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49 items tagged "webmaster"

Permalink for 'Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog/2012/01/26/What%e2%80%99s_new_with_Sitemaps'

Webmaster level: All

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:

The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed. With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.

Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.

In addition to on-the-spot testing, we’ve got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. Instead of repeating the same kind of error many times for one Sitemap, errors and warnings are now grouped, and a few examples are given. Likewise, for Sitemap index files, we’ve aggregated errors and warnings from the child Sitemaps that the Sitemap index encloses. No longer will you need to click through each child Sitemap one by one.

Finally, we’ve changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both from your account and the accounts of the other owners of the site. Be aware that a Sitemap may still be read or processed by Google even if you delete it from Webmaster Tools. For example if you reference a Sitemap in your robots.txt file search engines may still attempt to process the Sitemap. To truly prevent a Sitemap from being processed, remove the file from your server or block it via robots.txt.

For more information on Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools and how Sitemaps work, visit our Help Center. If you have any questions, go to Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Kamila Primke, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools

Update to Top Search Queries data

Posted: January 25th, 2012, 3:00pm CET by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 5 and 9. Previously, we would have averaged all these positions together and shown an Average Position of 7. Going forward, we’ll only average the highest position your site appeared in for each search (3 for Nick’s search and 5 for Jane’s search), for an Average Position of 4.

We anticipate that this new method of calculation will more accurately match your expectations about how a link's position in Google Search results should be reported.

How will this affect my Top Search Queries data?
This change will affect your Top Search Queries data going forward. Historical data will not change. Note that the change in calculation means that the Average Position metric will usually stay the same or decrease, as we will no longer be averaging in lower-ranking URLs.

Check out the updated Top Search Queries data in the Your site on the web section of Webmaster Tools. And remember, you can also download Top Search Queries data programmatically!

We look forward to providing you a more representative picture of your Google Search data. Let us know what you think in our Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Chris Anderson, Google Analytics team, and Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Clicks and impressions for authors

Posted: December 14th, 2011, 4:36pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)

With the latest improvements to the way authorship annotations look in search and the addition of authorship to Google News, authors have been really excited about getting more visibility, and users benefit from seeing the name, photo, and way to connect with the person who created the content.

Authors have also been giving us a lot of feedback on what else they'd like to see, so today we're introducing “Author Stats” in Webmaster Tools that shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. If you associate your content with your Google Profile either via e-mail verification or a simple link, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page. Check out what Matt Cutts would see for his content:

To see your information, go to google.com/webmasters and login with the same username you use for your Google+ Profile. On the left hand panel, you can see “Author Stats” under the “Labs” section. This is an experimental feature so we’re continuing to iterate and improve, but we wanted to get early feedback from you. You can e-mail us at authorship-pilot@google.com if you run into any issues or have feedback.

If you’re a content creator interested in learning more about authorship, check out our Help Center.

Posted by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer

Accessing search query data for your sites

Posted: October 18th, 2011, 1:18pm CEST by Anthony Chavez

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

SSL encryption on the web has been growing by leaps and bounds. As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on [https:] will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com. This change will be rolling out over the next few weeks.

What is the impact of this change for webmasters? Today, a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query. (Technically speaking, the user’s browser passes this information via the HTTP referrer field.) However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com.

Webmasters can still access a wealth of search query data for their sites via Webmaster Tools. For sites which have been added and verified in Webmaster Tools, webmasters can do the following:

View the top 1000 daily search queries and top 1000 daily landing pages for the past 30 days.
View the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), and average position in search results for each query, and compare this to the previous 30 day period.
Download this data in CSV format.

In addition, users of Google Analytics’ Search Engine Optimization reports have access to the same search query data available in Webmaster Tools and can take advantage of its rich reporting capabilities.

We will continue to look into further improvements to how search query data is surfaced through Webmaster Tools. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through the Webmaster Tools Help Forum.

Posted by Anthony Chavez, Product Manager

Work smarter, not harder, with site health

Posted: September 29th, 2011, 4:26pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.

Here’s what the new home page looks like:

You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon or the “Check site health” link next to that site:

This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.

Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:

Have we detected malware on the site?
Have any important pages been removed via our URL removal tool?
Are any of your important pages blocked from crawling in robots.txt?

You can click on any of these items to get more details about what we detected on your site. If the site health icon and the “Check site health” link don’t appear next to a site, it means that we didn’t detect any of these issues on that site (congratulations!).

A word about “important pages:” as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on “important pages.” Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.

Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website “unhealthy;” in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site. But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.

