Webmaster Tools for Blogger

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With our new Webmaster Tools integration that information is just a click or two away.



Webmaster Tools is a Google service that provides you with detailed information about your website’s visibility to Google’s search engine. You can see how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, find out who links to your site, what searches are used to find your site, and even control how your page appears in the Google web results.



We’ve added a new link from the Blogger in Draft dashboard to take you directly to Webmaster Tools. If you follow it, we’ll add all your blogs to Webmaster Tools and verify them for you automatically. From there, you can poke around and learn about how Google search sees your blog.





You can learn more about Webmaster Tools at Google’s Webmaster Help Center.



As always, your comments and feedback are extremely important to us and we hope you’ll give this feature a test drive.

New Feature: Star Ratings

With our new Star Ratings feature, your readers can easily rate your posts — or the things you post about — from one star to five stars with a single click, right from the post footer.

Think of Star Ratings as a mini-poll for each of your posts. If you blog about fashion, food, crafts, quotes, or art we think this will be particularly useful to you.

To enable Star Ratings, log it to http://draft.blogger.com/ and go to your Layouts page. From there, click the “Edit” link for the Blog Posts page element and then check the “Show Star Ratings” checkbox.

You can customize the location of the stars within the post by dragging the preview around in the “Arrange Items” box.

Additional Notes

• This is a Layouts-only feature. If you’re using a Classic template you’ll need to upgrade to Layouts to add Star Ratings.
• The star ratings widget should blend seamlessly with most solid-colored blog backgrounds (one exception is Rounders, where the edges of the widget will be visible via a color change). The text and background colors for the ratings are taken from the following skin variables:
  
  • Foreground: textcolor, textColor
  • Backrgound: mainBgColor, bgcolor
• If you have customized your blog widget’s template you may not see the Star Ratings. You will need to either reset your blog widget’s template or copy the Star Ratings code from a fresh template.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or just rate this post!