Written by: Peeyush Ranjan and Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools team
Since not every webmaster can come to us, we are coming to you. Last November, we announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now we're taking that program worldwide.
We are happy to announce the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program. Qualifying hosting service providers from around the world can now make use of Google APIs to provide Webmaster Tools accounts to your customers at no cost . Providers can be recognized by the nifty Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider badge that they can display on their sites.
With Google Webmaster Tools now available in 26 languages, hosting companies worldwide are invited to come on board. For example, IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, and Strato customers just joined our webmaster community and now have direct access to the great tools we offer.
How can you get in on this?
Webmasters: Watch to see if your hoster joins this program, so that the next time you create a new site, everything will be all set for you. Better yet, send your hosters a link to this post and tell them we're here to help them help you.
Hosters: Check out the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider site and sign up today!
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Items by Liza Ma
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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Helping yourself to Webmaster Tools
Posted: July 14th, 2008, 10:58am CEST by Liza Ma
Tags: webmaster tools
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Webmaster Tools now in 26 languages
Posted: May 14th, 2008, 5:31pm CEST by Liza Ma
Tags: webmaster tools
Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team
Webmasters come from all corners of the world and we are working hard to reach each and everyone of you. A few months back we introduced you to Googlers who help monitor our Webmaster Help Groups in fifteen languages. Since then, that number has grown to sixteen with the addition of the Chinese Help Group. Today, we're happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is now available in four more languages:
- Arabic
- Hebrew
- Hindi
- Thai
We're thrilled to be engaging with such a diverse community of webmasters. Thank you again for your feedback and support! -
Looking back on 2007
Posted: January 3rd, 2008, 2:31pm CET by Liza Ma
Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team
2007 has been a great year of change and growth for the Webmaster Central team. Without the webmaster community helping us drive our vision to create better tools we wouldn't have accomplished much. All of us with the Webmaster Central team would like to say a big thank you to everyone! Before we look ahead to 2008 and begin to incorporate your feedback from the blog posts and discussion groups, we would like to take a minute to reflect upon some of our bigger feats of the last twelve months.
Our blog has been very active since its launch in August 2006, and we hope you've found it helpful. For those who are new readers, you can find useful information about our Webmaster Tools updates here, as well as articles on how to make your sites more search engine-friendly and user-friendly. Outside of the US, we have readers from the UK, France, Canada, India and Germany, just to name a few—it just goes to show what a big and widespread community you are! In fact, we also have a dedicated group of readers for our Webmaster Central German and China blogs. For those keeping track, 47.28% of you are using Firefox to read our blog and 45.06% are using Internet Explorer, and our most popular post this past December answered your questions on meta tags and web search. Here's a snapshot of what our top search queries look like for December:
January- Made preparations for our big debut (see February)
February- Moved Webmaster Tools officially out of beta
- Traveled the globe and met with webmasters like you at conferences in Australia and London
- Launched the external and internal links feature in Webmaster Tools to make it easier for you to learn about your links
March- Extended anchor text information to show the entire phrase sites use to link to you (not just individual words)
- Posted some helpful articles about robots.txt
- Kicked off a new blog for German webmasters
April- Met with more of you at SES New York
- Added URL removal to Webmaster Tools
May- Shared some useful tips on how webmasters can make use of Google's newly unveiled universal search
- Met with webmasters like you at conferences in China, Italy, New York and San Jose
June- Revamped the Help Center to make it easier for everyone to find the content they need
- Reached out to webmasters at conferences in Seattle, Santa Clara and Toronto
July- Unveiled the Message Center, a key component in helping us keep in touch with you!
- Improved Sitemap feedback to help you identify important issues in your Sitemaps
- Launched a Webmaster Central blog in China
- Enabled non-English domain names in Webmaster Tools
- Chatted with you at SES San Jose
- Updated Webmaster Tool's feature to help you analyze your robots.txt files
- Updated Webmaster Tools:
- Introduced Subscriber stats
- Revamped the UI
- Added support for 2 new languages: Romanian & Turkish
October- Went all out for Halloween in true Google fashion
- Launched new features in Webmaster Tools—and a lot of them:
- Sitemap updates: cross-submissions and Code Search Sitemaps
- Top search queries—for the last 6 months!
- Sitelinks feature to help you identify the ones you have and help you get rid of the ones you don't like
- Set your geographic target to help your users find you more easily in country-specific searches
- Improved data freshness to keep you better informed about your site's performance
November- Highlighted terrific webmasters in the discussion group and introduced Googlers ready to answer your questions in 11 non-English languages.
- Made it easier for Go Daddy users to access our tools
- Produced some helpful videos featuring our very own Matt Cutts on the anatomy of a search result and how to use ALT attributes intelligently
December- Another Webmaster Tools update loaded with new features:
- Improved Sitemap summary pages to help you identify issues in your Sitemaps
- Content analysis
- Video Sitemaps
- Added support for 2 new languages: Czech and Hungarian
- Attended PubCon in Las Vegas and SES Chicago
It was a busy year, but we had a lot of fun. I hope you'll stick with us as we embark on more great adventures in 2008. Remember, you can always reach out to us through our discussion group or at various search conferences throughout the year and around the globe! -
Introducing Video Sitemaps
Posted: December 17th, 2007, 12:36pm CET by Liza Ma
Written by John Fisher-Ogden, Software Engineer, and Amy Wu, Associate Product Manager
In our effort to help users search all the world's public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata. Here's an example:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.0">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:title>My funny video</video:title>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
</video:video>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_other_video_landing_page.html</loc>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/videos/video1.mpg</video:content_loc>
<video:description>A really awesome video</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>To get started, create a Video Sitemap, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and add the Video Sitemap to your account.
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Webmasters can now provide feedback on Sitelinks
Posted: October 18th, 2007, 1:48pm CEST by Liza Ma
Written by Stacey Kuznetsov, Search Quality
Sitelinks are extra links that appear below some search results in Google. They serve as shortcuts to help users quickly navigate to the important pages on your site.
Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information for the user's query. Since our algorithms consider several factors to generate sitelinks, not all websites have them.
Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don't want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don't typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don't want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won't appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.
To view and manage your sitelinks, go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and click the site you want. In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks.
Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned for more updates!
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Subscriber stats and more
Posted: September 14th, 2007, 5:49pm CEST by Liza Ma
Posted by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team
We're unrolling some exciting new features in Webmaster Tools.
First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information.
To improve the navigation and look and feel, we've also made some changes to the interface, including:- No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar.
- Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
- A sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
- New sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.
Sign in to see these changes for yourself. For questions or feedback, please post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group.
