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• 

  Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

  Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by Jonathan Simon

  Tags:  webmaster tools  

  Webmaster Level: All
  
  Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.
  
  Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:
  

  • Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
  • Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

  
  Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)
  
  After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.
  
  
  
  
  
  Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)
  
  Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.
  
  
  
  After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.
  
  
  
  We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!
  
  Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools
• 

  Sharing the verification love

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:47pm CET by Sean Harding

  Tags:  webmaster tools  

  Webmaster Level: All
  
  Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.
  
  In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.
  
  
  
  Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from Webmaster Tools or the Verification home page). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.
  
  There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with Google Accounts. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!
  
  We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.
  
  Sean Harding, Software Engineer
• 

  Google's SEO Report Card

  Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:02pm CET by Maile Ohye

  Tags:  feedback and communication  

  Webmaster Level: All
  
  How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.
  
  Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.
  
  The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.
  
  We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.
  
  Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
• 

  Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse

  Posted: March 1st, 2010, 4:00pm CET by Michael Wyszomierski

  Tags:  feedback and communication  

  Webmaster Level: All
  As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
  You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.
  Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:

  • Spammy or abused user-generated content
  • Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
  • Suspected hacking

  These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
  A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:
  
  We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
  Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
  If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.
  Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team
• 

  How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz?

  Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 5:25pm CET by Chark

  Tags:  webmaster quiz  

  Webmaster Level: All
  
  Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!
  
  

  1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:
  
  Correct answer: a) 301 redirect
  
  Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.
  
  2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?
  
  Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests
  
  Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.
  
  3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?
  
  Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site
  
  Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.
  
  6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?
  
  Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.
  
  Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.
  
  9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
  
  Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.
  
  Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.

  
  Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!
  
  40/40:
  

  • ChrisRaimondi
  • theopeek
  • beussery

  39/40:
  

  • Petro
  • pornel
  • Ian Macfarlane
  • g1smd
  • Mattman
  • thinkpragmatic
  • GLV
  • GoalGorilla
  • rssmarketer

  38/40:
  

  • BartVB
  • Kim Minh Kaplan
  • Ippi
  • Erik Dafforn
  • scole01
  • Konstantin
  • John
  • fer.vazquez
  • eMBe
  • Todd Nemet
  • p.jaroszynski
  • ph0b

  
  Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
• 

  Request visitors' permission before installing software

  Posted: January 28th, 2010, 5:00pm CET by Jonathan Simon

  (Cross-posted on the Google Korea Blog)
  
  Webmaster Level: All
  
  Legitimate websites may require that their visitors install software. These sites often do so to provide their users with additional functionality beyond what's available in standard web browsers, like viewing a special type of document. Please note, however, that if your site requires specific software for your visitors, the implementation of this software installation process is very important. Incorrect implementation can appear as though you're installing malware, triggering our malware detection filters, and resulting in your site being labeled with a 'This site may harm your computer' malware warning in our search results.
  
  If using your site requires a special software install, you need to first inform visitors why they need to install additional software. Here are two bad examples and one good example of how to handle the situation of a new visitor to such a site:
  
  Bad: Install the required software without giving the visitor a chance to choose whether or not they want to install the software.
  
  Bad: Pop up a confirmation dialog box that prompts the visitor to agree to install the software, without providing enough detail for the visitor to make an informed choice. (This includes the standard ActiveX control installation dialog box, since it doesn't contain enough meaningful information for a visitor to make an informed decision about that particular piece of software.)
  
  Good: Redirect the new visitor to an information page which provides thorough details on why a special software installation is required to use the site. From this page the visitor can initiate the installation of the required software if they decide to proceed with installation.
  
  Has your site been labeled with a malware warning in our search results due to a poorly implemented software installation requirement? Updating the installation process to ensure that visitors are fully informed on why the installation is necessary, and giving them a chance to opt out, should resolve this issue. Once you've got this in place, you can go to Webmaster Tools and request a malware review to expedite the process of removing any malware warnings associated with your site in Google's search results.
  
  Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst
• 

  Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA

  Posted: January 26th, 2010, 11:00am CET by Michael Wyszomierski

  Tags:  products and services  

  Webmaster Level: All
  If you allow users to publish content on your website, from leaving comments to creating user profiles, you’ll likely see spammers attempt to take advantage of these mechanisms to generate traffic to their own sites. Having this spammy content on your site isn't fun for anyone. Users may be subjected to annoying advertisements directing them to low-quality or dangerous sites containing scams or malware. And you as a webmaster may be hosting content that violates a search engine's quality guidelines, which can harm your site's standing in search results.
  There are ways to handle this abuse, such as moderating comments and reviewing new user accounts, but there is often so much spam created that it can become impossible to keep up with. Spam can easily get to this unmanageable level because most spam isn’t created manually by a human spammer. Instead, spammers use computer programs called “bots” to automatically fill out web forms to create spam, and these bots can generate spam much faster than a human can review it.
  To level the playing field, you can take steps to make sure that only humans can interact with potentially spammable features of your website. One way to determine which of your visitors are human is by using a CAPTCHA , which stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." A typical CAPTCHA contains an image of distorted letters which humans can read, but are not easily understood by computers. Here's an example:
  
  You can easily take advantage of this technology on your own site by using reCAPTCHA, a free service owned by Google. One unique aspect of reCAPTCHA is that data collected from the service is used to improve the process of scanning text, such as from books or newspapers. By using reCAPTCHA, you're not only protecting your site from spammers; you're helping to digitize the world's books.
  Luis Von Ahn, one reCAPTCHA's co-founders, gives more details about how the service works in the video below:
  
  If you’d like to implement reCAPTCHA for free on your own site, you can sign up here. Plugins are available for easy installation on popular applications and programming environments such as WordPress and PHP.
  Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team
• 

  Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events

  Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 11:20am CET by Maile Ohye

  Tags:  crawling and indexing  

  Webmaster Level: All
  
  Last year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster.
  
  We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Today, we're excited to kick off the new year by adding support for events.
  
  Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. Here's an example of what the new events Rich Snippets will look like:
  
  
  The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.
  
  If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we've prepared to help you get started. Please note, however, that marking up your content is not a guarantee that Rich Snippets will show for your site. Just as we did for previous formats, we will take a gradual approach to incorporating the new event snippets to ensure a great user experience along the way.
  
  Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!
  
  Written by Mike Danylchuk and Nitin Shetti
• 

  Google SEO resources for beginners

  Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 12:30am CET by Maile Ohye

  Tags:  webmaster tools  

  Webmaster Level: Beginner
  
  Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:
  
  Step 1: Absorb the basics
  

  • If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you're on an exercise bike, training for Ironman.
  • Or, if you're more a video watcher, try listening to my "Search Friendly Development" session while you're cleaning your house. Keep in mind that some parts of the presentation are a little more technical.

  
  

  • For good measure, and because at some point you'll hear references to them, check out our webmaster guidelines for yourself.

  
  Step 2: Explore details that pique your interest
  Are you done with the basics but now you have some questions? Good for you! Try researching a particular topic in our Webmaster Help Center. For example, do you want more information about crawling and indexing or understanding what links are all about?
  
  Step 3: Verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools
  It takes a little bit of skill, but we have tons of help for verification. Once you verify ownership of your site (i.e., signal to Google that you're the owner), you can:

  • See more confidential information about your site, like crawl errors or messages from Google about your site
  • Run through the Webmaster Tools checklist and learn new ways to monitor and manage your site
  • Forward your Google messages to your personal email address

  
  
  A sample message regarding the crawlability of your site
  
  Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic
  Usually the basics (e.g., good content/service and a crawlable site with indexable information) are the necessities for SEO. You may hear or read differently, but before you do anything drastic on your site such as robots.txt disallow'ing all of your directories or revamping your entire site architecture, please try:

  • Researching material in our Help Center
  • Checking for related posts in our Webmaster Forum
  • Asking for feedback from the webmaster community -- we've got a super skilled group of Google employees, members, and Bionic Posters.

  Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
• 

  State of the Index 2009

  Posted: January 20th, 2010, 3:50pm CET by Michael Wyszomierski

  Tags:  feedback and communication  

  Webmaster Level: All
  At PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009, I gave a "State of the Index" talk which covers what Google has done for users, web developers, and webmasters in the last year. I recently recreated it on video for those of you who didn't make it to the conference. You can watch it below:
  
  And here are the slides if you'd like to follow along:
  
  Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team