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Ring in the new year with accessible content: Website clinic for non-profits

Posted: December 22nd, 2010, 11:55am CET by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

Webmaster level: Beginner

Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping -- just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they’ll know how to get around?
As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about.
So if you’ve resolved to boost your site’s user experience and online presence for the new year, improving your content accessibility is a great way to start. Thankfully, there are tons of features you can add to make your site more accessible. In this post, we’ll highlight three of them:

Intuitive navigation
Concise, descriptive anchor text for links
Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Intuitive navigationHelp users avoid confusion by providing them with intuitive navigation, so that when they arrive at your site, they’ll know where to click to find the information they’re looking for.
Here are three features you can implement in order to lead your users down the right path:

Navigational menu: Having a menu with links to the site’s most important pages is the fastest, easiest way to show users where to click next.
Text-based links: While drop-down menus, image-based links, and animation-based links can be appealing, keep in mind that users on text-only devices and some search engines may not be able to see or understand these links. Thus, many users prefer text-based links, which are also easier for search engines to crawl and interpret.
User-viewable site map: 59% of our submissions did not have a user-viewable site map. By providing one, you display the structure of your site and give the user easy one-click navigation. If users are having trouble finding specific pages on your site, a site map can help them find their way. Don’t send your users into the wild without a map!

Let’s explore how these features can make a site’s navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.

Thanks to this site’s clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site’s important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the “Home” button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site’s important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site’s content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.

Concise, descriptive anchor text for linksAnchor text -- the clickable text of a link -- can help users quickly decide which links they want to click on and find out more about. Meaningful anchor text makes it easier for users to navigate around your site and also helps search engines understand what the link’s destination page is about.
20% of our submissions could improve their sites by improving the anchor text used in some of their internal links. When writing anchor text, keep two things in mind:

Be descriptive: Use words that are relevant to the destination page, avoiding generic phrases like “click here” or “article.” Make sure the user can get a snapshot of the destination page’s overall content and functionality by reading the anchor text.
Keep it concise: Anchor text that contains a few words or a short phrase is more attractive and convenient for users to read than a sentence or paragraph-long link.

Let’s take a look at how anchor text played out in two user-submitted examples:

Organization	Anchor Text Examples	User Friendliness	Anchor Text Behavior
The Mosaic Project	Work for Mosaic Order Our Curriculum Guide Outdoor School	High: Users can get an accurate idea of the content on the links’ destination pages just by reading the anchor text.	Active verb phrases and rich nouns accurately describe the pages that the links are pointing to.
Asian Liver Center	Learn more here	Low: The anchor text is too generic and does not give users an idea of what the linked-to content is.	Generic phrases give little insight into the pages that the links are pointing to.

You can learn more about anchor text and internal linking strategies by checking out this blog post on the importance of link architecture.
Unique, accurate page titles throughout the siteEach page on your site is different, so flaunt your site’s diversity by giving a unique title to each page. Giving each page a unique title lets search engines know how that page is distinct from others within your site. In our analysis, over 28% of sites could have improved their site quality by adding unique page titles.
Let’s check out a few more examples to see what a difference unique, accurate page titles can make:

Organization	Page Title Examples	User Friendliness	Page Title Behavior
VAMS International	Upcoming Events \| VAMS International Request Service \| VAMS International FAQ’s \| VAMS International	High: Each page’s content is relevant to its title, and the user can get a good idea of each page’s unique offerings and functionality.	Concise, rich language joined with the organization’s name accurately describes the corresponding pages. The titles show how each page is unique while also acknowledging that they are all associated with one organization.
MHCD Evaluation and Research	MHCD Evaluation and Research	Low: This site contains a lot of diverse content and rich functionality; however, the uniform page titles do not convey these strengths.	This page title is too general and does not accurately describe the content on each page. The same title is used across all the pages on this site.

Wrapping things upWe hope that this blog post has given you some ideas on how to ring in the new year with improved content accessibility, which can boost the user experience and online presence for your site.
To learn more about the features discussed here and in our previous two site clinic posts, check out our SEO Report Card and SEO Starter Guide.
This blog post wraps up our website clinic for non-profits. We send our warmest regards to all the great non-profit causes you are working on, and thanks to everyone who took the time to submit their sites and read our posts!
Posted by Jen Lee and Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Evaluation TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

Holiday source code housekeeping: Website clinic for non-profits

Posted: December 21st, 2010, 12:15pm CET by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
As the holiday season comes around, we all have a bit of housekeeping to do. This is precisely why we wanted to focus the second post in our site clinic series on cleaning up your source code. Throughout our analysis of submitted non-profit websites, we noticed some confusion about what HTML markup, or tags, to use where, and what content to place within them, both of which could have significant impact on users and how your website looks on the search results page.
Before you deck the halls, deck out your <title> elementsOut of all the submitted non-profit websites, 27% were misusing their <title> elements, which are critical in letting both Google and users know what’s important to your website. Typically, a search engine will display ~60 characters from your title element; this is valuable real estate, so you should use it! Before getting into the actual code, let’s first take a look at how a great title element from one of our submitted sites, Sharp, will appear in the search results page:

Ideally, a great <title> element will include the name of the organization, along with a descriptive tag line. Let’s take a look at some submitted examples:

Organization	<title> source code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sharp	<title>Top San Diego Doctors and Hospitals - Sharp HealthCare</title>	Best	Includes organization’s name and a descriptive tag line
Interieur	<title>Interieur 2010 - 15-24 October Kortrijk, Belgium</title>	Good	Includes the organization’s name and a non-descriptive tag line
VAMS International	<title>Visual Arts and Music for Society \| VAMS International</title>	Okay	Includes only the organization’s name

If you don’t specify a <title> tag, then Google will try to create a title for you. You can probably do better than our best guess, so go for it: take control of your <title> tag! It’s a simple fix that can make a huge difference. Using specific <title> tags for your deeper URLs is also important, and we’ll address that in our next site clinic post.
Keep an eye on your description meta tagsDescription meta tags weren’t being utilized to their full potential in 54% of submitted sites. These tags are often used to populate the two-line snippet provided to users in the search results page. With a solid snippet, you can get your potential readers excited and ready to learn more about your organization. Let’s take another look at a good example from among the submitted sites, Tales of Aussie Rescue:

If description meta tags are absent or not relevant, a snippet will be chosen from the page’s content automatically. If you’re lucky and have a good snippet auto-selected, keep in mind that search engines vary in the way that they select snippets, so it’s better to keep things consistent and relevant by writing a solid description meta tag.
Keep your <h> elements in their placeAnother quick fix in your housekeeping is assuring your website makes proper use of heading tags. In our non-profit study, nearly 19% of submitted sites had room for improvement with heading elements. The most common problem in heading tags was the tendency to initiate headers with an <h2> or <h3> tag while not including an <h1> tag, presumably for aesthetic reasons.
Headings give you the opportunity to tell both Google and users what’s important to you and your website. The lower the number on your heading tag, the more important the text, in the eyes of Google and your users. Take advantage of that <h1> tag! If you don’t like how an <h1> tag is rendered visually, you can always alter its appearance in your CSS.
Use alt text for imagesEveryone is always proud to display their family photos come holiday season, but don’t forget to tell us what they’re all about. Over 37% of analyzed sites were not making appropriate use of the image alt attribute. If used properly, this attribute can:

Help Google understand what your image is
Allow users on text-only browsers, with accessibility problems, or on limited devices to understand your images

