Webmaster Level: All
Update on February 2, 2012: The new Google+ badge is now out of preview and available to all users on all sites.
When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we're adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You'll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.
If you’re still considering whether to add a Google+ badge on your website, consider this: We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page.
The Google+ Badge makes it easy for your fans to find and follow you on Google+. With these additional options, we hope it's even easier to create a badge that fits your website.
Follow the conversation on Google+.
Posted by Lucy Hadden, Software Engineer, Google+
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Related tags: services [+], indexing, feedback, crawling, communication
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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More Options for Google+ Badges
Posted: January 26th, 2012, 2:53pm CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
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Making form-filling faster, easier and smarter
Posted: January 25th, 2012, 11:00am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: Intermediate
One of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form – shopping and registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the goals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like our names and addresses on different sites across the web – a tedious task that causes many to give up and abandon the flow entirely.
Chrome’s Autofill and other form-filling providers help to break down this barrier by remembering common profile information and pre-populating the form with those values. Unfortunately, up to now it has been difficult for webmasters to ensure that Chrome and other form-filling providers can parse their form correctly. Some standards exist; but they put onerous burdens on the implementation of the website, so they’re not used much in practice.
Today we’re pleased to announce support in Chrome for an experimental new “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields that allows web developers to unambiguously labeltextandselectfields with common data types such as ‘full-name’ or ‘street-address’. With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend.
Just add an attribute to the input element, for example an email address field might look like:
<input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />
We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome asx-autocompletetypeto indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to thewebkitspeechattribute we released last summer.
For more information, you can read the full text of the proposed specification, ask questions on the Webmaster help forum, or you can share your feedback in the standardization discussion!
Posted by Ilya Sherman, Software Engineer -
Grow your audience with Google+
Posted: November 7th, 2011, 11:40am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
At Google, we help grow your audience by connecting you with new users. We introduced the +1 button so your site would stand out on search and your users could easily share your content on Google+. But, sometimes you want to join the conversation and post content directly to where people are sharing.
Today we’re introducing Google+ for Business, a collection of tools and products that help you grow your audience. At the core of this is Google+ Pages, your site’s identity on Google+.
Google+ Pages: Have real conversations with the right people
To get your site on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can engage in conversations with your visitors, direct readers back to your site for the latest updates, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Google+ Pages will help you build relationships with your users, encouraging them to spend more time engaging with your content.
Google+ Pages are at the heart of Google+ for Business
Hangouts
Sometimes you might want to chat with your users face-to-face. For example, if you run a food blog, you may want to invite a chef to talk about her favorite recipe, or if you manage a fashion review site, beauty specialists might want to hold how-to sessions with makeup tips. Hangouts make this easy, by letting you have high-quality video chats with nine people with a single click. You can use Hangouts to hold live forums, break news or simply get to know people better, all in real time.
Hangouts let you meet your customers, face-to-face
Circles
Circles allow you to group followers of your Page into smaller audiences. You can then share specific messages with specific groups. For example, you could create a Circle containing your most loyal readers and offer them exclusive content.
The Google+ badge: Grow your audience on Google+
To help your users find your page and start sharing, there are two buttons you can add to your site by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool:
The Google+ icon, a small icon that directly links to your Page.
The Google+ badge, which we’re introducing in the coming days. This badge lets people add your page to their circles without leaving your site, and allows them to get updates from your site via Google+.
Extend the power of +1, stand out in Google search
You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s -- from your Page, your website, and search results -- will get tallied together and appear as a single total. Potential visitors will be more likely to see the recommendations your site has received, whether they’re looking at a search result, your website, or your Page, meaning your +1’s will reach not only the 40 million users of Google+, but all the people who come to Google every day. You can link your site to your Page either using the Google+ badge or with a piece of code. To set this up, visit our Google+ badge configuration tool.
