Google has done quite a lot of changes to Google Webmaster Tools console recently. Just in a couple of days such things as a “Page Analise Link Keyword” and “Content Removal Tool” have appeared there.
First the Page Analise Link Keyword and Phrases functionality, it is showing now name variations of the links. First the functionality of the external links has been implemented at Google Webmasters Tools, but it has shown only the name of the external links, with no details of how those names are written or variations between the anchor text, but right now there is a new part at the same page of the Statistics Page analysis, but with much more information about the links text to your site, and as usually all this information is available for download in CSV format. Links text is one of the most important criterias for the search engines, and every webmaster like to know with what text other pages are referring their site, and Google Webmasters Console gives exact information about top 100 links to your page, so this is some information you won’t be wishing to miss.
Secondly, there is new “Content Removal Tool” which comes in line with a whole sequence of the changes related to the robots.txt file. Google Webmaster Console has added a new functionality to remove content without altering a line in robots.txt, with a help of new interface, you can remove indexing from selected files to whole directories on your site. I see that this is a very good improvement, but as the web is not equal to Google (there are still Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and MSN around), every reasonable webmaster will still need to remove manually in robots.txt all those files and directories. But if you don’t have access to your server and need to remove some file or directory from Google just go to your Google Webmaster Console, select URL Removals -> New Removal Request, and then just enter its name, and you are done.
Google Webmaster tools started very slowly with quite a few functionality available, but with no shade of doubts, Google has improved it quite a lot in the recent months (first of all with exact links to your site) and it is exciting to see where they are going to take it next. With Yahoo’s SiteExplorer appearing on the horizon this is quite a powerful move, and i know quite a number of people who has “switched” from SiteExplorer to Google Webmaster Tools console in the recent 3-4 months.