Keep in mind, rich and descriptive alt text is the key here. Let’s take another look at some of our submitted sites and their alt attribute usage:
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 15.0px Arial} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 15.0px Arial; color: #0000a1} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline} table.t1 {border-collapse: collapse} td.td1 {width: 100.0px; background-color: #c0c0c0; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td2 {width: 95.0px; background-color: #c0c0c0; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td3 {width: 285.0px; background-color: #c0c0c0; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td4 {width: 243.0px; background-color: #c0c0c0; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td5 {width: 100.0px; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td6 {width: 95.0px; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td7 {width: 285.0px; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px} td.td8 {width: 243.0px; border-style: solid; border-width: 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px 1.0px; border-color: #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa #aaaaaa; padding: 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px 8.0px}

Organization	Source Code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sponsor A Puppy	<img alt="Sponsor a Puppy logo" src=...	Best: the alt text specifies the image is the organization’s main logo	Uses rich, descriptive alt text to describe images, buttons, and logos
Philanthropedia	<img alt="Logo" height=...	Good: the alt text specifies the image is a logo, but does not further describe it by the organization or its behavior	Uses non-descriptive alt text for images, buttons, and logos, or uses alt text only sporadically
Coastal Community Foundation	<img src="...”>	Not ideal: alt text not present	No use of alt text, or use of text that does not add meaning (often seen in numbering the images)

A little window shopping for your New Year’s resolutionGoogle has some great resources to further address best practices in your source code. For starters, you can use our HTML Suggestion Tool in Webmaster Tools. Also, it’s always a good practice to make your site accessible to all viewers.
Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

A helping holiday hand: Website clinic for non-profits

Posted: December 20th, 2010, 10:22am CET by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
A New Year’s resolutionIn the spirit of the holidays, here at Google we wanted to take the time to help out those who spend their days making our world a better place: non-profit organizations. A few weeks back, we asked webmasters of non-profits to submit their organization’s site to our Search Quality team for analysis. After some number crunching and trend analysis, we’re back to report on general areas for improvement and to guide you towards some useful resources!
Making our list, checking it twiceFirst, we’d like thank all of the amazing organizations who participated by submitting their sites. We got some great results, and are excited about all the diverse non-profit causes out there.
Our analysis will take place in the following two posts. The first post will focus on cleaning up HTML tags in your source code, while the second will examine improving user experience via better content accessibility.
Visions of... URLs... dancing in our headsThe great news is, every single site submitted had at least one or two areas to tweak to make it even better! So this information should be helpful to everyone out there, big or small. Just to whet your appetites, here’s a quick list of items that will not be addressed in our following posts, but that had some room for improvement in a large percentage of submitted sites:

Keep an eye on proper canonicalization: 56% of analyzed non-profit sites could improve their canonicalization practices. You can read more about canonicalization in this blog post from a previous site clinic.
Make sure your volunteer/support sections are visible: 29% of our submissions could improve their sites by making their support, volunteer, or donation sections easier to find. A great way to accomplish this is to add a donations tab to your navigation bar so it’s just one click away at all times.
Protect your confidential information: Lots of non-profits, especially those in the medical industry, deal with some very important and confidential information. Read up on how to control your crawled and indexed content, and remember to protect confidential content through proper authentication measures.
Make your Flash sites search engine friendly: We saw some beautiful sites running on Flash. Search engines have a hard time understanding Flash files, and we’re working to improve Flash comprehension on our end, but here are some discussion points on how you can help us understand your Flash content.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Evaluation TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

Optimizing sites for TV

Posted: October 20th, 2010, 11:51pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

Just as mobile phones make your site accessible to people on the go, Google TV makes your site easily viewable to people lounging on their couch. Google TV is a platform that combines your current TV programming with the web and, before long, more apps. It’s the web you love, with the TV you love, all available on the sofa made for you. Woohoo!

Because Google TV has a fully functioning web browser built in, users can easily visit your site from their TV. Current sites should already work, but you may want to provide your users with an enhanced TV experience -- what's called the “10-foot UI” (user interface). They'll be several feet away from the screen, not several inches away, and rather than a mouse on their desktop, they'll have a remote with a keyboard and a pointing device.

For example, here’s YouTube for desktop users versus what we’re calling “YouTube Leanback” -- our site optimized for large screens:

YouTube desktop version on the left, YouTube Leanback on the right
See our Spotlight Gallery for more examples of TV-optimized sites.

What does "optimized for TV" mean?

It means that, for the user sitting on their couch, your site on their TV is an even more enjoyable experience:

Text is large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance.
Site navigation can be performed through button arrows on the remote (a D-pad), rather than mouse/touchpad usage
Selectable elements provide a visual queue when selected (when you’re 10 feet away, it needs to be really, really obvious what selections are highlighted)
and more...

How can webmasters gain a general idea of their site’s appearance on TV?

First, remember that appearance alone doesn't incorporate whether your site can be easily navigated by TV users (i.e. users with a remote rather than a mouse). With that said, here’s a quick workaround to give you a ballpark idea of how your site looks on TV. (For more in-depth info, please see the “Design considerations” in our optimization guide.)

On a large monitor, make your window size 1920 x 1080.
In a browser, visit your site at full screen.
Zoom the browser to 1.5x the normal size. This is performed in different ways with different keyboards. For example, in Chrome if you press ctrl+ (press ctrl and + at the same time) twice, that’ll zoom the browser to nearly 1.5x the initial size.
Move back 3 x (the distance between you and the monitor).
Check out your site!

And don’t forget, if you want to see your site with the real thing, Google TV enabled devices are now available in stores.

How can you learn more?

Our team just published a developer site, with TV optimization techniques, at code.google.com/tv/web/.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

SEO Starter Guide updated

Posted: September 28th, 2010, 4:00pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Update on October 3, 2010: We have fixed the issue causing the highlighted text to be obscured on Linux PDF readers.
About two years ago we published our first SEO Starter Guide, which we have since translated into 40 languages. Today, we’re very happy to share with you the new version of the guide with more content and examples.

Here’s what’s new:

Glossary to define terms throughout the guide
More example images to help you understand the content
Ways to optimize your site for mobile devices
Clearer wording for better readability

You may remember getting to see what Googlebot looks like in our “First date with Googlebot” post. In this version of the SEO Starter Guide, Googlebot is back to provide you with some more SEO tips.
You can download the new version here [PDF]. Entertain and impress your friends by leaving a printed copy on your coffee table.

Posted by Brandon Falls and Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Chrome Extensions for web development

Posted: May 27th, 2010, 12:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.

For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.

Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.

With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.

Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.

These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.

Written by Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team

Hard facts about comment spam

Posted: November 25th, 2009, 8:17pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: Beginner

It has probably happened to you: you're reading articles or watching videos on the web, and you come across some unrelated, gibberish comments. You may wonder what this is all about. Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point back to the poster's site in an attempt to boost their site's ranking. Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like "Nice site!") with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Why is it bad?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people's hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site's organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one's site in the long run.

Promote your site without comment spam

If you want to improve your site's visibility in the search results, spamming comments is definitely not the way to go. Instead, think about whether your site offers what people are looking for, such as useful information and tools.

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you'll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

Moreover, Google provides a list of advice in order to improve the crawlability and indexability of your site. Check out our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

What can I do to avoid spam on my site?

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site's users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

Disallow anonymous posting.
Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
Turn on comment moderation.
Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field.
Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

For detailed information about these topics, check out our Help Center document on comment spam.

My site is full of comment spam, what should I do?

It's never too late! Don't let spammers ruin the experience for others. Adopt security measures discussed above to stop the spam activity, then invest some time to clean up the spammy comments and ban the spammers from your site. Depending on you site's system, you may be able to save time by banning spammers and removing their comments all at once, rather than one by one.