Bringing Google+ to the rest of Google
Our ultimate vision for Google+ is to transform the overall Google experience -- weaving identity and sharing into all of our products. Beginning today, we’re rolling out a new experimental feature to a small group of eligible publishers, Google+ Direct Connect -- an easy way for your audience to find your Google+ Page on Google search. If you’ve linked your Page to your site and you qualify, when someone searches for your website’s name with the ‘+’ sign before it Direct Connect will send them directly to your Page. For example, try searching for ‘+YouTube’ on Google. Users will also be prompted to automatically add Pages they find through Direct Connect to their circles.
Direct Connect suggestions start populating as you type on Google.com
Just the beginning
We want to help you get your site on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. If you don’t have a Google account, it’s very quick and easy to join. And if you’re looking for inspiration, check out some of the sites that are already starting to set up their Pages:
To learn more about how Google+ works for your site, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started, and have many more features planned for the coming weeks and months. To keep up to date on the latest news and tips, add the Google+ Your Business page to your circles. If you have ideas on how we can improve Google+ for your site, we’d love to hear them.
Posted by Dennis Troper, Product Management Director, Google+ Pages -
Making the most of improvements to the +1 button
Posted: August 24th, 2011, 12:22pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster level: All
For the past few months, you might have used +1 buttons to help visitors recommend your content on Google Search and on their Google Profiles. We’ve just announced a few changes that make +1 even more useful.
First, the +1 button now lets visitors share links to your pages on Google+. If someone wants to start a conversation about your content, it’s easy for them to do so. Second, you can use +Snippets to customize the name, image and description that appear when your content is shared. Finally, new inline annotations help increase engagement after users see a friend’s recommendation right on your page.
Here are a couple of tips to help you take full advantage of these improvements:
+Snippets
The +1 button opens up your site to a valuable new source of traffic with sharing on Google+. +Snippets let you put your best face forward by customizing exactly what appears when your content is shared.
For example, if you’re running a movie review site, you might want visitors to share posts containing the title, movie poster, and a brief synopsis:
You may already be using this markup to build rich annotations for your pages on Google Search. If not, marking up your pages is simple. Just add the correct schema.org attributes to the data already present on your pages. You’ll set a name, image, and description in your code:
<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">Example code containing each of the +Snippet attributes
<h1 itemprop="name">This is the article name</h1>
<img itemprop="image" src="thumbnail.jpg" />
<p itemprop="description">This is the description of the article.</p>
</body>
For more details on alternate markup types, please see our technical documentation.
Inline annotations
Now, when a person visits a page that someone they know has +1’d, they can see a name and face reminding them to pay special attention to your content. Here’s how it looks:
Inline annotations let people see which of their friends +1’d your content
To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the configuration tool, select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu, and grab a new snippet of code.
Both sharing from +1 and inline annotations are rolling out fully over the next few days. To test these improvements right now, join our Platform Preview group.
Update later the same day, August 24, 2011: If you have any thoughts or feedback you'd like to share, continue the conversation on Google+.
Posted by Daniel Dulitz, Group Product Manager -
Page Speed for Chrome, and in 40 languages!
Posted: March 22nd, 2011, 11:30am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
This article is cross-posted on the Google Code Blog.
Today we’re launching the most requested feature for Page Speed, Page Speed for Chrome. Now Google Chrome users can get Page Speed performance suggestions to make their sites faster, right inside the Chrome browser. We would like to thank all our users for your great feedback and support since we launched. We’re humbled that 1.4 M unique users are using the Page Speed extension and finding it useful to help with their web performance diagnosis.
Google Chrome support has always been high on our priority list but we wanted to get it right. It was critical that the same engine that powers the Page Speed Add-On for Firefox be used here as well. So we first built the Page Speed SDK, which we then integrated into the Chrome extension.
Page Speed for Chrome retains the same core features as the Firefox add-on. In addition, there are two major improvements appearing in this version first. We’ve improved scoring and suggestion ordering to help web developers focus on higher-potential optimizations first. Plus, because making the web faster is a global initiative, Page Speed now supports displaying localized rule results in 40 languages! These improvements are part of the Page Speed SDK, so they will also appear in the next release of our Firefox add-on as well.
If your site serves different content based on the browser’s user agent, you now have a good method for page performance analysis as seen by different browsers, with Page Speed coverage for Firefox and Chrome through the extensions, and Internet Explorer via webpagetest.org, which integrates the Page Speed SDK.
We’d love to hear from you, as always. Please try Page Speed for Chrome, and give us feedback on our mailing list about additional functionality you’d like to see. Stay tuned for updates to Page Speed for Chrome that take advantage of exciting new technologies such as Native Client.
By Matthew Steele and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team -
Webmasters - configure Google services at your hosting panel
Posted: April 15th, 2010, 10:34am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
Today, as announced on the Official Google Blog, we’ve taken an additional step to improve access to Google webmaster services. Parallels, one of the leading providers of control panel software to hosting companies, has integrated Google Services for Websites into Parallels Plesk Panel, used by millions of website owners globally to manage their websites.
If you use Plesk for managing your hosting and website services, you can easily configure Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search, Web Elements and AdSense for your website right from within Plesk.
Since Plesk knows what domains you own, it automatically registers your domains to Webmaster Tools and allows you to automatically login to the Webmaster Tools console to verify your sites, as shown below.
We’re always trying to make our tools easier to use and easier to access. Since you’re probably visiting your hosting control panel on a regular basis, we hope that you find this integration convenient. If you have feedback please let us know in the Webmaster Forum.
Posted 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 -
Changes in First Click Free
Posted: December 1st, 2009, 10:02am CET by John Mueller
Tags: products and services
Webmaster level: intermediate
We love helping publishers make their content available to large groups of readers, and working on ways to make the world's information useful and accessible through our search results. At the same time, we're also aware of the fact that creating high-quality content is not easy and, in many cases, expensive. This is one of the reasons why we initially launched First Click Free for Google News and Google Web Search -- to allow publishers to sell access to their content in general while still allowing users to find it through our search results.
While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content. As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google's Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!
Questions and answers about First Click Free
Q: Do the rest of the old guidelines still apply?
A: Yes, please check the guidelines for Google News as well as the guidelines for Web Search and the associated blog post for more information.
Q: Can I apply First Click Free to only a section of my site / only for Google News (or only for Web Search)?
A: Sure! Just make sure that both Googlebot and users from the appropriate search results can view the content as required. Keep in mind that showing Googlebot the full content of a page while showing users a registration page would be considered cloaking.
Q: Do I have to sign up to use First Click Free?
A: Please let us know about your decision to use First Click Free if you are using it for Google News. There's no need to inform us of the First Click Free status for Google Web Search.
Q: What is the preferred way to count a user's accesses?
A: Since there are many different site architectures, we believe it's best to leave this up to the publisher to decide.
(Please see our related blog post for more information on First Click Free for Google News.)
Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich -
New personalization features in Google Friend Connect
Posted: November 4th, 2009, 8:40am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
Just a few weeks ago, we made Google Friend Connect a lot easier to use by dramatically simplifying the setup process. Today, we're excited to announce several new features that make it possible for website owners to get to know their users, encourage users to get to know each other, and match their site content (including Google ads) to visitors' interests.
To learn more about these new features, check out the Google Social Web Blog.
Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect -
Translate your website with Google: Expand your audience globally
Posted: September 30th, 2009, 4:54pm CEST by Susan Moskwa
Tags: products and services
(This has been cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.
Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.
After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.
It's easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.
Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate -
New tools for Google Services for Websites
Posted: August 11th, 2009, 1:05pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
(A nearly duplicate version :) cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
Earlier this year, we launched Google Services for Websites, a program that helps partners, e.g., web hoster and access providers, offer useful and powerful tools to their customers. By making services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search and AdSense, easily accessible via the hoster control panel, hosters can easily enable these services for their webmasters. The tools help website owners understand search performance, improve user retention and monetize their content — in other words, run more effective websites.
