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Items by Javier Tordable

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

• 

  Even more Top Search Queries data

  Posted: April 26th, 2012, 3:48pm CEST by Javier Tordable

  Webmaster level: All
  
  We recently updated the Top Search Queries data to take into account the average top position, we enabled programmatic download and we made sure you could still get all the queries that drive traffic to your site. Well, now it’s time to give you more search queries data!
  
  First, and most important, you can now see up to 90 days of historical data. If you click on the date picker in the top right of Search queries, you can go back three months instead of the previous 35 days.
  
  And after you click:
  
  In order to see 90 days, the option to view with changes will be disabled. If you want to see the changes with respect to the previous time period, the limit remains 30 days. Changes are disabled by default but you can switch them on and off with the button between the graph and the table. Top search queries data is normally available within 2 or 3 days.
  
  Another big improvement in Webmaster Tools is that you can now see basic search query data as soon as you verify ownership of a site. No more waiting to see your information.
  
  Finally, we're now collecting data for the top 2000 queries for which your site gets clicks. You may see less than 2000 if we didn’t record any clicks for a particular query in a given day, or if your query data is spread out among many countries or languages. For example, a search for [flowers] on Google Canada is counted separately from a search for [flowers] on google.com. Nevertheless, with this change 98% of sites will have complete coverage. Let us know what you think. We hope the new data will be useful.
  
  Written by Javier Tordable, Tech Lead, Webmaster Tools
• 

  Updated malware feature in Webmaster Tools

  Posted: April 19th, 2010, 10:53am CEST by Javier Tordable

  Webmaster Level: All
  A little over six months ago we released a new malware diagnostic tool in Webmaster Tools with the help of Lucas Ballard from the anti-malware team. This feature has been a great success; many of you were interested to know if Google had detected malicious software in your site, and you used the tool's information to find and remove that malware and to fix the vulnerabilities in your servers.
  Well, a few days ago we promoted the malware diagnostics tool from Labs to a full Webmaster Tools feature. You can now find it under the Diagnostics menu. Not only that, we also added support for malware notifications. As you may already know, if your site has malware we may show a warning message in our search results indicating that the site is potentially harmful. If this is the case, you should remove any dangerous content as soon as possible and patch the vulnerabilities in your server. After you've done that, you can request a malware review in order to have the warning for your site removed. What's new in our latest release is that the form to request a review is now right there with the rest of the malware data:
  
  We've also made several other improvements under the covers. Now the data is updated almost four times faster than before. And we've improved our algorithms for identifying injected content and can pinpoint exploits that were difficult to catch when the feature first launched.
  
  On the Webmaster Tools dashboard you'll still see a warning message when you have malware on one of your sites. This message has a link that will take you directly to the malware tool. Here at Google we take malware very seriously, and we're working on several improvements to this feature so that we can tell you ASAP if we detect that your site is potentially infected. Stay tuned!
  For more details, check out the Malware & Hacked sites help forum.
  Written by Javier Tordable, Tech Lead, Webmaster Tools
  
• 

  Message Center info through our API

  Posted: December 10th, 2008, 3:15pm CET by Javier Tordable

  Recently we mentioned some updates in the Webmaster Tools GData API: we've just launched a whole new API, the Message Center GData API, as part of the Webmaster Tools API. The Message Center is the way that Google communicates to webmasters important issues regarding their sites—for example, if there's a problem crawling your site, or if someone has requested a change in crawl rate. Until now it was only possible to access these messages through the Message Center section of Webmaster Tools; but now you can also use GData to access it as a feed. This way you don't need to continually check your messages in Webmaster Tools, you can retrieve the messages feed automatically and be informed as soon as possible of any critical issues regarding your site.

  What can I do?

  The Message Center GData API lets you retrieve all messages, mark the messages as read or unread, and delete messages. You can do these tasks using the provided Java client libraries, or you can create your own client code based on the protocol information.
  

  • Retrieve messages: The messages feed contains all the messages sent to your account. These messages have important information about your verified sites. Examples of messages include infinite spaces warnings and crawl rate change notifications.
    