If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you've cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

For more information about this topic and to discuss it with others, join us in the Webmaster Help Forum. (But don't leave spammy comments!)

Written by Adel Saoud and Paolo Petrolini

Dealing with low-quality backlinks

Posted: October 16th, 2009, 6:53pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

Tags: general tips

Webmaster level: Intermediate/Advanced

Webmasters who check their incoming links in Webmaster Tools often ask us what they can do when they see low-quality links. Understandably, many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as "being part of a bad neighbourhood," which over time might harm their site's ranking.

If your site receives links that look similarly dodgy, don't be alarmed... read on!

While it's true that linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithms, it's just one of many. I know we say it a lot, but having something that people want to look at or use—unique, engaging content, or useful tools and services—is also a huge factor. Other factors can include how a site is structured, whether the words of a user's query appear in the title, how close the words are on the page, and so on. The point is, if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it's important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site. If you have a well-structured and regularly maintained site with original, high-quality content, those are the sorts of things that users will see and appreciate.

That having said, in an ideal world you could have your cake and eat it too (or rather, you could have a high-quality site and high-quality backlinks). You may also be concerned about users' perception of your site if they come across it via a batch of spammy links. If the number of poor-quality links is manageable, and/or if it looks easy to opt-out or get those links removed from the site that's linking to you, it may be worth it to try to contact the site(s) and ask them to remove their links. Remember that this isn't something that Google can do for you; we index content that we find online, but we don't control that content or who's linking to you.

If you run into some uncooperative site owners, however, don't fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don't have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a website testing tool to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site's overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.

Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google knows about these links and is valuing them appropriately, feel free to bring them to our attention using either our spam report or our paid links report.

Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Kirkland

Let's make the mobile web faster

Posted: October 16th, 2009, 4:59pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

(Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)

This week, we've been celebrating all things mobile across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to make the web faster. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our Make the mobile web faster article.

Posted by Jeremy Weinstein, Google Webmaster

Specifying an image's license using RDFa

Posted: August 14th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.

If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Peter Linsley, Product Manager

How do you use Webmaster Tools? Share your stories and become a YouTube star!

Posted: August 6th, 2009, 6:45pm CEST by Ríona MacNamara

Tags: general tips

Our greatest resource is the webmaster community, and here at Webmaster Central we're constantly impressed by the knowledge and expertise we see among webmasters: real-life SEOs, bloggers, online retailers, and all those other people creating great online content.

How do real-life webmasters actually use Webmaster Tools? We'd love to know, and we'd like to showcase some real-life examples for the rest of the community. Create a video telling your story, and upload it via the gadget in our Help Center. We'll highlight the best on our Webmaster Central YouTube channel, and even embed some in relevant Help Center articles (with full credit to you, of course).

To share your stories: Make a video, upload it to YouTube, then go to our Help Center, and submit your vid via our Help Center gadget. Our full guidelines give more information, but here is a summary of the key points:

Keep the video short; 3-5 minutes is ideal. Think small: a short video is a good way to showcase your use of - for example - Top Search Queries, but not long enough to highlight your whole SEO strategy.
Focus on a real-life example of how you used a particular feature. For example, you could show how you used link data to research your brand, or crawl errors to diagnose problems with your site structure. Do you have a great tip or recommendation?
Upload your video before September 30.
White hats are recommended. They show up better on screen.

Written by Michael Wyszomierski and Ríona MacNamara

Spam2.0: Fake user accounts and spam profiles

Posted: June 26th, 2009, 11:06am CEST by Jason Morrison

Tags: general tips

You're a good webmaster or web developer, and you've done everything you can to keep your site from being hacked and keep your forums and comment sections free of spam. You're now the proud owner of a buzzing web2.0 social community, filling the web with user-generated content, and probably getting lots of visitors from Google and other search engines.

Many of your site's visitors will create user profiles, and some will spend hours posting in forums, joining groups, and getting the sparkles exactly right on the rainbow-and-unicorn image for their BFF's birthday. This is all great.

Others, however, will create accounts and fill their profiles with gibberish, blatherskite and palaver. Even worse, they'll add a sneaky link, a bit of redirecting JavaScript code, or a big fake embedded video that takes your users off to the seediest corners of the web.

Welcome to the world of spam profiles. The social web is growing incredibly quickly and spammers look at every kind of user content on the web as an opportunity for traffic. I've spoken with a number of experienced webmasters who were surprised to find out this was even a problem, so I thought I would talk a little bit about spam profiles and what you might do to find and clean them out of your site.

Why is this important?Imagine the following scenario:

"Hello there, welcome to our new web2.0 social networking site. Boy, have I got a new friend for you. His name is Mr. BuyMaleEnhancementRingtonesNow, and he'd love for you to check out his profile. He's a NaN-year-old from Pharmadelphia, PA and you can check out his exciting home page at http://example.com/obviousflimflam.

Not interested? Then let me introduce you to my dear friend PrettyGirlsWebCam1234, she says she's an old college friend of yours and has exciting photos and videos you might want to see."

You probably don't want your visitors' first impression of your site to include inappropriate images or bogus business offers. You definitely don't want your users hounded by fake invites to the point where they stop visiting altogether. If your site becomes filled with spammy content and links to bad parts of the web, search engines may lose trust in your otherwise fine site.

Why would anyone create spam profiles?Spammers create fake profiles for a number of nefarious purposes. Sometimes they're just a way to reach users internally on a social networking site. This is somewhat similar to the way email spam works - the point is to send your users messages or friend invites and trick them into following a link, making a purchase, or downloading malware by sending a fake or low-quality proposition.

Spammers are also using spam profiles as yet another avenue to generate webspam on otherwise good domains. They scour the web for opportunities to get their links, redirects, and malware to users. They use your site because it's no cost to them and they hope to piggyback off your good reputation.

The latter case is becoming more and more common. Some fake profiles are obvious, using popular pharmaceuticals as the profile name, for example; but we've noticed an increase in savvier spammers that try to use real names and realistic data to sneak in their bad links. To make sure their newly-minted gibberish profile shows up in searches they will also generate links on hacked sites, comment spam, and yes, other spam profiles. This results in a lot of bad content on your domain, unwanted incoming links from spam sites, and annoyed users.

Which sites are being abused?You may be thinking to yourself, "But my site isn't a huge social networking juggernaut; surely I don't need to worry." Unfortunately, we see spam profiles on everything from the largest social networking sites to the smallest forums and bulletin boards. Many popular bulletin boards and content management systems (CMS) such as vBulletin, phpBB, Moodle, Joomla, etc. generate member pages for every user that creates an account. In general CMSs are great because they make it easy for you to deploy content and interactive features to your site, but auto-generated pages can be abused if you're not aware.

For all of you out there who do work for huge social networking juggernauts, your site is a target as well. Spammers want access to your large userbase, hoping that users on social sites will be more trusting of incoming friend requests, leading to larger success rates.

