Should I use Google Webmaster Tools?

No it won't hurt your rankings, or in any way make your site more visible to google than it already is. If your site violates their guidelines enough, it will get smacked regardless of whether you use WMT or not.

Its a great tool and has many benefits like counting backlinks, helps to analyze web contents and also helps you to know your sites load time.

Webmaster tools are great for keeping an eye on your website health, deep analysis, finding crawl errors etc. It can be used effectively to remove inconsistencies from website like duplicate titles, missing meta tag and descriptions. Webmaster tools are Google openness search feature. Using and understanding webmaster tools will help you to understand how Google search works.

Using the Webmaster tools , you have to know about your website crawling errors, indexing pages , malware errors , sitemap issues , etc.

Google webmaster tool is worth to use since you will get many help for your site and the knowledge to improve your site.Just try to read some tutorials online on how how to use this tool before you start to use it.

Webmaster tools can provide you fairly accurate gaze over your site health and optimization efforts. No. It doesn't help you in ranking
They know it anyway, Doesn't matter whether you are using webmaster tool or not

With the updated search query data provided in Google's Webmaster Tools you have a powerful tool to help improve organic search results. Not only can you view rankings for most of the organic keywords for which your website's pages appeared in recent search results, but more importantly, Google displays data such as Impressions (the number of times one of your web pages appeared in the search results for a keyword phrase), the number of Clicks and Click-Through Rates (CTR) for each keyword as well as data on the web pages/files returned in the search results.

You can use this data to improve organic search results including:

Improve Click-Through Rates by improving the listing.
Determine important keywords for which you should attempt to improve rankings.
Learn what pages to optimize to improve results.
Discover problems with pages and files being retuned in search results.

Examining the search query data Google provides also should make it very clear that the search listing itself is as important as or more important than the position where it appears in the search results, that indeed organic keyword rankings do vary widely, and that it's important to focus on the correct keywords. Google gives you almost all the data you need to determine the best keywords to focus on from among the keywords for which your site appeared in the search results (If you don't have Google's Webmaster Tools see the "For More Info" section below).

I've always been a little weary of it. (Call me paranoid.)

Statcounter is a pretty solid alternative IMO.

GWT won't rank your sites higher, but it's indeed a very good tool in analyzing your site's performance.

and like JSProjects before said, if you don't like it you can still use StatCounter. Its free version has everything one would need.

Great, thanks a lot, guys. Appreciate the info.
Google Webmaster Tools, here I come.

Have a nice weekend.

Best regards,
Thomas

Check broken links, and check indexation of your pages, get the most searched keywords on your website, submit URL and sitemap.

Google webmaster tool provides deep analysis of website like indexing, crawling, sitemap,
HTML suggestions, search queries and impressions, links to website, server errors etc which
helps a lot for in optimization of website for search engines in order to get better online
visibility.

webmaster tool is very useful to a known the status of our site. we can get a idea to improve the traffic.

I don't see how Google Webmaster tools can hurt your site. It's there for people like you and me who want to be aware of unnatural link warnings and such.

Use it.

If Google detects that your site has been compromised, we'll tell you about it in Webmaster Tools (to ensure that you're notified quickly, you can have your Message Center messages forwarded to your email account). If the hacker inserted malware into your site, we'll also identify your site as infected in our search results to protect other users.

If your site has been hacked or infected with malware, you should act quickly to repair the damage. Google recommends reviewing the recommendations provided by the organization antiphishing.org.

Well, as you buy link package time to time so adding your site to google webmaster tool can be a great risk for your site. I think you should not add your site to any webmaster tool in that case. But if your leave buying link package from now then its ok.

Google webmaster tool is a must for them who want to have a closer look on any error or warning coming from google side and many other useful tools inbuilt in GWT.G

Of course man. Just use it

Yea , nothing wrong using it

Google, Bing are having great tools for webmasters or so bloggers !

If you buy link packages regularly, you will get penalized whether you are using Webmaster tools or not.

Webmaster tools is basically just a small window of insight into what the Google spiders already know about your site.

I'm a huge fan of Google Webmaster Tools, and I've written a tool for it which seems quite popular, (and might get an update soon). I've been noticing that people find my site by searching for the search term "how to use Google Webmaster Tools", so I thought I'd post a guide of how I use it on a weekly basis to check on the health of my sites.