As you probably noticed yesterday, Google released some very interesting and new features for his very useful Webmaster Tools utility…
Before the change, to view variations in the Search Queries Webmaster Tools and evaluate your result in SERPs, you had to work it out with the fantastic, but not so much user friendly Webmaster Tools API. Not that useful if you’re not a Geek, a Zend_GData or a Java/Java Web developer…
You now just have to click on the “Your site on the web” > “Search Queries” tab in your browser…
Here’s the result:
Google makes SEO easier with some new features added to Webmaster Tools!
As you can see, we now have 9 sorting features instead of 5 
Very useful to see if you’re doing SEO the right way (just sort your results by their Average Position in SERPs), or if the period for a search term is not the right one (to be compared with Google Insights).
You can take a look at the impressions count change, to see if you can get some more visitors from Search Engines for a certain Keyword on which you should focus on because it is trending right now. Otherwise you can just leave the SEO work you’re doing on some key words because it is no more a trend!
This is surely going to change the way SEO experts works on positioning optimization (don’t tell me it’s not an affidable tool… It works great, also if displayed values are only relative! Everyone out there who’s not a developer should find these features vital for their success in SEO!)
That’s not all, we’ve not finished yet!
There’s more for web developers!
You probably didn’t notice it, but if you take a look at the “Site configuration” > “Settings” > “Parameter handling” tab in your Webmaster Tools, then you’ll notice that you can now decide what parameters google should use for your urls containing GET parameters! Great, I’ll no more get duplicate content from wrong in-site-search results being crawled by Google!
That’s very useful for developers too lazy to implement the Canonical meta-tag for their websites ^_^
If you want to discover more, you can find out great news on the Google Official Webmaster Central Blog…
Good luck and have fun!
I know this post is more than a year old, but since there’s still no way to access the data without the zend package, i’ve written a simple PHP class that doesn’t require any 3rd party libraries/packages. Just download the class, enter your login details and you can download the top search query data, as well as the top pages data, as csv automatically.
http://code.google.com/p/php-webmaster-tools-downloads/
Actually, I see no harm in using Zend Framework’s GData for this stuff
Rewriting it is probably an overkill, don’t you think?
Doesn’t mean your solution is not valid 😉
You’re right about that using the GData lib won’t harm. But when i wrote this up, i was working on a machine where i did not have had privileges to install new packages. So that was my quick approach to get hands on the data anyway. 😉
Hi i still can’t see the screen you see….can u update this article with the 2012 version please? Do u know if something changed?
Thanks
It should be under the “traffic” section