What can you do?This isn't an easy problem to solve - the bad guys are attacking a wide range of sites and seem to be able to adapt their scripts to get around countermeasures. Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through. Here are some things you can do to make their lives more difficult and keep your site clean and useful:

Make sure you have standard security features in place, including CAPTCHAs, to make it harder for spammers to create accounts en masse. Watch out for unlikely behavior - thousands of new user accounts created from the same IP address, new users sending out thousands of friend requests, etc. There is no simple solution to this problem, but often some simple checks will catch most of the worst spam.
Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts. We often see large numbers of fake profiles on one innocent site all linking to the same domain, so once you find one, you should make it simple to remove all of them.
Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and other security holes that allow spammers to inject questionable code onto their profile pages. We've seen techniques such as JavaScript used to redirect users to other sites, iframes that attempt to give users malware, and custom CSS code used to cover over your page with spammy content.
Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages. This makes your site less attractive to anyone trying to pass PageRank from your site to their spammy site. Spammers seem to go after the low-hanging fruit, so even just nofollowing new profiles with few signals of trustworthiness will go a long way toward mitigating the problem. On the flip side, you could also consider manually or automatically lifting the nofollow attribute on links created by community members that are likely more trustworthy, such as those who have contributed substantive content over time.
Consider noindexing profile pages for new, not yet trustworthy users. You may even want to make initial profile pages completely private, especially if the bulk of the content on your site is in blogs, forums, or other types of pages.
Add a "report spam" feature to user profiles and friend invitations. Let your users help you solve the problem - they care about your community and are annoyed by spam too.
Monitor your site for spammy pages. One of the best tools for this is Google Alerts - set up a site: query along with commercial or adult keywords that you wouldn't expect to see on your site. This is also a great tool to help detect hacked pages. You can also check 'Keywords' data in Webmaster Tools for strange, volatile vocabulary.
Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries. It's always great to see the line on your pageviews chart head upward, but pay attention to commercial or adult queries that don't fit your site's content. In cases like this where a spammer has abused your site, that traffic will provide little if any benefit while introducing users to your site as "the place that redirected me to that virus."

Have any other tips to share? Please feel free to comment below. If you have any questions, you can always ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Watch out for your .yu domain!

Posted: June 24th, 2009, 3:47am CEST by Luisella Mazza

Tags: general tips

Are you the owner of a .yu domain? Then you might have heard the news: as of September 30, all .yu domains will stop working, regardless of their renewal date. This means that any content you're hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. For those of you who would still like to have your site online, we've prepared some recommendations to make sure that Google keeps crawling, indexing, and serving your content appropriately.

Check your backlinks. Since it won't be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a "comma separated value" -- .csv -- file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.

Check your internal links. If you are planning to simply move your content in bulk from the old to the new site, make sure that the new internal navigation is up to date. For example, if you are renaming pages on your site from "www.example.yu/home.htm" to "www.example.com/home.htm" make sure that your internal navigation reflects such changes to prevent broken links.

Start moving the site to your new domain. It's a good idea to start moving while you can still maintain control of your old domain, so don't wait! As mentioned in our best practices when moving your site, we recommend starting by moving a single directory or subdomain, and testing the results before completing the move. Remember that you will not be able to keep a 301 redirection on your old domain after September 30, so start your test early.

While you're moving your site, you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Although we may not crawl or index all the pages listed in each Sitemap, we recommend that you submit one because doing so helps Google understand your site better. You can read more on this topic in our answers to the most frequently asked questions on Sitemaps. And remember that for any question or concerns we're waiting for you in the Google Webmaster Help Forum!

Update: as mentioned here, we have introduced a new feature: Change of Address. Check it out if you are moving from one domain to another! By using this feature you will help us update our index faster and hopefully make the transition for your users smoother.

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Let's make the web faster

Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 5:55pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

Tags: general tips

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google Code Blog)

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.

We are excited to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:

Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.
In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.
Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.
While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC's decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.

To find out what Googlers think about making the web faster, see the video below. If you have ideas on how to speed up the web, please share them with the rest of the community. Let's all work together to make the web faster!

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations and Bill Coughran, SVP, Engineering

Let visitors recommend your content

Posted: May 15th, 2009, 8:20pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

We recently posted about some of the engaging gadgets you can add to your site with Google Friend Connect. Here's one more that may be of interest if you're looking for another way to get feedback from your site's visitors:

The new Recommendation gadgets make it easy for your visitors to let you and the world know which parts of your site they like best. By placing recommendation buttons next to photos, articles or other content, visitors can recommend specific items to others with the click of a button. Your most popular items will surface to the top of the recommendation list.

To install a recommendation gadget on your site, or to check out the other gadgets that are available, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Google Trends for your website

Posted: May 9th, 2009, 4:30pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

In a recent post on the Official Google Blog, we mentioned our Google Trends gadget, and we thought it made sense to also post something here for all the webmasters that might be interested in having Trends on their website. Google Trends is a great way to see what's popular on the web -- people tend to search for what they care about -- and the Trends gadget makes it easy for you to put Trends on your website. Just cut and paste a small snippet of code, input your search terms, and you can show your readers how searches for Obama have changed during the last 30 days or who's the most popular American Idol contestant. So take a little piece of Google with you, and show your readers what's hot on the web.

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

More ways to engage your community

Posted: May 8th, 2009, 2:10pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: All

Over the last few weeks, Google Friend Connect has added several new ways for you to strengthen the community that visits your site. These gadgets help to make your site more engaging and gives your visitors a new way to interact with your content and other visitors.

Here is a quick overview of these new gadgets:

Event gadget - Have an upcoming event you want to promote to your community? Embed this gadget on your site to let members get details about the event, see a map, indicate if they're coming, and see who else is attending. They can even add the event to their personal Google Calendars with just a click.

Polls gadget - Polls are a fun and easy way for your visitors to express themselves and a great tool for you to see what your users like. This gadget makes it easy to publish opinion polls and adds a social element by displaying the faces of the community members and friends who voted on each answer.

Get Answers gadget - Add the Get Answers gadget to your site to encourage visitors to ask questions of the community and answer questions posed by other community members. This gadget lets visitors browse questions, submit answers, and vote on answers they think are the best.

Comments gadget - Bring your site to life by adding the comments gadget to your pages. This gadget enables visitors to post comments and links to videos on your site. Visitors can even use the new translation feature to read comments in their preferred language.

Check out the Friend Connect gallery to see these gadgets along with all the other features Friend Connect has to offer. And keep an eye on the Social Web Blog for additional gadgets we'll soon be launching.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Tips on requesting reconsideration

Posted: April 24th, 2009, 12:23pm CEST by Brian White

Tags: general tips

Do you think your site might be penalized because of something that
happened on it? As two leaders of the reconsideration team, we recently made
a video to help you discover how to create a good reconsideration request,
including tips on what we look for on our side. Watch the video and then
let us know if you have questions in the comments!

Posted by Rachel Searles and Brian White, Search Quality Team

Helping your site look great with Google Chrome

Posted: March 26th, 2009, 6:35pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Since launching Google Chrome last September, we received a number of questions from webmasters and web developers about how to make their sites look great in Google Chrome. The questions were very insightful and illuminating for the Chrome team, and I want to respond with a few helpful tips for making your site look stellar in Google Chrome.

Detecting Google Chrome

Most sites will render the same in both Safari and Google Chrome, because they're both WebKit-based browsers. If your site looks right in Safari, then it should look right in Google Chrome, too.

Since Chrome is relatively new, many sites have confused Google Chrome with another browser. If your site doesn't look quite right in Chrome but works fine in Safari, it's possible your site may just not recognize Chrome's user-agent string.

As platforms and browsers adopt WebKit as their rendering engine, your site can detect and support them automatically with the right JavaScript checks. Commonly, sites use JavaScript to 'sniff' the navigator.userAgent property for "Chrome" or "Safari", but you should use proper object detection if possible. In fact, Gmail has been detecting WebKit properly in Chrome since day one!

