Webmaster Level: All
In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.
We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.
This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.
If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.
Overall, our advice for publishers continues to be to focus on delivering the best possible user experience on your websites and not to focus on specific algorithm tweaks. This change is just one of the over 500 improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. As always, please post your feedback and questions in our Webmaster Help forum.
Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer
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13 items tagged "results"
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
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Page layout algorithm improvement
Posted: January 19th, 2012, 4:00pm CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
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Announcing Instant Pages
Posted: June 14th, 2011, 12:30pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster level: All
Earlier today we announced Instant Pages, a new feature to help users get to their desired search results even faster--in some cases even instantly! The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we're very confident about which result is the best answer for the user's search.
This prerendering technology is currently in the Chrome Dev Channel and will be going to Beta later this week.
You can see Instant Pages in action in this video:
At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've seen time and time again how an increase in apparent speed leads to a direct increase in user happiness and engagement. Instant Pages helps visitors arrive at your site faster. When we trigger Instant Pages for your site, users can start interacting with your site almost immediately, without having to wait for text and images to load. We'll only trigger Instant Pages when we have very high confidence that your site is the exact result users are looking for. Search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature, with only results the user visited counted. We'll take the time this summer before the feature launches in stable versions of Chrome to collect your feedback.
The vast majority of sites will automatically work correctly when prerendered in Chrome. Check out the prerendering post on the Chromium blog if you want to learn more about how prerendering works in Chrome or how you can detect that your site is being prerendered.
Written by Ziga Mahkovec, Software Engineer -
Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web
Posted: June 2nd, 2011, 2:10am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Today we’re announcing schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites.
At Google, we’ve supported structured markup for a couple years now. We introduced rich snippets in 2009 to better represent search results describing people or containing reviews. We’ve since expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including products, events, recipes, and more.
Example of a rich snippet: a search result enhanced by structured markup. In this case, the rich snippet contains a picture, reviews, and cook time for the recipe.
Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.
We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort to add this markup to your pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for Sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.
Now let’s discuss some of the details of schema.org relevant to you as a webmaster:
1) Schema.org contains a lot of new markup types.
We’ve added more than 100 new types as well as ported over all of the existing rich snippets types. If you’ve looked at adding rich snippets markup before but none of the existing types were relevant for your site, it’s worth taking another look. Here are a few popular types:- Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
- Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
2) Schema.org uses microdata.
Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.
To get an overview of microdata as well as the conventions followed by schema.org, take a look at the schema.org Getting Started guide.
3) We’ll continue to support our existing rich snippets markup formats.
If you’ve already done markup on your pages using microformats or RDFa, we’ll continue to support it. One caveat to watch out for: while it’s OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers.
4) Test your markup using the rich snippets testing tool.
It’s very useful to test your web pages with markup to make sure we’re able to parse the data correctly. As with previous rich snippets markup formats, you should use the rich snippets testing tool for this purpose. Note that while the testing tool will show the marked up information that was parsed from the page, rich snippets previews are not yet shown for schema.org markup. We’ll be adding this functionality soon.
The schema.org website and the rich snippets testing tool are in English. However, Google shows rich snippets in search results globally, so there’s no need to wait to start marking up your pages.
To learn more about rich snippets and how they relate to schema.org, check out the Rich snippets schema.org FAQ.
By Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta, Search Quality team -
Petits fours in your search results
Posted: November 17th, 2010, 6:00pm CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Recently we made a change to show more results from a domain for certain types of queries -- this helped searchers get to their desired result even faster. Today we’re expanding the feature so that, when appropriate, more queries show additional results from a domain. As a webmaster, you’ll appreciate the fact that these results may bring targeted visitors directly to the pages they’re interested in.
Here’s an example: in the past, the query [moma] (the Museum of Modern Art), might have triggered two results from the official site:
With this iteration, our search results may show:- Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
- Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact
Like all the hundreds of changes we make a year, we’re trying to help users quickly reach their desired result. Even though we’re constantly improving our algorithms, our general advice still holds true: create compelling, search-engine friendly sites in order to attract users, buzz, and often targeted traffic!
Written by Harvey Jones, Software Engineer -
Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events
Posted: September 2nd, 2010, 6:57pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Since the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared to one year ago. Here are three recent product updates.
Testing tool improvements
Despite the healthy adoption rate by webmasters so far, implementing the rich snippets markup correctly can still be a major challenge. To help address this, we’ve added new error messages to the rich snippets testing tool to help you better identify and fix any problems with the markup.