Since we launched the program, several hosting platforms have enhanced their offerings by integrating with the appropriate APIs. Webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense, all with a few clicks at their hoster control panel. More partners are in the process of implementing these enhancements.
We've just added new tools to the suite:- Web Elements allows your customers to enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. Webmasters can provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. With the Conversation Element, websites can create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search over your own site (or others you specify) without having to write any code and various options to customize further.
- Page Speed allows webmasters to measure the performance of their websites. Snappier websites help users find things faster; the recommendations from these latency tools allow hosters and webmasters to optimize website speed. These techniques can help hosters reduce resource use and optimize network bandwidth.
- The Tips for Hosters page offers a set of tips for hosters for creating a richer website hosting platform. Hosters can improve the convenience and accessibility of tools, while at the same time saving platform costs and earning referral fees. Tips include the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.
And if your hosting service doesn't have Google Services for Websites yet, send them to this page. Once they become a partner, you can quickly configure the services you want at your hoster's control panel (without having to come to Google).
As always, we'd love to get feedback on how the program is working for you, and what improvements you'd like to see.
Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager -
Google Friend Connect - Now in 47 new languages
Posted: July 14th, 2009, 1:05am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Have you been holding off on using Google Friend Connect because your site isn't in English? Starting today, Friend Connect is available in 47 new languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Portuguese. Now you can easily add social features that match the language of other content on your site.
Most Google-created gadgets (such as the members, comments, and recommendation gadgets) are now available in these new languages. Some developers have also created gadgets that support additional languages and we hope that there will be more to come in the future. To see a list of gadgets available in your language, visit the gadget gallery.
When you add Friend Connect to a new site, it will default to your primary language. But if your site is in another language, simply select it on the site settings tab and Friend Connect will automatically render the gadgets in that language. And if have multiple sites in different languages, you can select a different language for each of your sites.
To learn more or see the full list of languages, check out the Social Web Blog.
Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect -
Google Maps gadget: Help customers find their way
Posted: July 7th, 2009, 6:30pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: All
With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.
Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the 4th of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.
Google has made this process easy for you. By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions powered by Google Maps to their users.
The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And for those who prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.
If someone enters a vague starting address, they have the option to specify a more exact address, which will then fly into the "From" field.
Providing directions from Google Maps is very flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your customers directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates for any of your locations.
Example destinations:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W
You can also give your address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)
Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.
Written by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps -
Best practices for Product Search
Posted: June 17th, 2009, 10:27am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate
If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:- Attributes to include in your feed
- FAQs
- Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
- Do product listings expire after 30 days?
- How often should I submit my feed?
More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead -
Best practices for Product Search
Posted: June 17th, 2009, 10:27am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate
If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:- Attributes to include in your feed
- FAQs
- Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
- Do product listings expire after 30 days?
- How often should I submit my feed?
More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead -
Friend Connect now available in beta to everyone
Posted: December 5th, 2008, 4:38am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
If you've been looking for a way to grow traffic and make your site more interactive, check out Google Friend Connect -- now in beta and available to all webmasters. Remember that with Friend Connect, you can easily add social features to your site by just copying and pasting a few snippets of code, no programming necessary! Your visitors will be able to join your site, create or link to a profile, interact with other visitors, and invite friends to visit your site. Best of all, your visitors won't be required to create yet another username and password -- Friend Connect lets them sign in using an existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID account. To learn more, watch the video below:
So for any of you who were interested in Friend Connect after our first announcement, and also to all of the newer readers out there, go ahead and give Friend Connect a try.
Written by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager -
A new look for our Webmaster Help Group
Posted: December 4th, 2008, 9:15am CET by Susan Moskwa
Tags: products and services
Googlers strongly believe in dogfooding our own products. We manage our work schedules with Google Calendar, publish our blogs on Blogger, and store scads of documentation on Google Sites. So, ever since we launched our first Webmaster Help Group, we've been using Google Groups to facilitate conversations about Webmaster Tools and web search issues.