If you must detect the user-agent type, you can use this simple JavaScript to detect WebKit:

var isWebkit =
  navigator.userAgent.indexOf("AppleWebKit") > -1;

Or, if you want to check that the version of WebKit is at least a certain version—say, if you want to use a spiffy new WebKit feature:

var webkitVersion =
  parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.split("AppleWebKit/")[1]) ||
  undefined;
if (webkitVersion && webkitVersion > 500 ) {
  // use spiffy WebKit feature here
}

For reference, here are a few browser releases and the version of WebKit they shipped:

Browser	Version of WebKit
Chrome 1.0	525.19
Chrome 2.0 beta	530.1
Safari 3.1	525.19
Safari 3.2	525.26.2
Safari 4.0 beta	528.16

We do not recommend adding "Google" or "Apple" to your navigator.vendor checks to detect WebKit or Google Chrome, because this will not detect other WebKit or Chromium-based browsers!

You can find more information about detecting WebKit at webkit.org.

Other helpful tips

Google Chrome doesn't support ActiveX plug-ins, but does support NPAPI plug-ins. This means you can show plug-in content like Flash and Java in Google Chrome the same way you do with Firefox and Safari.
If text on your site looks a bit off, make sure you provide the proper content type and character encoding information in the HTTP response headers, or at the beginning of your pages, preferably near the top of the <head> section.
Don't put block elements inside inline elements.

Wrong: <a><div>This will look wrong.</div></a>

Right: <div><a>This will look right!</a></div>

If your JavaScript isn't working in Google Chrome, you can debug using Chrome's built-in JavaScript debugger, under the "page" menu -> 'Developer' -> 'Debug JavaScript' menu option.

To help webmasters and web developers find more answers, we created a support center and forum specifically to answer your questions. Of course, if you find something you think is really a bug in Chrome, please report it to us!

Help us improve Google Chrome!

If you'd like to help even more, we're looking for sites that may be interested in allowing Google to use their site as a benchmark for our internal compatibility and performance measurements. If you're interested in having Google Chrome development optimized against a cached version of your site, please contact us about details at chrome-webmasters@google.com.

Please keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep working to improve Google Chrome!

Written by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager, Google Chrome

Open redirect URLs: Is your site being abused?

Posted: January 30th, 2009, 6:17pm CET by Jason Morrison

Tags: general tips

No one wants malware or spammy URLs inserted onto their domain, which is why we all try to follow good security practices. But what if there were a way for spammers to take advantage of your site, without ever setting a virtual foot in your server?

There is, by abusing open redirect URLs.

Webmasters face a number of situations where it's helpful to redirect users to another page. Unfortunately, redirects left open to any arbitrary destination can be abused. This is a particularly onerous form of abuse because it takes advantage of your site's functionality rather than exploiting a simple bug or security flaw. Spammers hope to use your domain as a temporary "landing page" to trick email users, searchers and search engines into following links which appear to be pointing to your site, but actually redirect to their spammy site.

We at Google are working hard to keep the abused URLs out of our index, but it's important for you to make sure your site is not being used in this way. Chances are you don't want users finding URLs on your domain that push them to a screen full of unwanted porn, nasty viruses and malware, or phishing attempts. Spammers will generate links to make the redirects appear in search results, and these links tend to come from bad neighborhoods you don't want to be associated with.

This sort of abuse has become relatively common lately so we wanted to get the word out to you and your fellow webmasters. First we'll give some examples of redirects that are actively being abused, then we'll talk about how to find out if your site is being abused and what to do about it.

Redirects being abused by spammersWe have noticed spammers going after a wide range of websites, from large well-known companies to small local government agencies. The list below is a sample of the kinds of redirect we have seen used. These are all perfectly legitimate techniques, but if they're used on your site you should watch out for abuse.

Scripts that redirect users to a file on the server—such as a PDF document—can sometimes be vulnerable. If you use a content management system (CMS) that allows you to upload files, you might want to make sure the links go straight to the file, rather than going through a redirect. This includes any redirects you might have in the downloads section of your site. Watch out for links like this:

example.com/go.php?url=
example.com/ie/ie40/download/?

Internal site search result pages sometimes have automatic redirect options that could be vulnerable. Look for patterns like this, where users are automatically sent to any page after the "url=" parameter:

example.com/search?q=user+search+keywords&url=

Systems to track clicks for affiliate programs, ad programs, or site statistics might be open as well. Some example URLs include:

example.com/coupon.jsp?code=ABCDEF&url=
example.com/cs.html?url=

Proxy sites, though not always technically redirects, are designed to send users through to other sites and therefore can be vulnerable to this abuse. This includes those used by schools and libraries. For example:

proxy.example.com/?url=

In some cases, login pages will redirect users back to the page they were trying to access. Look out for URL parameters like this:

example.com/login?url=

Scripts that put up an interstitial page when users leave a site can be abused. Lots of educational, government, and large corporate web sites do this to let users know that information found on outgoing links isn't under their control. Look for URLs following patterns like this:

example.com/redirect/
example.com/out?
example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?

Is my site being abused?Even if none of the patterns above look familiar, your site may have open redirects to keep an eye on. There are a number of ways to see if you are vulnerable, even if you are not a developer yourself.

Check if abused URLs are showing up in Google. Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google's results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn't supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.

You can also watch out for strange queries showing up in the Top search queries section of Webmaster Tools. If you have a site dedicated to the genealogy of the landed gentry, a large number of queries for porn, pills, or casinos might be a red flag. On the other hand, if you have a drug info site, you might not expect to see celebrities in your top queries. Keep an eye on the Message Center in Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google.

Check your server logs or web analytics package for unfamiliar URL parameters (like "=http:" or "=//") or spikes in traffic to redirect URLs on your site. You can also check the pages with external links in Webmaster Tools.

Watch out for user complaints about content or malware that you know for sure can not be found on your site. Your users may have seen your domain in the URL before being redirected and assumed they were still on your site.

What you can doUnfortunately there is no one easy way to make sure that your redirects aren't exploited. An open redirect isn't a bug or a security flaw in and of itself—for some uses they have to be left fairly open. But there are a few things you can do to prevent your redirects from being abused or at least to make them less attractive targets. Some of these aren't trivial; you may need to write some custom code or talk to your vendor about releasing a patch.

Change the redirect code to check the referer, since in most cases everyone coming to your redirect script legitimately should come from your site, not a search engine or elsewhere. You may need to be permissive, since some users' browsers may not report a referer, but if you know a user is coming from an external site you can stop or warn them.

If your script should only ever send users to an internal page or file (for example, on a page with file downloads), you should specifically disallow off-site redirects.

Consider using a whitelist of safe destinations. In this case your code would keep a record of all outgoing links, and then check to make sure the redirect is a legitimate destination before forwarding the user on.

Consider signing your redirects. If your website does have a genuine need to provide URL redirects, you can properly hash the destination URL and then include that cryptographic signature as another parameter when doing the redirect. That allows your own site to do URL redirection without opening your URL redirector to the general public.

If your site is really not using it, just disable or remove the redirect. We have noticed a large number of sites where the only use of the redirect is by spammers—it's probably just a feature left turned on by default.

Use robots.txt to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your site. This won't solve the problem completely, as attackers could still use your domain in email spam. Your site will be less attractive to attackers, though, and users won't get tricked via web search results. If your redirect scripts reside in a subfolder with other scripts that don't need to appear in search results, excluding the entire subfolder may even make it harder for spammers to find redirect scripts in the first place.

You can also use Webmaster Tools to remove URLs. Chances are that the spammers have also hacked and abused other sites to generate links to the spammed section of your site. If you see suspicious sites or spammed forums linking in, feel free to report those to us, preferably with the verified spam report form in Webmaster Tools.