  • Mark messages as read or unread: In order to keep track of new communications from Google, you can mark your messages as read or unread, the same way that you would manage your inbox. If you retrieve a single message, this message will be automatically marked as read.
    
  • Delete mesages: It's possible to delete messages using the GData API. However, be careful because if you delete a message through the API it will also be deleted in your Webmaster Tools account, as both interfaces share the same data.
    

  How do I do it?

  You can download code samples in Java for all these new features. These samples provide simple ways to use the messages feed. The following snippet shows how to retrieve the messages feed in a supported language and print all the messages:

    // Connect with the service and authenticate
    WebmasterToolsService service
        = new WebmasterToolsService("exampleCo-exampleApp-1");
    try {
      service.setUserCredentials(USERNAME, PASSWORD);
    } catch (AuthenticationException e) {
      System.out.println("Username or password invalid");
      return;
    }

    // Retrieve messages feed
    MessagesFeed messages;
    try {
      URL feedUrl;
      if (USER_LANGUAGE == null) {
        feedUrl = new URL(MESSAGES_FEED_URI);
      } else {
        feedUrl = new URL(MESSAGES_FEED_URI
            + "?hl=" + USER_LANGUAGE);
      }
      messages = service.getFeed(feedUrl, MessagesFeed.class);
    } catch (IOException e) {
      System.out.println("There was a network error.");
      return;
    } catch (ServiceException e) {
      System.out.println("The service is not available.");
      return;
    }

    // Print the messages feed
    System.out.println(messages.getTitle().getPlainText());
    for (MessageEntry entry : messages.getEntries()) {
      if (entry.getRead()) {
        System.out.print("   t");
      } else {
        System.out.print("newt");
      }
      System.out.print(entry.getDate().toUiString() + "t");
      System.out.println(entry.getSubject());
    }

  Where do I get it?

  If you want to know more about GData, you may want to start by checking out the GData website. The homepage of the Webmaster Tools GData API contains a section on the messages feed, with details about the protocol. You can also download the sample Message Center client form the GData download site. It will show you how to use all the Message Center GData API features.

  
  Written by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer
• 

  Webmaster Tools API updated with Site Settings

  Posted: October 13th, 2008, 4:18pm CEST by Javier Tordable

  Tags:  webmaster tools  

  The Webmaster Tools GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of Webmaster Tools, such as setting a geographic location or your preferred domain. For those of you that aren't familiar with GData, it's a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit Sitemaps programmatically. Now you can also access and update site-specific information. This is especially useful if you have a large number of sites. With the Webmaster Tools API, you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.

  What can I do?

  We've included four new features in the API. You can see and update these settings for each site that you have verified. The features are:

  • Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server's capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
  • Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn't reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
  • Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
  • Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

  How do I do it?

  We provide you with Java code samples for all the current Webmaster Tools API functionality. Here's a sample snippet of code that takes a list of sites and updates the geographic location of all of them:

  
    // Authenticate against the Webmaster Tools service
    WebmasterToolsService service;
    try {
      service = new WebmasterToolsService("exampleCo-exampleApp-1");
      service.setUserCredentials(USERNAME, PASSWORD);
    } catch (AuthenticationException e) {
      System.out.println("Error while authenticating.");
      return;
    }
  
    // Read sites and geolocations from your database
    readSitesAndGeolocations(sitesList, geolocationsList);
  
    // Update all sites
    Iterator sites = sitesList.iterator();
    Iterator geolocations = geolocationsList.iterator();
    while (sites.hasNext() && geolocations.hasNext()) {
      // Create a blank entry and add the updated information
      SitesEntry updateEntry = new SitesEntry();
      updateEntry.setGeolocation(geolocations.next());
  
      // Get the URL to update the site
      String encodedSiteId = URLEncoder.encode(sites.next(),
          "UTF-8");
      URL siteUrl = new URL(
          "http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/feeds/sites/"
          + encodedSiteId);
  
      // Update the site
      service.update(siteUrl, updateEntry);
    }
  

  Where do I get it?

  The main page for the Webmaster Tools GData API explains all the details of the API. It has a detailed reference guide and also many code snippets that explain how to use the Java client library, which is available for download. You can find more details about GData and all the different Google APIs in the Google Data API homepage.

  
  Written by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer