Our team had an awesome Halloween and we hope you did too. Yes, the picture below is our team; we take our Halloween costumes pretty seriously. :)
As a post-Halloween treat, we're happy to announce a brand new user interface for our Keywords feature. We'll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful of URLs that contain a specific keyword. The significance column compares the frequency of a keyword to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your site. When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword.
This will be really useful when you re-implement your site on a new technology framework, or need to identify which URLs may have been hacked. For example, if you start noticing your site appearing in search results for terms totally unrelated to your website (for example, "Viagra" or "casino"), you can use this feature to find those keywords and identify the pages that contain them. This will enable you to eliminate any hacked content quickly.
Let us know what you think!
Posted by Kurt Dresner, Tanya Gupta, and Sagar Kamdar, Webmaster Tools team
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Items by Sagar Kamdar
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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Post-Halloween Treat: New Keywords User Interface!
Posted: November 11th, 2009, 1:37am CET by Sagar Kamdar
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Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details -- now in Webmaster Tools Labs!
Posted: October 12th, 2009, 5:15pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
The Webmaster Tools team is lucky to have passionate users who provide us with a great set of feature ideas. Going forward, we'll be launching some features under the "Labs" label so we can quickly transition from concept to production, and hear your feedback ASAP. With Labs releases, you have the opportunity to play with features and have your feedback heard much earlier in the development lifecycle. On the flip side, since these features are available early in the release cycle they're not as robust, and may break at times.
Today we're launching two cool features:- Malware details
- Fetch as Googlebot
Before today, you may have been relying on manual testing, our safe browsing API, and malware notifications to determine which pages on your site may be distributing malware. Sometimes finding the malicious code is extremely difficult, even when you do know which pages it was found on. Today we are happy to announce that we'll be providing snippets of code that exist on some of those pages that we consider to be malicious. We hope this additional information enables you to eliminate the malware on your site very quickly, and reduces the number of iterations many webmasters go through during the review process.
More information on this cool feature is available at our Online Security Blog.
Fetch as Googlebot (developed by Javier Tordable)
"What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?" is a common question webmasters ask us on our forums and at conferences. Our keywords and HTML suggestions features help you understand the content we're extracting from your site, and any issues we may be running into at crawl and indexing time. However, we realized it was important to provide the ability for users to submit pages on their site and get real-time feedback on what Googlebot sees. This feature will help users a great deal when they re-implement their site with a new technology stack, find out that some of their pages have been hacked, or want to understand why they're not ranking for specific keywords.
We're pretty excited about this launch, and hope you are too. Let us know what you think!
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools -
New parameter handling tool helps with duplicate content issues
Posted: October 5th, 2009, 2:33pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
Duplicate content has been a hot topic among webmasters and our blog for over three years. One of our first posts on the subject came out in December of '06, and our most recent post was last week. Over the past three years, we've been providing tools and tips to help webmasters control which URLs we crawl and index, including a) use of 301 redirects, b) www vs. non-www preferred domain setting, c) change of address option, and d) rel="canonical".
We're happy to announce another feature to assist with managing duplicate content: parameter handling. Parameter handling allows you to view which parameters Google believes should be ignored or not ignored at crawl time, and to overwrite our suggestions if necessary.
Let's take our old example of a site selling Swedish fish. Imagine that your preferred version of the URL and its content looks like this:http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
However, you may also serve the same content on different URLs depending on how the user navigates around your site, or your content management system may embed parameters such as sessionid:http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candyhttp://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
With the "Parameter Handling" setting, you can now provide suggestions to our crawler to ignore the parameters category, trackingid, and sessionid. If we take your suggestion into account, the net result will be a more efficient crawl of your site, and fewer duplicate URLs.
Since we launched the feature, here are some popular questions that have come up:
Are the suggestions provided a hint or a directive? Your suggestions are considered hints. We'll do our best to take them into account; however, there may be cases when the provided suggestions may do more harm than good for a site.
When do I use parameter handling vs rel="canonical"?rel="canonical" is a great tool to manage duplicate content issues, and has had huge adoption. The differences between the two options are:- rel="canonical" has to be put on each page, whereas parameter handling is set at the host level
- rel="canonical" is respected by many search engines, whereas parameter handling suggestions are only provided to Google
As always, your feedback on our new feature is appreciated.
Posted by Tanya Gupta and Ningning Zhu, Software Engineers -
Webmaster Tools gets a "Summer Shine"
Posted: July 20th, 2009, 5:30pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
The Google Webmaster Tools team has code names for each update we release. Today's update is aptly named "Summer Shine".