After you’ve resolved any site health issues we’ve flagged, it will usually take several days for the warning to disappear from your Webmaster Tools account, since we have to recrawl the site, see the changes you’ve made, and then process that information through our Web Search and Webmaster Tools pipelines. If you continue to see a site health warning for that site after a week or so, the issue may not have been resolved. Feel free to ask for help tracking it down in our Webmaster Help Forum... and let us know what you think!

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Reconsideration requests get more transparent

Posted: September 15th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Wysz

Tags: webmaster guidelines

Webmaster level: All
If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had received the request, we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request. This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. Earlier this year, we started experimenting with sending more detailed reconsideration request responses and the feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive!
Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.
If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it. For more help debugging ranking issues, read our article about why a site may not be showing up in Google search results.
We’ve made a lot of progress on making the entire reconsideration request process more transparent. We aren’t able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but now many webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and they’ll know the outcome of the reconsideration review. In an ideal world, Google could be completely transparent about how every part of our rankings work. However, we have to maintain a delicate balance: trying to give as much information to webmasters as we can without letting spammers probe how to do more harm to users. We're happy that Google has set the standard on tools, transparency, and communication with site owners, but we'll keep looking for ways to do even better.
Posted by Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Reorganizing internal vs. external backlinks

Posted: August 31st, 2011, 4:57pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.

You can manage many different types of sites in Webmaster Tools: a plain domain name (example.com), a subdomain (www.example.com or cats.example.com), or a domain with a subfolder path (www.example.com/cats/ or www.example.com/users/catlover/). Previously, only links that started with your site’s exact URL would be categorized as internal links: so if you entered www.example.com/users/catlover/ as your site, links from www.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links. This also meant that if you entered www.example.com as your site, links from example.com would be considered external because they don’t start with the same URL as your site (they don’t contain www).

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

Links for www.google.com	External links	Internal links
Previously categorized as...	www.example.com/ www.example.org/stuff.html scholar.google.com/ sketchup.google.com/ google.com/	www.google.com/ www.google.com/stuff.html www.google.com/support/webmasters/
Now categorized as...	www.example.com/ www.example.org/stuff.html	scholar.google.com/ sketchup.google.com/ google.com/ www.google.com/ www.google.com/stuff.html www.google.com/support/webmasters/

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

As always, drop us a comment or join our Webmaster Help Forum if you have questions!

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Introducing new and improved sitelinks

Posted: August 16th, 2011, 2:15pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

This week we launched an update to sitelinks to improve the organization and quality of our search results. Sitelinks are the two columns of links that appear under some search results and ads that help users easily navigate deeper into the site. Sitelinks haven’t changed fundamentally: they’re still generated and ranked algorithmically based on the link structure of your site, and they’ll only appear if useful for a particular query.

Sitelinks before today’s changes
Here’s how we’ve improved sitelinks with today’s launch:

Visibility. The links have been boosted to full-sized text, and augmented with a green URL and one line of text snippet, much like regular search results. This increases the prominence of both the individual sitelinks and the top site overall, making them easier to find.

Flexibility. Until now, each site had a fixed list of sitelinks that would either all appear or not appear; there was no query-specific ranking of the links. With today’s launch, sitelink selection and ranking can change from query to query, allowing more optimized results. In addition, the maximum number of sitelinks that can appear for a site has been raised from eight to 12, and the number shown also varies by query.

Clarity. Previously, pages from your site could either appear in the sitelinks, in the regular results, or both. Now we’re making the separation between the top domain and other domains a bit clearer. If sitelinks appear for the top result, then the rest of the results below them will be from other domains. One exception to this is if the top result for a query is a subpart of a domain. For instance, the query [the met exhibitions] has www.metmuseum.org/special/ as the top result, and its sitelinks are all from within the www.metmuseum.org/special section of the site. However, the rest of the results may be from other parts of the metmuseum.org domain, like store.metmuseum.org or blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about.

Quality. These user-visible changes are accompanied by quality improvements behind the scenes. The core improvement is that we’ve combined the signals we use for sitelinks generation and ranking -- like the link structure of your site -- with our more traditional ranking system, creating a better, unified algorithm. From a ranking perspective, there’s really no separation between “regular” results and sitelinks anymore.

Sitelinks after today’s changes
These changes are also reflected in Webmaster Tools, where you can manage the sitelinks that appear for your site. You can now suggest a demotion to a sitelink if it’s inappropriate or incorrect, and the algorithms will take these demotions into account when showing and ranking the links (although removal is not guaranteed). Since sitelinks can vary over time and by query, it no longer makes sense to select from a set list of links -- now, you can suggest a demotion of any URL for any parent page. Up to 100 demotions will be allowed per site. Finally, all current sitelink blocks in Webmaster Tools will automatically be converted to the demotions system. More information can be found in our Webmaster Tools Help Center.

