What Webmaster Tools Do You Want in 2014?

As a website owner, you’ll have your own views about what sort of webmaster tools you want.

In an ideal world you would be able to pick up the phone to Google and say, “hey guys, you know what would be really cool…?” and proceed to rattle off your wish list.

Well, I don’t have a phone number for you, but here’s the next best thing.

Matt Cutts recently posted on his personal blog that he wants to know what you would like to see from Webmaster Tools in 2014.

How cool is that?

He asked the same question back in 2007 and, since then, has delivered on a lot of peoples’ requests.

Just to get your little grey cells working, here are a few suggestions he makes:

• Making it easier or faster to claim authorship or do authorship markup
• Improving the reporting of spam, bugs, errors or issues
• Having the option to download the web pages that Google has seen from your site, in case of a disaster
• Checklists to help new business
• Better tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content or scrapers
• Show the source pages that link to your 404 pages, so you can contact other sites and ask if they want to fix their broken links
• Better bulk url removal
• Ways for site owners to tell Google more about their site

You can see a full list here.

Of course, there’s no promise that every request will be actions, but at least it means that Google wants to hear from you, so why not make the most of the opportunity?

Author: Sally Ormond, Copywriter and MD at Briar Copywriting Ltd. Follow her on Twitter and Google+