Here are a few highlights:- Our site selector now lists all verified sites that you own, and allows you to search as you type.
- You can now block non-homepage sitelinks. Before today if you owned example.com, you couldn't block sitelinks for example.com/email.
- You can now see URL removal requests submitted by other users for any sites you own, and revoke them if necessary. In the past, if another webmaster for your site mistakenly removed a URL on your site and left for vacation it was a difficult process to undo the request.
- Our "Home" page is much easier to navigate. We now make a clear distinction between verified and unverified sites.
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools -
Tell us what you think!
Posted: June 24th, 2009, 4:17pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
(Cross-posted on the Google Product Ideas Blog)
The Webmaster Central team does our best to support the webmaster community via Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster Central Blog, the Webmaster YouTube Channel, Help Center, our forum, and a fellow named Matt Cutts.
If you've got ideas and suggestions for Webmaster Central - features you want, things we can do better - tell us. From now until Friday, July 24, 2009, Product Ideas for Webmaster Central will be open for feedback. Every suggestion you add will be seen not only by the Webmaster Central team, but by other users and webmasters. We'll review every submission, and we'll update you regularly with our progress and feedback.
The more feedback the better, so get started now.
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools -
Reconsideration requests: Now with notifications
Posted: June 17th, 2009, 5:46pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
If you've submitted a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools, you've probably wondered what happens once Google receives it. We've always done our best to act upon these requests as quickly as possible, but until now we haven't notified webmasters once we've processed their requests.
As of last week, after your request has been processed, we'll confirm this by sending a message to your Message Center in Webmaster Tools. (Prefer to be notified by email? You can do that too.) Sometime after you receive a reconsideration request confirmation message, check your site's performance in search results. If it's doing well, it means that Google has reviewed your site and believes that it adheres to our Webmaster Guidelines. If your site still isn't performing well in search, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines and also checking out these possible reasons why your site might not be doing as well as you expect.
Posted by Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Search Quality -
Reconsideration requests: Now with notifications
Posted: June 17th, 2009, 5:46pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
If you've submitted a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools, you've probably wondered what happens once Google receives it. We've always done our best to act upon these requests as quickly as possible, but until now we haven't notified webmasters once we've processed their requests.
As of last week, after your request has been processed, we'll confirm this by sending a message to your Message Center in Webmaster Tools. (Prefer to be notified by email? You can do that too.) Sometime after you receive a reconsideration request confirmation message, check your site's performance in search results. If it's doing well, it means that Google has reviewed your site and believes that it adheres to our Webmaster Guidelines. If your site still isn't performing well in search, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines and also checking out these possible reasons why your site might not be doing as well as you expect.
Posted by Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Search Quality -
Out with the old, in with the new
Posted: June 10th, 2009, 7:00pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
Tags: webmaster tools
Webmaster Level: All
We launched a preview of our new Webmaster Tools interface three weeks ago, and received a lot of valuable feedback. Most of you liked the update, appreciating features such as the one-stop dashboard, more top search query data, and the improved menu and navigation.
You offered some constructive feedback as well:- You missed the option to switch listing 25, 50, or 100 rows in features such as links to your site. We did not add the option back to select how many rows you would like to see but increased our default to 100!
- Top search query information differed between the old and new versions. We expected this since we went through a lot of re-engineering to improve the new top search queries backend. We reviewed many of the issues posted on our forums, and verified that the new backend is far more accurate and reliable.
- Initially, the Sitemaps downloaded and indexed URL counts differed between the two versions. We resolved this issue quickly.
- Backlinks numbers between the old and the new user interface (UI) may differ since our new UI shows the original anchor (not following redirects) as it's linked on the web. Let's say example.com links to http://google.com, then http://google.com 301s to http://www.google.com/:
- In the new UI -- only verified site owners of google.com will see examples.com's backlink (because we show the original link prior to any redirects)
- In the old UI -- verified site owners of www.google.com could see example.com's backlink
- The new site switcher lists only five sites, and some of you who manage a large number of sites found this limiting. We appreciate the feedback and will work on addressing this limitation in a future release.
Thanks to all the users that took time to give us feedback on the new user interface. To those users using it for the first time today, we hope you enjoy it. As always, your feedback is appreciated.
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team -
Introducing Page Speed
Posted: June 4th, 2009, 11:29am CEST by Sagar Kamdar
At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user's experience and helps them become more productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we've used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page Speed.
Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages -- it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug. When you run Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve their speed. For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn't actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.
