Today I was amazed to come across this nice new tool from Google, a tool that provides a little peek into exactly how their spiders view your Website.

If you have a web site then you need to take a look at this.

First get yourself a Google Account - This could be a gmail account, Adwords account etc.

Then Login to that account and don't close your web browser.

Now go to this page: this page at the bottom of this page is a box to add your web site address. Enter it in there.

Now before you can view the stats you have to prove to Google that you are in control of the site so you will to verify the site first. This is done by clicking verify next to the site Google will provide you with a page name. All that you need to do is create an empty page with the name that google requests and add this page to the root of your web site.

There are instructions on the site to explain all this better than I can :)

So cutting to the chase what can you find out from this tool? - Well you can see things such as:

Indexed pages in your site
Pages that refer to your site
The most popular queries that your Website shows up for
Pages that link to your site
Crawl statistics: Pages succesfully crawled, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages that generated HTTP errors or were unreachable
The current cache of your site
Information Google has about your site
Pages that are similar to your site
The top queries from which you get clickthroughs
The PageRank distribution within your site
Various indexing stats (pages indexed, etc.)

This is an amazing glimpse into the inner workings of Google - and an excellent resource for Webmasters, and something that hopefully the other search engines will do as well.