Benefits of Using Google Webmaster Tools

The link:www.domain.com command in Google shows only a fraction of total number of backlinks indexed in Google. To see total number of incoming links indexed by Google, you need to create an account in Google Webmaster Tools and verify your website. Some of other benefits of webmaster tools are:

1. Display crawl errors such as broken links and pages not accessible
2. Shows pages with duplicate or missing Title and Meta Description
3. Provision to submit XML Sitemap
4. Shows website crawling stats and allows selecting crawling rate
5. Setting such as country to be targeted, www or non-www version on SERPs etc.
6. Robots.txt validation and page removal request
7. Malware infection information and re-inclusion request for banned websites

It should be noted that it is not a part of Google Analytics but rather a platform to let webmasters know how their website is viewed by search engine. Yahoo and Bing also have their version of Webmaster Tools.