It’s also worth mentioning a few things that haven’t changed. One-line sitelinks, where sitelinks can appear as a row of links on multiple results, and sitelinks on ads aren’t affected. Existing best practices for the link structure of your site are still relevant today, both for generating good quality sitelinks and to make it easier for your visitors. And, as always, you can raise any questions or comments in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Harvey Jones, Software Engineer, & Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Sitelinks team

+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Posted: June 28th, 2011, 2:54pm CEST by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
The Social Actions report lets you track the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.

If you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code, when you add +1 buttons to your site, we automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/11/11 1:44pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Written by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer

Permalink for 'Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog/2011/06/07/Pilot_Webmaster_Tools%e2%80%99_Search_Queries_data_in_Google_Analytics'

Pilot Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries data in Google Analytics

Posted: June 7th, 2011, 12:00pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Webmasters have long been asking for better integration between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Today we’re happy to announce a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search Queries data from Webmaster Tools.

In addition to including Search Queries data found in Webmaster Tools, these Search Engine Optimization reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports, you should sign up for the pilot and you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator. Each additional user who would like to view them also needs to individually sign up for the pilot.

Posted by Christina Chen & Torrey Hoffman, Webmaster Tools Team

Troubleshooting Instant Previews in Webmaster Tools

Posted: May 18th, 2011, 3:21pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

In November, we launched Instant Previews to help users better understand if a particular result was relevant for a their search query. Since launch, our Instant Previews team has been keeping an eye on common complaints and problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews.

When we see issues with preview images, they are frequently due to:

Blocked resources due to a robots.txt entry
Cloaking: Erroneous content being served to the Googlebot user-agent
Poor alternative content when Flash is unavailable

To help webmasters diagnose these problems, we have a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs section of Webmaster Tools (in English only for now).

Here, you can input the URL of any page on your site. We will then fetch the page from your site and try to render it both as it would display in Chrome and through our Instant Preview renderer. Please keep in mind that both of these renders are done using a recent build of Webkit which does not include plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, so it's important to consider the value of providing alternative content for these situations. Alternative content can be helpful to search engines, and visitors to your site without the plugin would benefit as well.

Below the renders, you’ll also see automated feedback on problems our system can detect such as missing or roboted resources. And, in the future, we plan to add more informative and timely feedback to help improve your Instant Previews!

Please direct your questions and feedback to the Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Michael Darweesh, Software Engineer

Update to Webmaster Tools Search Queries

Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 3:08pm CET by Gary Illyes

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

Last year we relaunched an exciting feature in Webmaster Tools: Search Queries, an analysis tool that visualizes your site’s presence in our search results. It has two main parts: an interactive graph, and a table containing detailed data related to queries for which your site appears in our search results.

Two of the most important pieces of information in the table are ‘impressions’ and ‘clicks.’ ‘Impressions’ shows the number of times your pages were shown in the search results for a certain query, and ‘clicks’ is how many times users actually clicked on a result from your site.

Based on webmaster feedback, today we’re announcing a slight change in how these numbers are represented in Webmaster Tools, to simplify their interpretation. Instead of showing numbers rounded to two or three digits, the numbers will now be shown with one or two significant digits. For example, instead of Webmaster Tools showing you 246,000 impressions, it will now show 250,000 impressions, which is a nicer representation for a better, less confusing experience. We have not altered the way we calculate the numbers internally, but only changed how we round them in Webmaster Tools. Generally, a difference of less than 10% between the numbers you see now and those you saw prior to this change should not be considered significant.

Impressions before and after today’s Search Queries update

We hope that this update makes Search Queries easier to understand. If you want to learn more about this feature you can visit our Help Center. If you have feedback or suggestions for Search Queries, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Pierre Far and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst team

Using Webmaster Tools like an SEO

Posted: January 26th, 2011, 12:00pm CET by Wysz

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate
We on the Webmaster Central team aren’t SEOs, but that doesn’t stop me from pretending to be one! In our latest video, I’ll talk about utilizing some features in Webmaster Tools as though I were the SEO for www.googlestore.com.

Just as a grandparent raves about their grandchild, I could have gone on for hours about (my baby!) Webmaster Tools. Thankfully I stopped myself -- but if you have tips to share or questions to ask, please comment below.
Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Permalink for 'Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog/2010/12/10/Webmaster_Tools%e2%80%99_Holiday_Update'

Webmaster Tools’ Holiday Update

Posted: December 10th, 2010, 2:21pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Just in time for the holidays, the Webmaster Tools team has updated the "Search queries" and "Links to your site" features.

