I recently began using Google’s webmaster tools.  I can’t heap enough kudos on the usability of the information available.

For example, this morning I pulled all of the index’s 404 entries for this blog.  While 99% of them were generated in response to disabling the post e-mail function in early November (all of the old “e-mail this to a friend” links no longer exist), there were eight or nine of them that were typos.  I was able to locate all of them—well, I hope all of them—and get them corrected.  A handful were leftovers from the transition from PostNuke to WordPress and the subsequent URI changes I made at that time.  Some were silly mistakes such as not including quotes around link targets.  A few were problems due to writing a post in Word and not properly changing all the fancy quotes to text quotes.  Within fifteen minutes of downloading the report, I had located all of the mistakes I could find that correlated to Google’s index errors.  I’ll check the report again in a week or two and verify I didn’t miss anything.

In viewing the site’s crawl information, I also noticed there was (I assume) a brief network hiccup while Googlebot was on the site.  Six or seven posts returned “network not available” errors.  Those posts are intact and the site is available, so my guess is there was a brief intertubes/intarweb/internets boo-boo that was transient and fixed almost as quickly as it had shown up.

It also offers me the ability to control how often Google indexes the site, see statistics for site crawls, set the preferred domain for index entries, and a plethora of other controls and statistics.  Overall, it’s a pretty cool set of tools.