Fetch! Google. Fetch!

A few SEO guys have been talking about a couple of new things that are now available in the Google Webmaster Tools. Webmasters now have access to a malware search, and a tool to ‘fetch’ a URL as Google would.

The malware details tool is nice, and should probably be a standard item in the toolkit, but I think the more interesting development is the ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ tool. At the moment it is very basic, and only returns the header response of a page and the details of any redirects or problems with a page, but if this is the shape of things to come, this could prove useful. What I am imagining is a site header/redirect checker that highlights any 302’s, and allows you to submit a list of redirects that should be in place, and alerts you if they are broken. That would be nice, and I believe that these are the type of things that Microsoft’s IIS SEO Toolkit provides, but that is limited to people using Microsoft servers, as well as being comfortable changing their server configuration.

These new tools are obviously a first iteration of some potential new features, but it is good to see that the Webmaster Tools are still being looked at by Google, and there are new things on the way.