Open redirect abuse is a big issue right now but we think that the more webmasters know about it, the harder it will be for the bad guys to take advantage of unwary sites. Please feel free to leave any helpful tips in the comments below or discuss in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Adding a social playlist to your site

Posted: January 15th, 2009, 12:00pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

As you're building your site, you may be looking for a simple way to provide fresh content that captures the attention of first time visitors and loyal users alike. They say that music brings people together, so what better way to engage your visitors than by inviting them to help build a unique, collaborative soundtrack for your website? Now, social application creator iLike has built a special version of their social playlist gadget for sites using Google Friend Connect.

Visitors can add their favorite songs
iLike's playlist gadget lets you and your visitors shape the site's "musical footprint" as a group. With this application, anyone visiting your website can listen to songs on the playlist, and if they sign in using Friend Connect, they can add their own favorites to the list. Of course, you can also add songs to the playlist, and as the site administrator, you have the ability to remove songs or change the order.

If you already have Friend Connect running on your website, you can add some musical flair in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. Sign in at www.google.com/friendconnect, click "Social Gadgets," and you'll find the iLike "Playlist gadget" in the gallery.

Select the "Playlist gadget," and Friend Connect will automatically generate a snippet of code for you to copy-and-paste into your website's HTML. While you're there, you may also consider adding the "Wall gadget"—music can be a great conversation starter!

This iLike gadget is fully integrated with your existing Friend Connect account, so you can edit your website's playlist, moderate wall posts, and manage membership all from a single interface.

Like all of the social applications that work with Friend Connect, iLike's application is built using OpenSocial, and it's a great example of how a social application can foster a sense of community around a website. Any site using Friend Connect can host gadgets created by the OpenSocial developer community.

If you're a site owner who wants to begin adding social features to your website, visit Google Friend Connect. No programming is required!

If you're a developer interested in building a social application to run on the tens thousands of websites that are now using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.opensocial.org.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager - Google Friend Connect

Preventing Virtual Blight: my presentation from Web 2.0 Summit

Posted: January 12th, 2009, 2:13pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

One of the things I'm thinking about in 2009 is how Google can be even more transparent and communicate more. That led me to a personal goal for 2009: if I give a substantial conference presentation (not just a question and answer session), I'd like to digitize the talk so that people who couldn't attend the conference can still watch the presentation.

In that spirit, here's a belated holiday present. In November 2008 I spoke on a panel about "Preventing Virtual Blight" at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. A few weeks later I ended up recreating the talk at the Googleplex and we recorded the video. In fact, this is a "director's cut" because I could take a little more time for the presentation. Here's the video of the presentation:

And if you'd like to follow along at home, I'll include the actual presentation as well:

You can also access the presentation directly. By the way thanks to Wysz for recording this not just on a shoestring budget but for free. I think we've got another video ready to go pretty soon, too.

Written by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

Better targeting your indic language site

Posted: November 13th, 2008, 9:50pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.

‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’

We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.

To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>

This script tag will load the google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>

When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.

Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.

Cheers,
Jayashree and Zareen, Search Quality Team, Google India

Keeping comment spam off your site and away from users

Posted: September 26th, 2008, 4:26pm CEST by Jason Morrison

Tags: general tips

So, you've set up a forum on your site for the first time, or enabled comments on your blog. You carefully craft a post or two, click the submit button, and wait with bated breath for comments to come in.

And they do come in. Perhaps you get a friendly note from a fellow blogger, a pressing update from an MMORPG guild member, or a reminder from your Aunt Millie about dinner on Thursday. But then you get something else. Something... disturbing. Offers for deals that are too good to be true, bizarre logorrhean gibberish, and explicit images you certainly don't want Aunt Millie to see. You are now buried in a deluge of dreaded comment spam.

Comment spam is bad stuff all around. It's bad for you, because it adds to your workload. It's bad for your users, who want to find information on your site and certainly aren't interested in dodgy links and unrelated content. It's bad for the web as a whole, since it discourages people from opening up their sites for user-contributed content and joining conversations on existing forums.

So what can you, as a webmaster, do about it?

A quick disclaimer: the list below is a good start, but not exhaustive. There are so many different blog, forum, and bulletin board systems out there that we can't possibly provide detailed instructions for each, so the points below are general enough to make sense on most systems.

Make sure your commenters are real people

Add a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs require users to read a bit of obfuscated text and type it back in to prove they're a human being and not an automated script. If your blog or forum system doesn't have CAPTCHAs built in you may be able to find a plugin like Recaptcha, a project which also helps digitize old books. CAPTCHAs are not foolproof but they make life a little more difficult for spammers. You can read more about the many different types of CAPTCHAS, but keep in mind that just adding a simple one can be fairly effective.

Block suspicious behavior. Many forums allow you to set time limits between posts, and you can often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and other activity more common to bots than human beings.

Use automatic filtering systems

Block obviously inappropriate comments by adding words to a blacklist. Spammers obfuscate words in their comments so this isn't a very scalable solution, but it can keep blatant spam at bay.

Use built-in features or plugins that delete or mark comments as spam for you. Spammers use automated methods to besmirch your site, so why not use an automated system to defend yourself? Comprehensive systems like Akismet, which has plugins for many blogs and forum systems and TypePad AntiSpam, which is open-source and compatible with Akismet, are easy to install and do most of the work for you.

Try using Bayesian filtering options, if available. Training the system to recognize spam may require some effort on your part, but this technique has been used successfully to fight email spam.

Make your settings a bit stricter

Nofollow untrusted links. Many systems have a setting to add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the links in comments, or do so by default. This may discourage some types of spam, but it's definitely not the only measure you should take.

Consider requiring users to create accounts before they can post a comment. This adds steps to the user experience and may discourage some casual visitors from posting comments, but may keep the signal-to-noise ratio higher as well.

Change your settings so that comments need to be approved before they show up on your site. This is a great tactic if you want to hold comments to a high standard, don't expect a lot of comments, or have a small, personal site. You may be able to allow employees or trusted users to approve posts themselves, spreading the workload.

Think about disabling some types of comments. For example, you may want to disable comments on very old posts that are unlikely to get legitimate comments. On blogs you can often disable trackbacks and pingbacks, which are very cool features but can be major avenues for automated spam.

Keep your site up-to-date

Take the time to keep your software up-to-date and pay special attention to important security updates. Some spammers take advantage of security holes in older versions of blogs, bulletin boards, and other content management systems. Check the Quick Security Checklist for additional measures.

You may need to strike a balance on which tactics you choose to implement depending on your blog or bulletin board software, your user base, and your level of experience. Opening up a site for comments without any protection is a big risk, whether you have a small personal blog or a huge site with thousands of users. Also, if your forum has been completely filled with thousands of spam posts and doesn't even show up in Google searches, you may want to submit a reconsideration request after you clear out the bad content and take measures to prevent further spam.

As a long-time blogger and web developer myself, I can tell you that a little time spent setting up measures like these up front can save you a ton of time and effort later. I'm new to the Webmaster Central team, originally from Cleveland. I'm very excited to help fellow webmasters, and have a passion for usability and search quality (I've even done a bit of academic research on the topic). Please share your tips on preventing comment and forum spam in the comments below, and as always you're welcome to ask questions in our discussion group.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Workin' it on all browsers

Posted: September 5th, 2008, 2:44pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

To web surfers, Google Chrome is a quick, exciting new browser. As webmasters, it's a good reminder that regardless of the browser your visitors use to access your site—Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, etc.—browser compatibility is often a high priority. When your site renders poorly or is difficult to use on many browsers you risk losing your visitors' interest, and, if you're running a monetized site, perhaps their business. Here's a quick list to make sure you're covering the basics:

Step 1: Ensure browser compatibility by focusing on accessibility
The same techniques that make your site more accessible to search engines, such as static HTML versus fancy features like AJAX, often help your site's compatibility on various browsers and numerous browser versions. Simpler HTML is often more easily cross-compatible than the latest techniques.

