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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Webmaster Tools added lots of new functionality over the past year, such as improvements to
Sitemaps and
Crawl errors, as well as the new
User Administration
feature. In recent weeks, we also updated the look and feel of our user interface to match
Google's new style. In order to keep bringing you improvements, we occasionally review each of our
features to see if they're still useful in comparison to the maintenance and support they require.
As a result of our latest round of spring cleaning, we'll be removing the Subscriber stats
feature, the Create robots.txt tool, and the Site performance feature in the next two weeks.
Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site's RSS or Atom feeds. This
functionality is currently provided in Feedburner, another Google product which offers its own
subscriber stats as well as other cool features specifically geared for
feeds
of all types. If you are looking for a replacement to Subscriber stats in Webmaster Tools, check
out
Feedburner.
The Create robots.txt tool provides a way to generate
robots.txt files for the purpose of blocking
specific parts of a site from being crawled by Googlebot. This feature has very low usage, so
we've decided to remove it from Webmaster Tools. While many websites don't even need a robots.txt
file, if you feel that you do need one, it's easy to make one yourself in a text editor or use one
of the many other tools available on the web for generating robots.txt files.
Site performance is a
Webmaster Tools Labs
feature that provides information about the average load time of your site's pages. This feature
is also being removed due to low usage. Now you might have heard our announcement from a couple of
years ago that the latency of a site's pages is a
factor in our search ranking algorithms.
This is still true, and you can analyze your site's performance using the
Site Speed
feature in Google Analytics or using Google's
PageSpeed online. There are also
many other site performance analysis tools available like
WebPageTest and the
YSlow browser plugin.
If you have questions or comments about these changes please post them in our
Help Forum.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google Webmaster Tools is removing the Subscriber stats, Create robots.txt, and Site performance features due to low usage and the availability of alternative solutions."],["Feedburner is recommended as a replacement for the Subscriber stats feature for tracking RSS or Atom feed subscribers."],["Website owners needing a robots.txt file can easily create one using a text editor or other readily available tools."],["While Site performance is being removed, site speed remains a factor in search ranking, and Google recommends using Google Analytics' Site Speed, Google's PageSpeed, or other tools like WebPageTest and YSlow for performance analysis."]]],["Webmaster Tools will remove three features within two weeks: Subscriber stats, Create robots.txt tool, and Site performance. Subscriber stats can be replaced with Feedburner. The robots.txt tool had low usage, and users can create their own or use alternative web tools. Site performance information is still relevant for search ranking and can be analyzed with Google Analytics' Site Speed, PageSpeed, or other third-party tools like WebPageTest and YSlow.\n"]]