Page Speed's suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement. To help you understand the suggestions and rules, we have created detailed documentation to describe the rationale behind each of the rules. We look forward to your feedback on the Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team -
Spring time design refresh!
Posted: May 12th, 2009, 5:30pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar
Tags: webmaster tools
We've been listening to you at conferences, user studies, forums and blogs and we decided to start from the ground up with a brand new Webmaster Tools design! It was much needed, and the end result is beautiful in our eyes:
Highlights- One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
- More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and clickthrough! In addition, we've substantially improved data quality in this area.
- Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
- Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
- Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
- Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we've streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
- Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
- Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We're always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.
The new user interface is available at [www.google.com]. The old user interface will continue to be available for a couple of weeks to give you guys time to adjust and provide feedback.
We did our best to get the product localized; however, you may notice a few missing translations in some areas of the user interface. We apologize for the inconvenience and when we switch everyone over in a couple of weeks, we'll fully support 40 languages. The one exception will be our Help Center, which will be available in 21 languages going forward.
We're really excited about this launch, and hope you are as well. Tell us what you think and stay tuned for more updates!
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, and Josh Teague, Interaction Designer, Webmaster Tools Team -
Making more tools available with just a click
Posted: March 25th, 2009, 12:20pm CET by Sagar Kamdar
Last July, we launched our Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program and it's been a huge hit. Hundreds of providers have signed up, and thousands of users now access Webmaster Tools via their provider's control panel.
Today we are launching the Google Services for Websites Access Provider Program which enables providers to offer the following features to site owners:- Enhance their site with Custom Search or Google Site Search
- Monetize with AdSense
- Optimize for search with Webmaster Tools
How can you get in on this?
Webmasters: Watch to see if your provider join this program, so the next time you manage your site, everything will be all set for you. Better yet, send your provider a link to this post and tell them we're here to help them help you.
Providers: Check out the Google Services for Websites site and sign up today!
And in case you're wondering, providers that have signed up for the Webmaster Tools Access Provider program will automatically be upgraded to the new program. Also, no worries for developers -- the backend Webmaster Tools APIs remain unchanged.
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager
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Year in Review
Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 11:21am CET by Sagar Kamdar
Tags: webmaster tools
2008 was another great year for the Webmaster Central team. We experienced tremendous user growth with our blogs (97% increase in monthly pageviews), Help Center (25%), Help Forums (225%), and Webmaster Tools (35%). We would like to welcome our new users that joined us in '08, and thank our loyal and passionate user base that have been with us for the last couple of years. We focused on two basic goals for 2008, and here's how we think we did:
Goal #1: Educate and grow our webmaster community- We had our first ever online webmaster chat in February '08 to answer your top questions, and followed it up with three more. They have been incredibly successful, and we're planning for more this year.
- We'd like to send a special thank you to our Bionic Posters, who have played a huge part in supporting our growing community.
- Localization has been a big focus for us, so we launched our blog and Help Center in additional languages, and made Webmaster Tools available in 40 languages. We hope this makes it easier for people in other parts of the world to adopt our tools and gain a better understanding of how search works.
- We launched a new Help Forum in English and Polish, with a broader rollout planned in other languages this year.
- Our SEO starter guide was released and it has been one of our most successful articles to date.
- We placed an emphasis on sharing material via YouTube and created seven video series totaling two hours of content. We kicked off '09 with a bang on the video front with Matt's "Virtual Blight" presentation.
- We launched GData APIs and iGoogle gadgets, allowing end users to access their data outside of Webmaster Tools in a way that makes sense to them.
- Managing a robots.txt file can be complicated, especially for first time webmasters, so we launched a robots.txt generator.
- In our effort to be more transparent and proactive, we enhanced our Message Center to send out messages such as the infinite spaces and hackable site warning notifications.
- To simplify the process of getting up and running on Webmaster Tools, we launched the Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program.
- To reduce frustration felt by users when trying to access a URL which does not exist on a site, we created a 404 widget.
- We enabled webmasters to view details of "404 Not Found" crawl errors.
- Sitemaps keep getting better, including integration with Custom Search Engine and simplified submissions.
- 4 new members of our product development team joined us in '08 to work on many of these efforts:
- Josh Teague, User Experience Designer, soon-to-be-dad, Southern gentleman
- Tanya Gupta, Software Engineer, passionate community services volunteer, thrill-seeking skydiver
- Pooja Shah, Software Engineer, nature lover, enthusiastic cook always looking to experiment
- Javier Tordable, Software Engineer and International Man of Mystery
Written by Sagar Kamdar, Webmaster Tools Product Manager, in need of some Rock Band skillz