Search queries with top pages:
Throughout the past year we’ve made some significant changes to the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. We've received lots of feedback about this tremendously popular feature. One frequent request we heard was that people wanted to be able to see search queries data for their site’s individual pages. Well, we totally agreed that this would be useful and promptly set out to add this functionality to search queries. The fruits of our effort have finally ripened enough on the vine and are ready for you to enjoy. Now when you visit the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools you'll see a new tab titled "Top Pages." The "Top Pages" tab lists impression, click, and position data for the top pages on your site based on their performance in Google's search results.

If you click on one of the individual pages listed you’ll see a list of the queries driving traffic to that page, along with impressions and number of clicks for each query.

Just like in the "Top queries" view, you can click on a specific query to see more detailed data and evaluate how the query is performing across the whole site.

To make filtering in search queries even easier, we've added pie charts to show visually the proportions of search type, location and traffic. Also in the "Top queries" view, you can now specify “containing” or “not containing” when filtering queries.

Links to your site with intermediate links:
Links to your site now shows when a particular URL redirects. If there's a link to your site that links to URL1 which then redirects to URL2, we are now showing the link from URL1 to URL2 as an intermediate link. We also added a "Download all links" option to all the tables in the Links to your site feature.

Now that you know about these updates, please take a few minutes to check them out for your site. We hope it will provide you with a little bit of extra joy this holiday season. Let us know what you think by submitting a comment here or posting in our Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Holidays from the Webmaster Tools team!

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Google Instant: Impact on Search queries

Posted: September 8th, 2010, 12:15pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.”

While the presentation of the search results may change, our most important advice to webmasters remains the same: Users want to visit pages with compelling content and a great user experience.
With Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant:

Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.

With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:

The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.

The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

To give an example, let’s say your site has lots of impressions for [hotels] and [hotels in santa cruz]. Now, because Instant is quickly fetching results as the user types, the user could see your site in the search results for [hotels] after typing only the partial query [hote]. If a user types the partial query [hote] and then clicks on any result on the page for [hotels], that counts as an impression for your site. That impression will appear in Webmaster Tools for the query [hotels]. The term 'hotels' would also be included in the HTTP referrer when the user clicks through to visit your website.

It’s likely that your site will still see impressions for queries like [hotels in santa cruz], but because Instant is helping the user find results faster, your site may see an increase in impressions for shorter terms as well.

Let us know if we can help you better understand how these changes impact Webmaster Tools, measured Search queries and impressions, CTR, or anything else. We’d love to hear from you in our blog comments or Webmaster Help Forum.

Guest post by Doantam Phan, Instant Search Team

New ways to view Webmaster Tools messages

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 12:15pm CEST by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Now there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites, or for just one site at a time.

Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve noticed related to your site which may indicate serious problems. For instance, alerts may warn you about an increase in crawl errors, an increase in 404 errors, or about possible outages. With their newfound prominence comes a new name: what used to be “SiteNotice messages” will now simply be known as “alerts.”

Messages containing alerts will be marked with an icon to make them quickly distinguishable from other messages. Each site’s Dashboard will display a notification whenever the site has unread alerts. The Dashboard notification will lead to the new site Message Center with a filter enabled to show only alerts for the current site.

You can also enable the alerts filter yourself. On the home page, enabling the alerts filter across all your sites is a great way to see alerts you may have missed and may help you find problems common across multiple sites. Even with these changes we recommend you use the email forwarding feature to receive these important alerts without having to visit Webmaster Tools.

We hope these new features make it easier to manage your messages. If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Written by Steve Geluso, Software Engineering Intern

To err is human, Video Sitemap feedback is divine!

Posted: August 17th, 2010, 12:06am CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

You can now check your Video Sitemap for even more errors right in Webmaster Tools! It’s a new Labs feature to signal issues in your Video Sitemap such as:

URLs disallowed by robots.txt
Thumbnail size errors (160x120px is ideal. Anything smaller than 90x50 will be rejected.)

Video Sitemaps help us to better crawl and extract information about your videos, so we can appropriately feature them in search results.

Totally new to Video Sitemaps? Check out the Video Sitemaps center for more information. Otherwise, take a look at this new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools.

Written by Jackie Lai, Video Search Team

Quality links to your site

Posted: June 21st, 2010, 12:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster guidelines

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content -- something that lets your expertise shine -- people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and "spread the word." Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site's reputation in a positive way.

