central Blog

Ok, we all are, at least a little, scared about the data Google is collecting and what they will do with it in the future. I understand the concerns to use Google Analytics on your website. But with the Google Webmaster-Tools (WT), you can get valueable data from Google, without using one “data-collecting” service of them.
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