Today, however, I'm thrilled to announce that our English and Polish Help Groups are getting a makeover. And the changes are more than just skin-deep. Our new Help Forums should make it easier for you to find answers, share resources with others, and have your participation acknowledged.
You can read more about the changes on the Official Google Blog, and then check it out for yourself: English, Polish.
Q: What will happen to the old English and Polish Help Groups?
A: While our old groups are now closed to new posts, they will still be available in read-only mode in case you want to reference any of your favorite posts from the good old days. Many of the most frequently-asked questions (and answers!) have already been transferred to our new Help Forums.Q: If I was a member of the old group, will I automatically be a member of the new forum?
A: We won't be "transferring" membership from the old groups to the new, so even if you were a member of our Google Groups forum, you'll still need to join the new forum in order to participate. Nicknames and user profiles are also managed separately, so you're welcome to recreate your Google Groups profile in our new forum, or reinvent yourself.Q: What about the Webmaster Help Groups in other languages?
A: They'll be moving to the new Help Forum format in 2009. Specific dates will be announced in each of the groups as they get closer to their moving date.Feel free to post any other questions about the new Help Forums in the comments below.
Written by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst -
Helping you break the language barrier
Posted: October 14th, 2008, 1:03pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
When webmasters put content out on the web it's there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world's population.
In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.
Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at [translate.google.com].
The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.
Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:
And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at mydomain dot com</span>
to the <head> of your page and we won't translate any of the content on that page.<meta name="google" value="notranslate">
Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:
Thanks to chaoskaizer for pointing this out in the comments. :)<meta name="google" content="notranslate">
Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.
With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Written by Josh Estelle, Google Translate -
Google Trifecta recording now available
Posted: July 17th, 2008, 5:18pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski
Tags: products and services
Last Tuesday, Google hosted an online presentation about three free tools to help analyze and improve your sites. Dubbed "The Google Trifecta," this presentation explains the key features of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer, and how you can use them together.
To make the information from this presentation accessible to those who were unable to listen in last week or would like to review it again, we've put a recording of the session on YouTube for your viewing pleasure:
If you have any followup questions about the topics covered in the video, we welcome you to ask! Each of these products has a discussion group available for you to discuss the product with other users and Googlers. Please post in the appropriate group, so your question is seen by the right people:
Google Webmaster Help (Webmaster Tools)
Analytics Help
Website Optimizer Forum
Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team -
A new layer to Google Trends
Posted: June 20th, 2008, 11:13am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: products and services
Written by R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management - Consumer Search Properties
Two years ago, we launched Google Trends, a tool that lets anyone see what the world is searching for, and compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Last year, we added Hot Trends, which shows what people are searching for right now - the fastest rising search queries on Google, updated every hour. And just last week, we introduced normalized search volume numbers available for export in Google Trends.
Today, we add a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.
Let's take a look at one example, the release of Radiohead's In Rainbows album. As part of our annual Zeitgeist, we post the fastest rising search terms, and this past year, radiohead took the crown as the fastest rising search term in the last quarter of 2007.
Using Google Trends, we can see the search volume for radiohead compared to in rainbows over the last 12 months.
radiohead vs. in rainbows
With Hot Trends, we can see that on October 10th (the release date of In Rainbows), people were most interested in downloading In Rainbows and reviews of the new release.
Now, using Trends for Websites, this story can be viewed from another perspective: we can see how the number of unique visitors that visit radiohead.com and inrainbows.com has changed over the last 12 months, the countries where the sites are most popular, the top related sites and search terms.
radiohead.com vs. inrainbows.com
We can see that in October 2007, radiohead.com (the blue line) saw a huge surge in popularity. The release of In Rainbows clearly drove many people to visit the band's website. The album's website, inrainbows.com (the red line), saw an even more dramatic jump; probably because that is where you could actually download the new album. And, it looks like site traffic to radiohead.com has increased overall, even as inrainbows.com traffic declined.
Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information. For more information, be sure to check out our Website Owners FAQs.
To start using Trends for Websites, head over to Google Trends.