Step 2: Consider validating your code
If your code passes validation, you've eliminated one potential issue in browser compatibility. With validated code, you won't need to rely on each browsers' error handling technique. There's a greater chance that your code will function across different browsers, and it's easier to debug potential problems.

Step 3: Check that it's usable (not just properly rendered)
It's important that your site displays well; but equally important, make sure that users can actually use your site's features in their browser. Rather than just looking at a snapshot of your site, try navigating through your site on various browsers or adding items to your shopping cart. It's possible that the clickable area of a linked image or button may change from browser to browser. Additionally, if you use JavaScript for components like your shopping cart, it may work in one browser but not another.

Step 4: Straighten out the kinks
This step requires some trial and error, but there are several good places to help reduce the "trials" as your make your site cross-browser compatible. Doctype is an open source reference with test cases for cross-browser compatibility, as well as CSS tips and tricks.

For example, let's say you're wondering how to find the offset for an element on your page. You notice that your code works in Internet Explorer, but not Firefox and Safari. It turns out that certain browsers are a bit finicky when it comes to finding the offset—thankfully contributors to Doctype provide the code to work around the issue.

Step 5: Share your browser compatibility tips and resources!
We'd love to hear the steps you're taking to ensure your site works for the most visitors. We've written a more in-depth Help Center article on the topic which discusses such things as specifying a character encoding. If you have additional tips, please share. And, if you have browser compatibility questions regarding search, please ask!

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Sitemaps offer better coverage for your Custom Search Engine

Posted: May 6th, 2008, 2:04pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search

If you're a webmaster or site owner, you realize the importance of providing high quality search on your site so that users easily find the right information.

We just announced today that AdSense for Search is now powered by Custom Search. Custom Search (a Google-powered search box that you can install on your website in minutes) helps your users quickly find what they're looking for. As a webmaster, Custom Search gives you advanced customization options to improve the accuracy of your site's search results. You can also choose to monetize your traffic with ads tuned to the topic of your site. If you don't want ads, you can use Custom Search Business Edition.

Now, we're also looking to index more of your site's content for inclusion in your Custom Search Engine (CSE) used for search on your site. We figure out what sites and URLs are included in your CSE, and -- if you've provided Sitemaps for the relevant sites -- we use that information to create a more comprehensive experience for your site's visitors. You don't have to do anything specific, besides submitting a Sitemap (via Webmaster Tools) for your site if you haven't already done so. Note that this change will not result in more pages indexed on Google.com and your search rankings on Google.com won't change. However, you will be able to get much better results coverage in your CSE.

Custom Search is built on top of the Google index. This means that all pages that are available on Google.com are also available to your search engine. We're now maintaining a CSE-specific index in addition to the Google.com index for enhancing the performance of search on your site. If you submit a Sitemap, it's likely that we will crawl those pages and include them in the additional index we build.

In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. Your Sitemap will also help us identify the URLs that are important. Please ensure you are not blocking us from crawling any pages you want indexed. Improved index coverage is not instantaneous, as it takes some time for the pages to be crawled and indexed.

So what are you waiting for? Submit your Sitemap!

My site's been hacked - now what?

Posted: April 7th, 2008, 1:37pm CEST by Nathan Johns

Tags: general tips

Written by Nathan Johns, Search Quality Team

All right, you got hacked. It happens to many webmasters, even despite the hard work you devote to prevent this type of thing from happening. Prevention tips include keeping your site updated with the latest software and patches, creating an account with Google Webmaster Tools to see what's being indexed, keeping tabs on your log files to make sure nothing fishy's going on, etc. (There's more information in the Quick Security Checklist we posted last year.)

Remember that you're not alone—hacked sites are becoming increasingly common. Getting hacked can result in your site being infected with badware (more specifically malware, one type of badware). Take a look at StopBadware's recently released report on Trends in Badware 2007 for a comprehensive analysis of threats and trends over the previous year. Check out this post on the Google Online Security Blog which highlights the increasing number of search results containing a URL labeled as harmful. For even more in-depth technical reports on the analysis of web-based malware, see The Ghost in the Browser (pdf) and this technical report (pdf) on drive-by downloads. Read these, and you'll have a much better understanding of the scope of the problem. They also include some real examples for different types of malware.

The first step in any case should be to contact your hosting provider, if you have one. Often times they can handle most of the technical heavy lifting for you. Lots of webmasters use shared hosting, which can make it difficult to do some of the things listed below. Certain tips labeled with an asterisk (*) are cases in which webmasters using shared hosting will most likely require assistance from their hosting provider. In the case that you do have full control over your server, we recommend covering these four bases:

Getting your site off-line

Take your site off-line temporarily, at least until you know you've fixed things.*
If you can't take it off-line, return a 503 status code to prevent it from being crawled.
In the Webmaster Tools, use the URL removal tool to remove any hacked pages or URLs from search results that may have been added. This will prevent the hacked pages from being served to users.

Damage Assessment

It's a good idea to figure out exactly what the hacker was after.

Were they looking for sensitive information?
Did they want to gain control of your site for other purposes?

Look for any modified or uploaded files on your web server.
Check your server logs for any suspicious activity, such as failed login attempts, command history (especially as root), unknown user accounts, etc.
Determine the scope of the problem—do you have other sites that may be affected?

Recovery

The absolute best thing to do here is a complete reinstall of the OS from a trusted source. It's the only way to be completely sure you've removed everything the hacker may have done.*
After a fresh re-installation, use the latest backup you have to restore your site. Don't forget to make sure the backup is clean and free of hacked content too.*
Patch any software packages to the latest version. This includes things such as weblog platforms, content management systems, or any other type of third-party software installed.
Change your passwords - [https:]

Restoring your online presence

Get your system back online.
If you're a Webmaster Tools user, sign in to your account

If your site was flagged as having malware, request a review to determine whether your site is clean
If you used the URL removal tool on URLs which you do want in the index, request that Webmaster Tools re-include your content by revoking the removal.

Keep an eye on things, as the hacker may try to return.

Answers to other questions you may be asking:

Q: Is it better to take my site off-line or use robots.txt to prevent it from being crawled?
A: Taking it off-line is a better way to go; this prevents any malware or badware from being served to users, and prevents hackers from further abusing the system.

Q: Once I've fixed my site, what's the fastest way to get re-crawled?
A: The best way, regardless of whether or not your site got hacked, is to follow the Webmaster Help Center guidelines.

Q: I've cleaned it up, but will Google penalize me if the hacker linked to any bad neighborhoods?
A: We'll try not to. We're pretty good at making sure good sites don't get penalized by actions of hackers and spammers. To be safe, completely remove any links the hackers may have added.

Q: What if this happened on my home machine?
A: All of the above still applies. You'll want to take extra care to clean it up; if you don't, it's likely the same thing will happen again. A complete re-install of the OS is ideal.

Additional resources you may find helpful:

If your site's been flagged by Google as serving malware, we'll alert you when you visit Webmaster Tools.
Don't forget about the Google Webmaster Help Group; it's full of extremely knowledgeable users, and Googlers as well. For a nice, on-topic example, check out this thread. There's also a Stop Badware group.
Matt Cutts recently posted Three tips to protect your WordPress installation on his blog, and there are lots of great comments below the post as well.

