Webmaster Tools

Add your site

If you have a Google Account (like a Gmail address), you can sign in to Webmaster Tools straight away. If not, you can get a free Google Account now.

Once you have your account, sign in to Webmaster Tools and click Add a site. We recommend adding every version of your site (for example, add both example.com and www.example.com). More information.

Verify your site

Because Google needs to know you own a site before we can give you information about it, we'll ask you to verify your site by making a change that only a site owner can do. There are several options for verifying your site:

• Adding a meta tag to your site’s HTML. This is a good method if you can edit your home page’s code.
• Uploading a file we specify to the server. Choose this if you have access to your server.
• Using your Google Analytics tracking code.
• Verifying via your site’s domain registrar.

More information about verification options.

Once your site has been successfully verified, it may take a few days for data to appear in Webmaster Tools.

Add other users to your site

If multiple people will need access to your site data, you can easily add and remove users. You can specify permissions for each user. More information.

Google uses the Webmaster Tools Message Center to communicate with verified site owners. We may periodically send you messages about your site for the following reasons:

• Critical site health issues—for example, we’ll let you know if your site is down or inaccessible, or if it’s infected with malware.
• Problems we’re having crawling or indexing pages on your site.
• Information about changes to your Webmaster Tools account.
• News and information you may find useful.

We strongly recommend having messages forwarded to your email account. This way, you won't miss critical notifications if you don't regularly visit Webmaster Tools.

Specify a preferred domain

Technically, http://example.com and http://www.example.com are completely different sites and can display completely different content.

To avoid potential problems and get a better view of your data, we recommend adding both versions of your site to Webmaster Tools, and then specifying the version you prefer (Google calls this a "preferred domain").

Specify a geographical target

If your site is aimed at users in a specific geographic region, tell us about it. (For example, if your site http://paris.example.com covers restaurants in Paris, you can target your site at users in France, rather than Canada.) This will help us in determining the relevancy of your content to users' searches.

To determine if Google is having any problem accessing or understanding your site's content, check the Crawl Errors page in Webmaster Tools. This page lists problems Google encountered when attempting to crawl your site. There are two types of errors.

• Site errors: Problems that prevent Google from accessing your site at all. These often mean that your site is down, and you should address these issues as quickly as possible. Often these occur because your server is down or overloaded, or because your site or web hoster is blocking Googlebot.
• URL errors: Problems Googlebot encountered when trying to crawl specific pages. Your site or webhoster may be blocking access to these pages, or a visitor may have clicked a broken link or a link to a deleted page.

To check a specific URL at any time, use the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools. More information on crawl errors.

Once you've added your site to Webmaster Tools and verified ownership, you'll be able to access detailed information about it. With Webmaster Tools, you can diagnose potential problems that may impact your site's ranking in search results.