Back in September, Google launched an update to its Webmaster Tools API to make it more consistent with other Google APIs. Those using other APIs from the company would find the new one easier to implement, the company said.

Now, Google has announced that with the pending shutdown of ClientLogin, the old version will be shut down on April 20.

“If you’re still using the old API, getting started with the new one is fairly easy,” says Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller. “The new API covers everything from the old version except for messages and keywords. We have examples in Python, Java, as well as OACurl (for command-line fans & quick testing). Additionally, there’s the Site Verification API to add sites programmatically to your account. The Python search query data download will continue to be available for the moment, and replaced by an API in the upcoming quarters.”

When it introduced the new API, Google said it made it easier to authenticate apps or web services, and provided access to some of the main Webmaster Tools features. These are some specific things you can do with it:

• list, add, or remove sites from your account (you can currently have up to 500 sites in your account)
• list, add, or remove sitemaps for your websites
• get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps
• get a time-series of all kinds of crawl errors for your site
• list crawl error samples for specific types of errors
• mark individual crawl errors as “fixed” (this doesn’t change how they’re processed, but can help simplify the UI for you)

You can find the links for the Python, Java, and OACurl examples here.

Mueller says that comments and questions about the API should be posted in this blog post or this forum.

Image via Google