If you’ve added markup in the past but haven’t seen rich snippets appear for your site, we encourage you to take a few minutes to try testing the markup again on the updated testing tool.
Rich snippets markup for breadcrumbs
Last year, Google announced a modification to search results to begin showing site hierarchies (typically referred to as "breadcrumbs") rather than standard URLs in cases where it helped users to better understand a website:
We are now adding support for a Breadcrumbs markup format that allows webmasters to explicitly identify the breadcrumb hierarchy on their pages.
If the breadcrumbs UI is already showing for your site, we'll continue to show it even if you don't do the markup, so don't worry about any existing UI disappearing. Note that this new format is experimental. Based on feedback and on other available standards, this format may be modified or replaced in the future. As with other rich snippet types, while markup helps us to better understand the content on your site, it does not guarantee that the breadcrumbs UI will be shown for your web pages in search results.
Events
In January, we added support for rich snippets for events. If a web page containing events listings showed up in search results, up to three links to specific events could be shown in the search result snippet.
This works well for general queries like [concerts in seattle], but we also wanted to improve the search experience when searching for a specific event. We will now show rich snippets when pages containing a single event show up in search results. Single event rich snippets now contain the date and location of the event:
For instructions on adding events markup, refer to the events page in the rich snippets documentation.
Posted by Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta, Search Quality team -
Showing more results from a domain
Posted: August 20th, 2010, 11:40am CEST by Jonathan Simon
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:
Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.
We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.
Written by Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer -
Rich snippets go international
Posted: April 26th, 2010, 6:51pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
As part of our efforts to make search results more useful to our users around the world, we’re announcing the international availability of rich snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.
For example, we recently launched rich snippets for recipes which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for:
We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content - so today’s announcement is very exciting for us.
In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published documentation on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)
We encourage you to read the documentation to take advantage of the different types of rich snippets currently supported: people profiles, reviews, videos, events and recipes. You can also use our testing tool (in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to make sure results show as you would expect.
Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages.
Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Yu Watanabe -
URL removal explained, Part III: Removing content that you don't own
Posted: April 20th, 2010, 3:26pm CEST by Jonathan Simon
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Welcome to the third episode of our URL removals series! In episodes one and two, we talked about expediting the removal of content that's under your control and requesting expedited cache removals. Today, we're covering how to use Google's public URL removal tool to request removal of content from Google’s search results when the content originates on a website not under your control.
Google offers two tools that provide a way to request expedited removal of content:
1. Verified URL removal tool: for requesting to remove content from Google’s search results when it’s published on a site of which you’re a verified owner in Webmaster Tools (like your blog or your company’s site)
2. Public URL removal tool: for requesting to remove content from Google’s search results when it’s published on a site which you can’t verify ownership (like your friend’s blog)
Sometimes a situation arises where the information you want to remove originates from a site that you don't own or can't control. Since each individual webmaster controls their site and their site’s content, the best way to update or remove results from Google is for the site owner (where the content is published) to either block crawling of the URL, modify the content source, or remove the page altogether. If the content isn't changed, it would just reappear in our search results the next time we crawled it. So the first step to remove content that's hosted on a site you don't own is to contact the owner of the website and request that they remove or block the content in question.- Removed or blocked content
If the website owner removes a page, requests for the removed page should return a "404 Not Found" response or a "410 Gone" response. If they choose to block the page from search engines, then the page should either be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file or contain a noindex meta tag. Once one of these requirements is met, you can submit a removal request using the "Webmaster has already blocked the page" option.
Sometimes a website owner will claim that they’ve blocked or removed a page but they haven’t technically done so. If they claim a page has been blocked you can double check by looking at the site’s robots.txt file to see if the page is listed there as disallowed.
Another place to check if a page has been blocked is within the page’s HTML source code itself. You can visit the page and choose “View Page Source” from your browser. Is there a meta noindex tag in the HTML “head” section?User-agent: *
Disallow: /blocked-page/
If they inform you that the page has been removed, you can confirm this by using an HTTP response testing tool like the Live HTTP Headers add-on for the Firefox browser. With this add-on enabled, you can request any URL in Firefox to test that the HTTP response is actually 404 Not Found or 410 Gone.<html>
<head>
<title>blocked page</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
</head>
... - Content removed from the page
Once you've confirmed that the content you're seeking to remove is no longer present on the page, you can request a cache removal using the 'Content has been removed from the page' option. This type of removal--usually called a "cache" removal--ensures that Google's search results will not include the cached copy or version of the old page, or any snippets of text from the old version of the page. Only the current updated page (without the content that's been removed) will be accessible from Google's search results. However, the current updated page can potentially still rank for terms related to the old content as a result of inbound links that still exist from external sites. For cache removal requests you’ll be asked to enter a "term that has been removed from the page." Be sure to enter a word that is not found on the current live page, so that our automated process can confirm the page has changed -- otherwise the request will be denied. Cache removals are covered in more detail in part two of the "URL removal explained" series. - Removing inappropriate webpages or images that appear in our SafeSearch filtered results
Google introduced the SafeSearch filter with the goal of providing search results that exclude potentially offensive content. For situations where you find content that you feel should have been filtered out by SafeSearch, you can request that this content be excluded from SafeSearch filtered results in the future. Submit a removal request using the 'Inappropriate content appears in our SafeSearch filtered results' option.
Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst - Removed or blocked content
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Better recipes on the web: Introducing recipe rich snippets
Posted: April 13th, 2010, 7:50pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
Anticipating the start of the season of barbecues and potlucks, we’ve added recipes as our newest rich snippets format. This means that for certain sites with recipe content, Google users will see quick facts when these recipe pages show up as part of the search results.
For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets.
Recipes is the fifth format we support, following the introduction of reviews, people, video and, most recently, events.
If you have recipe content on your site, you can get started now by marking up your recipes with microdata, RDFa, or the hRecipe microformat. To learn more, read our documentation on how to mark up recipe information or our general help articles on rich snippets for a more complete overview.
Please remember that to ensure a great user experience we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that we can’t guarantee that marking up your site will result in a rich snippet when your page shows up on our search results. However, we encourage you to get started, and once you’re done you can test your pages with our rich snippets testing tool.
Written by Jun Gong, Kosuke Suzuki, and Yu Watanabe -
Help test some next-generation infrastructure
Posted: August 10th, 2009, 6:14pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
To build a great web search engine, you need to:- Crawl a large chunk of the web.
- Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
- Rank and return the most relevant pages for users' queries as quickly as possible.
Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at [www2.sandbox.google.com] and try searches there.
Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.
Here's how to give us feedback: Do a search at [www2.sandbox.google.com] and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Update on August 11, 2009: [ If you have language or country specific feedback on our new system's search results, we're happy to hear from you. It's a little more difficult to obtain these results from the sandbox URL, though, because you'll need manually alter the query parameters.
You can change these two values appropriately:
hl = language
gl = country code
Examples:
German language in Germany: &hl=de&gl=de
[www2.sandbox.google.com]
Spanish language in Mexico: &hl=es&gl=mx
[www2.sandbox.google.com]
And please don't forget to add the word "caffeine" in the feedback text box. :) ]
Posted by Sitaram Iyer, Staff Software Engineer, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer -
Introducing Rich Snippets
Posted: May 12th, 2009, 2:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Webmaster Level: All
As a webmaster, you have a unique understanding of your web pages and the content they represent. Google helps users find your page by showing them a small sample of that content -- the "snippet." We use a variety of techniques to create these snippets and give users relevant information about what they'll find when they click through to visit your site. Today, we're announcing Rich Snippets, a new presentation of snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages.
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we're beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.
To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp's review page for "Drooling Dog BarBQ" before adding markup data:
and now with microformats markup:
or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:
By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google's search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we're excited about the possibilities.
To ensure that this additional data is as helpful as possible to users, we'll be rolling this feature out gradually, expanding coverage to more sites as we do more experiments and process feedback from webmasters. We will make our best efforts to monitor and analyze whether individual websites are abusing this system: if we see abuse, we will respond accordingly.
To prepare your site for Rich Snippets and other benefits of structured data on the web, please see our documentation on structured data annotations.
Now, time for some Q&A with the team:
If I mark up my pages, does that guarantee I'll get Rich Snippets?
No. We will be rolling this out gradually, and as always we will use our own algorithms and policies to determine relevant snippets for users' queries. We will use structured data when we are able to determine that it helps users find answers sooner. And because you're providing the data on your pages, you should anticipate that other websites and other tools (browsers, phones) might use this data as well. You can let us know that you're interested in participating by filling out this form.
What about other existing microformats? Will you support other types of information besides reviews and people?
Not every microformat corresponds to data that's useful to show in a search result, but we do plan to support more of the existing microformats and define RDFa equivalents.
What's next?
We'll be continuing experiments with new types (beyond reviews and people) and hope to announce support for more types in the future.
I have too much data on my page to mark it all up.
