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Google Webmaster Tools has announced adding a new feature: an alert function that will notify webmasters on significant changes in the search query data.

Google Webmaster Tools alerts function sets up automated messages to draw your attention to this or that issue. July saw the addition of a Crawl Error Alerts and as of yesterday Google have supplemented the package with Search Queries Alerts.

What this means in practice is that Google Webmaster Tools, which already monitors the impressions and clicks for your designated sites, will send you a message when a significant spike or drop occurs in either of these figures.

Image: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

This handy feature of Webmaster Tools saves time by drawing your attention to the anomalies as and when they occur. You should investigate the causes which might lie behind sudden changes in the impressions or clicks on your site as they happen, but when things are running as expected you don’t have to spend time monitoring figures which aren’t out of the ordinary.