Tuesday, April 24, 2012<\/p>\n
\n Webmaster Tools added lots of new functionality over the past year, such as improvements to \n Subscriber stats reports the number of subscribers to a site’s RSS or Atom feeds. This \n The Create robots.txt tool provides a way to generate \n Site performance is a \n If you have questions or comments about these changes please post them in our
\n Sitemaps<\/a> and
\n Crawl errors<\/a>, as well as the new
\n User Administration<\/a>
\n feature. In recent weeks, we also updated the look and feel of our user interface to match
\n Google’s new style. In order to keep bringing you improvements, we occasionally review each of our
\n features to see if they’re still useful in comparison to the maintenance and support they require.
\n As a result of our latest round of spring cleaning, we’ll be removing the Subscriber stats
\n feature, the Create robots.txt tool, and the Site performance feature in the next two weeks.\n<\/p>\n
\n functionality is currently provided in Feedburner, another Google product which offers its own
\n subscriber stats as well as other cool features specifically geared for
\n feeds<\/a>
\n of all types. If you are looking for a replacement to Subscriber stats in Webmaster Tools, check
\n out
\n Feedburner<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n robots.txt<\/a> files for the purpose of blocking
\n specific parts of a site from being crawled by Googlebot. This feature has very low usage, so
\n we’ve decided to remove it from Webmaster Tools. While many websites don’t even need a robots.txt
\n file, if you feel that you do need one, it’s easy to make one yourself in a text editor or use one
\n of the many other tools available on the web for generating robots.txt files.\n<\/p>\n
\n Webmaster Tools Labs<\/a>
\n feature that provides information about the average load time of your site’s pages. This feature
\n is also being removed due to low usage. Now you might have heard our announcement from a couple of
\n years ago that the latency of a site’s pages is a
\n factor in our search ranking algorithms<\/a>.
\n This is still true, and you can analyze your site’s performance using the
\n Site Speed<\/a>
\n feature in Google Analytics or using Google’s
\n PageSpeed<\/a> online. There are also
\n many other site performance analysis tools available like
\n WebPageTest<\/a> and the
\n YSlow<\/a> browser plugin.\n<\/p>\n
\n Help Forum<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n