may i ask what we are discussing here? as it seems to me ist like any other survey topics as Is phpBB any good? or is "some temamember" a nice guy/girl?
I'm inclined to agree with Rotsblok on this one as i'm not seeing the discussion value in this.
I'll leave it open for now, but will lock it on the first signs of it turning into a survey topic.
I'm a web-designing code-decrypting tech-support musician
|| Twitter || Flickr || phpBB Snippets || Formerly known as cherokee red
I just asked those questions because I didn't find any good use of google webmasters in the initial stages of my website's launch. Google didn't visit my pages any often. Now that it's been up or a while google visits my site anyway even though I don't have any sitemaps added to it by myself.
Tools like StatCounter are much more useful I would say. You get all kinds of stats like, total hits, most popular pages, recent keyword searches, search engine results (results coming from which search engines the most etc). And other stuff. Just keep reading the stats you'll get a very good idea for what to do with your website.
It may not be useful if you're not getting any traffic but if you have even a moderate amount of traffic it will provide some very valuable information. Off the top of my head you can get a quick glimpse of how many pages Google is crawling per day, what searches you r pages showed up in, the top serches that reuslted in someone going to your site. It also provides a lot of diagnostic tools, I've caught more than few things that needed fixing through there.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
One of my favorite things about google webmaster is the tools section. They have a great little tool to both analyze and generate your robots.txt file. The analyze is great because you can test your robot.txt on different urls to make sure you are not disallowing a bot from indexing certain pages you want to be index. The robots.txt can get really tricky when you start filtering on a query string. The analyze tool takes the guess work out of it.