Feel free to leave additional tips you have in the comments.

Taking advantage of universal search, part 2

Posted: March 25th, 2008, 11:46am CET by Susan Moskwa

Tags: general tips

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Universal search and personalized search were two of the hot topics at SMX West last month. Many webmasters wanted to know how these evolutions in search influence the way their content appears in search results, and how they can use these features to gain more relevant search traffic. We posted several recommendations on how to take advantage of universal search last year. Here are a few additional tips:

Local search: Help nearby searchers find your business.
Of the various search verticals, local search was the one we heard the most questions about. Here are a few tips to help business owners get the most out of local search:

Add your business to our Local Business Center
Make sure your business is listed under the appropriate categories
Make sure your business name, address and phone number appear on your website, and that they're accessible to search engines
Add your business hours, images, coupons, or additional information to help searchers determine whether your business meets their needs

Video search: Enhance your video results.
Several site owners asked whether they could specify a preferred thumbnail image for videos when they appear in search results. Good news: our Video Sitemaps protocol lets you suggest a thumbnail for each video.
Personalized search basics
A few observations from Googler Phil McDonnell:

Personalization of search results is usually accomplished through subtle ranking changes, rather than a drastic rearrangement of results. You shouldn't worry about personalization radically altering your site's ranking for a particular query.
Targeting a niche, or filling a very specific need, may be a good way to stand out in personalized results. For example, rather than creating a site about "music," you could create a site about the musical history of Haiti. Or about musicians who recorded with Elton John between 1969-1979.
Some personalization is based on the geographic location of the searcher; for example, a user searching for [needle] in Seattle is more likely to get search results about the Space Needle than, say, a searcher in Florida. Take advantage of features like Local Business Center and geographic targeting to let us know whether your website is especially relevant to searchers in a particular location.
As always, create interesting, unique and compelling content or tools.

Image search: Increase your visibility.
One panelist presented a case study in which a client's images were being filtered out of search results by SafeSearch because they had been classified as explicit. If you find yourself in this situation and believe your site should not be filtered by SafeSearch, use this contact form to let us know. Select the Report a problem > Inappropriate or irrelevant search results option and describe your situation.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have other tips to share!

Good housekeeping

Posted: March 20th, 2008, 8:45am CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: general tips

Written by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Today's the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, so now is a perfect time to start your spring cleaning. But as a webmaster, your chores don't end after you've cleaned the garage -- you'll probably also want to do some cleaning on your server as well.

Exterior
Before we get to the interior, step outside, and see how your site looks from the street -- or in Google search results. Just head on over to your nearest Google search box, and do a site search on your site using the query format [site:example.com]. Just like you keep your street number visible on your house, and maybe even your name on the mailbox, check to see that your visitors can easily identify your site and its contents from the title and snippet listed in Google. If you'd like to improve your current appearance, try out the content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, and read up on how to influence your snippets.

Speaking of making your address visible, how are you listed? My name is Michael, but I'll also answer to Mike or even Wysz. However, I only expect to be listed once in the phone book. Similarly, your site may have pages that can be accessed from multiple URLs: for instance, www.example.com and example.com. To consolidate your site's listings in Google, use 301 redirects to tell Google (and other search engines) how you'd prefer your pages to be listed. You can also easily let Google know about your preferred domain via Webmaster Tools. And just like I'd want my bank to understand that deposits to Mike and Michael should route to the same account, those redirects can help Google appropriately consolidate link properties (like PageRank) to the destination page.

Interior
No matter how clean your home is, all that work may go unnoticed if your visitors can't get in the door or find their way around. Review your site's appearance and functionality on multiple browsers to make sure that all of your visitors get the experience you've worked so hard to design. Not everyone uses Internet Explorer, so it's a good idea to test using browsers representing different layout engines. Firefox, Safari, and Opera all see things differently, and these three browsers likely control how at least 20% of your users are experiencing the web. For some sites it can be dramatically higher -- The New York Times recently reported that around 38% of their online readers used either Firefox or Safari.

If your site requires the use of plug-ins, check to see how this additional content behaves across different operating systems. Keep in mind that many people only update their operating system with the purchase of a new computer, so go back a version or two and see how your site works on yesterday's OS. And to make sure you're not completely shutting out visitors with limited capabilities, try to navigate your site without using images, Flash or JavaScript. If you want to see where Google may be having trouble getting in, check Webmaster Tools to see if there have been any crawl errors reported for your site.

Taking out the trash
Unfortunately, many of us have hosted unwelcome guests. If they left a mess behind, do your future visitors a favor and get rid of the garbage. Tear out spammed guestbook pages. Pull out those weeds in your forum that were planted by an off-topic advertiser. And while you're throwing stuff away, look out for any blank or abandoned pages. We've all had projects in the basement that never got finished. If your site still shows URLs with one of those circa-1997 "under construction" graphics or templates showing "Products > Shirts > Graphic T's: There are no graphic t's at this time" and they're just gathering dust, it's probably safe to say you'll never get around to finishing it. After you've collected the junk and corrected any broken links on your site, make sure you let everyone know it's really gone by using the 404 HTTP status code. You can check to see which code your server is returning by using the Live HTTP Headers extension for Firefox.

Security and preventive maintenance
To prevent problems with future visitors, especially those who may try to come in your back door at night, go through our checklist to verify you've covered security basics.

If your site's maintenance tasks, such as upgrading software packages, make your content temporarily unavailable, let your visitors know to "pardon the dust" by using the 503 HTTP status code. This will let Google know to check back later, and not index your error page as part of your site's content. If you're using WordPress, you can easily set up your message along with the status code using the Maintenance Mode plug-in.

And speaking of intruders and software updates, you just never know when something will go wrong. Before something does happen, now is a great time to evaluate your backup strategy. Like insurance for your home, the effort and expense put into it is well worth the peace of mind alone, not to mention if you ever actually need it. A good backup system archives your backups in a different location than the working site, and happens automatically to avoid the problems of forgetfulness. It's a great idea to make a backup of your site (including databases) right before running any software updates or making a major change.

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29 items tagged "tips and general"

Posted: December 22nd, 2010, 11:55am CET by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: December 21st, 2010, 12:15pm CET by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: December 20th, 2010, 10:22am CET by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: October 20th, 2010, 11:51pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: September 28th, 2010, 4:00pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: May 27th, 2010, 12:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: November 25th, 2009, 8:17pm CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: October 16th, 2009, 6:53pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: October 16th, 2009, 4:59pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: August 14th, 2009, 11:00pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: August 6th, 2009, 6:45pm CEST by Ríona MacNamara

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Posted: June 26th, 2009, 11:06am CEST by Jason Morrison

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Posted: June 24th, 2009, 3:47am CEST by Luisella Mazza

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Posted: June 23rd, 2009, 5:55pm CEST by Michael Wyszomierski

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Posted: May 15th, 2009, 8:20pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: May 9th, 2009, 4:30pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: April 24th, 2009, 12:23pm CEST by Brian White

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Posted: March 26th, 2009, 6:35pm CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: January 30th, 2009, 6:17pm CET by Jason Morrison

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Posted: January 15th, 2009, 12:00pm CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: January 12th, 2009, 2:13pm CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: November 13th, 2008, 9:50pm CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: September 26th, 2008, 4:26pm CEST by Jason Morrison

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Posted: September 5th, 2008, 2:44pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: May 6th, 2008, 2:04pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: April 7th, 2008, 1:37pm CEST by Nathan Johns

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Posted: March 25th, 2008, 11:46am CET by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: March 20th, 2008, 8:45am CET by Maile Ohye

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