Fetch as Google Adds Page Rendering

Google has announced an addition to the Fetch as Google tool in Webmaster Tools, allowing webmasters to render their webpage as Googlebot sees it and address any issues.

When selecting the Fetch and Render option, you have the option to have Googlebot fetch as Desktop, Mobile: Smartphone, Mobile: XHTML/WML or Mobile: cHTML. This option will help webmasters determine if there are any issues with the mobile version versus the desktop version of the site, as well as identify rendering issues.
The new Fetch and Render option takes longer than the usual Fetch option, which checks the crawlability of your site and then lets you submit pages to Google's index.
To access the Fetch as Google tool, simply log into your Webmaster Tools account, click on Crawl > Fetch as Google. It will default to the homepage of the site you have selected, or you can specify a page on the site, then select the Render option.
Be aware that when you Fetch as Google, Googlebot will honor any robots.txt or meta-tags that prohibits Google from crawling correctly. So if your site is in development, you’ll need to temporarily allow Googlebot if you want to check for issues prior to launching.
Fetch as Google with rendering is now live on all Google Webmaster Central accounts.


Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2347410/Fetch-as-Google-Adds-Page-Rendering

Google Webmaster Tools Give Users More Link Data

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts kicked off SES San Francisco this morning by announcing a change to the way Google Webmaster Tools serves backlinks to users. Now, instead of getting a huge list of backlinks in alphabetical order, they are giving a better representation of all the backlinks.
"If I download my backlinks in Webmaster Tools, my list ends at H. If you are Amazon or eBay, you get 000000a.com to 000000c.com," Cutts said.
When Google is serving 100,000 backlinks in Webmaster Tools, it wasn't that useful to users when they could get so many results from a single domain, and there was no way to sort them.
Shortly after the announcement this morning at SES, Google published a blog post detailing the changes:

Based on feedback from the webmaster community, we're improving how we select these backlinks to give sites a fuller picture of their backlink profile. The most significant improvement you'll see is that most of the links are now sampled uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically. You're also more likely to get example links from different top-level domains (TLDs) as well as from different domain names. The new links you see will still be sorted alphabetically.
Starting soon, when you download your data, you'll notice a much broader, more diverse cross-section of links. Site owners looking for insights into who recommends their content will now have a better overview of those links, and those working on cleaning up any bad linking practices will find it easier to see where to spend their time and effort.

This is a great change for webmasters, especially when people are trying to clean up after receiving a bad backlink warning. This was a problem for larger sites, and especially if someone was cleaning up a site that had thousands of low-quality/spammy backlinks pointing to a site.
The change has already gone live, so you can download a better cross-section of your backlinks in Google Webmaster Central right now.

Source : http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2294466/Google-Webmaster-Tools-Give-Users-More-Link-Data