That wasn't a question, but we'll answer anyway. For the purpose of getting data into snippets, we don't need every bit of data: it simply wouldn't fit. For example, a page that says it has "497 reviews" of a product probably has data for 10 and links to the others. Even if you could mark up all 497 blocks of data, there is no way we could fit it into a single snippet. To make your part of this grand experiment easier, we have defined aggregate types where necessary: a review-aggregate can be used to summarize all the review information (review count, average/min/max rating, etc.).
Why do you support multiple encodings?
A lot of previous work on structured data has focused on debates around encoding. Even within Google, we have advocates for microformat encoding, advocates for various RDF encodings, and advocates for our own encodings. But after working on this Rich Snippets project for a while, we realized that structured data on the web can and should accommodate multiple encodings: we hope to emphasize this by accepting both microformat encoding and RDFa encoding. Each encoding has its pluses and minuses, and the debate is a fine intellectual exercise, but it detracts from the real issues.
We do believe that it is important to have a common vocabulary: the language of object types, object properties, and property types that enable structured data to be understood by different applications. We debated how to address this vocabulary problem, and concluded that we needed to make an investment. Google will, working together with others, host a vocabulary that various Google services and other websites can use. We are starting with a small list, which we hope to extend over time.
Wherever possible, we'll simply reuse vocabulary that is in wide use: we support the pre-existing vCard and hReview types, and there are a variety of other types defined by various communities. Sites that use Google Custom Search will be able to define their own types, which we will index and present to users in rich Custom Search results pages. Finally, we encourage and expect this space to evolve based on new ideas from the structured data community. We'll notice and reach out when our crawlers pick up new types that are getting broad use.
Written by Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, and Othar Hansson -
Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush
Posted: December 22nd, 2008, 2:04am CET by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
Season's greetings, webmasters! We've compiled a list of quick and simple tips for websites preparing for the holiday rush. For online and offline retailers, we understand that your website is a big part of your business, especially this time of year. Whether it's to make the sale online or to increase foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location, your web presence is a critical part of your business plan. The tips below are fast, free, and can make a big difference.
Verify that your site is indexed by Google (and is returned in search results)
Check your snippet content and page titles with the site: command [site:example.com] -- do they look accurate and descriptive for users? Ideally, each title and snippet should be unique in order to reflect that each URL contains unique content. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools. There you can see which URLs on your site show duplicate titles or meta descriptions.
Label your images accurately
Don't miss out on potential customers! Because good 'alt' text and descriptive filenames help us better understand images, make sure you change non-descriptive file names [001.jpg] to something more accurate [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of our largest search properties, so you should take advantage of it.
Know what Google knows (about your site)
Check for crawl errors and learn the top queries that bring traffic to your site through Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.
Have a plan for expiring and temporary pages
Make sure to serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you no longer sell a product, serve a 404. If you have changed a product page to a new URL, serve a 301 to redirect the old page to the new one. Keeping your site up-to-date can help bring more targeted traffic your way.
Increase foot traffic too
If your website directs customers to a brick-and-mortar location, make sure you claim and double check your business listing in Google Local.
Usability 101
Test the usability of your checkout process with various browsers. Ask yourself if a user can get from product page to checkout without assistance. Is your checkout button easy to find?
Tell us where to find all of your web pages
If you upload new products faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a Sitemap and include 'last modification' and change frequency' information. A Sitemap can point Googlebot to your new or hard-to-find content.
Manage your sitelinks
Your site may be triggering Sitelinks in the search results, so check the links and make sure the destination pages are fully functional. Remember: in Webmaster Tools you can remove any sitelinks that you don't think users will find useful.
Don't forget to check out these additional resources:- Read our recently released SEO Starter Guide.
- Watch our Tutorials for Webmasters.
- Find out what information Google has about your website in Webmaster Tools.
- Get your other questions answered in our Webmaster Help Center.
- Ask your last-minute questions in the Webmaster Help Forum.
- Countdown to 2009!
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Matt Cutts on ranking, spam and the future of search
Posted: July 18th, 2008, 10:36am CEST by Maile Ohye
Tags: Search results
During a recent visit to the Mountain View Googleplex, I had the chance to interview Matt Cutts for our German Webmaster Blog. While enjoying the California sunshine we chatted about how to rank in Google, resources for webmasters and Matt's first encounter with spam. As these topics are not only interesting for a German audience, I want to share them with you as well. So watch the video and find out how difficult it can be for the head of webspam engineering to surf the Internet. :)
If you speak German you might want to check out the German translation of the interview.
Posted by Juliane Stiller, Search Quality Team
