It’s been a while since I’ve written about Google Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en). It’s a tool for folks who have websites. Sign up and it will provide you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. So that’s nice – but unfortunately last weekend I learned an even more valuable part of the tool.

Google Webmaster Tools will help monitor the health of your website. For example it will alert you to any crawl errors (broken links et al) and any malware on your site. This was my issue last week. I had a site with suspected malware. I use two other forms of site protection on the site – but neither provided me with the level of detail that Google Webmaster Tools did. Specifically, it told me where the suspicious code was – at least for the forward facing pages of the site. (Because I block access to the web-based admin tools on the site, it wasn’t helpful there.) I still had to dig through to find the code and delete and/or fix it – but the info provided by Google was invaluable.

While I hope you’ll never need this info – I’m glad that you’re now armed with it!