Humor can be another way to gain both great links and get people to talk about your site. With Google Buzz and other social media services constantly growing, entertaining content is being shared now more than ever. We've seen all kinds of amusing content, from ASCII art embedded in a site's source code to funny downtime messages used as a viral marketing technique to increase the visibility of a site. However, we do not recommend counting only on short-lived link-bait tactics. Their appeal wears off quickly and as powerful as marketing stunts can be, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or as your only marketing effort.

It's important to clarify that any legitimate link building strategy is a long-term effort. There are those who advocate for short-lived, often spammy methods, but these are not advisable if you care for your site's reputation. Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they're likely to have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. If your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid them.

Directory entries are often mentioned as another way to promote young sites in the Google index. There are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet. But there are not many of them in proportion to those of lower quality. If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it's on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.

It can be a good idea to take a look at similar sites in other markets and identify the elements of those sites that might work well for yours, too. However, it's important not to just copy success stories but to adapt them, so that they provide unique value for your visitors.

Social bookmarks on YouTube enable users to share content easily

Finally, consider making linking to your site easier for less tech savvy users. Similar to the way we do it on YouTube, offering bookmarking services for social sites like Twitter or Facebook can help spread the word about the great content on your site and draw users' attention.

As usual, we'd like to hear your opinion. You're welcome to comment here in the blog, or join our Webmaster Help Forum community.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

Permalink for 'Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog/2010/03/08/Fetch_as_Googlebot_Mobile_and_Claim_your_Sidewiki_comment___added_to_Webmaster_Tools_Labs_'

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.

Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:

Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.

Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.

After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.

We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

Sharing the verification love

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:47pm CET by Sean Harding

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.

In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.

Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from Webmaster Tools or the Verification home page). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.

There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with Google Accounts. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!

We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Sean Harding, Software Engineer

How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz?

Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 5:25pm CET by Chark

Tags: webmaster quiz

Webmaster Level: All

Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!

1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:

Correct answer: a) 301 redirect

Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?

Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests

Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?

Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site

Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.

6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?

Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.

Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.

9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:

Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.

Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!

40/40:

ChrisRaimondi
theopeek
beussery

39/40:

Petro
pornel
Ian Macfarlane
g1smd
Mattman
thinkpragmatic
GLV
GoalGorilla
rssmarketer

38/40:

BartVB
Kim Minh Kaplan
Ippi
Erik Dafforn
scole01
Konstantin
John
fer.vazquez
eMBe
Todd Nemet
p.jaroszynski
ph0b

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Google SEO resources for beginners

Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 12:30am CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:

Step 1: Absorb the basics

If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you're on an exercise bike, training for Ironman.
Or, if you're more a video watcher, try listening to my "Search Friendly Development" session while you're cleaning your house. Keep in mind that some parts of the presentation are a little more technical.

For good measure, and because at some point you'll hear references to them, check out our webmaster guidelines for yourself.

Step 2: Explore details that pique your interest
Are you done with the basics but now you have some questions? Good for you! Try researching a particular topic in our Webmaster Help Center. For example, do you want more information about crawling and indexing or understanding what links are all about?

Step 3: Verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools
It takes a little bit of skill, but we have tons of help for verification. Once you verify ownership of your site (i.e., signal to Google that you're the owner), you can:

See more confidential information about your site, like crawl errors or messages from Google about your site
Run through the Webmaster Tools checklist and learn new ways to monitor and manage your site
Forward your Google messages to your personal email address

A sample message regarding the crawlability of your site

Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic
Usually the basics (e.g., good content/service and a crawlable site with indexable information) are the necessities for SEO. You may hear or read differently, but before you do anything drastic on your site such as robots.txt disallow'ing all of your directories or revamping your entire site architecture, please try:

Researching material in our Help Center
Checking for related posts in our Webmaster Forum
Asking for feedback from the webmaster community -- we've got a super skilled group of Google employees, members, and Bionic Posters.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Test your webmaster know-how!

Posted: January 19th, 2010, 11:00am CET by Chark

Tags: webmaster quiz

Webmaster Level: All
We thought it might be fun and educational to create a quiz for webmasters about issues we commonly see in the Webmaster Help Forum. Together with our awesome Bionic Posters, we've tried to come up with questions and answers that reflect recurring concerns in the forum and some information that may not be well known. Some things to keep in mind when taking this quiz:

The quiz will be available to take from today until Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST.
It doesn't cover all facets of webmaster problems that arise, and—as with any test—it is at best only a fun way to test your webmaster prowess ;). We leave discussion of specific cases to the forum.
We've set up the quiz using our very own Google Docs. This means you won't see results right away, but we plan to write a follow-up blog post explaining answers and listing top scorers. Be sure to save your answers or print out your completed quiz before submitting! This way you can check your answers against the correct ones when we publish them.
It's just for fun!

Now go take the quiz!
Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Your site's performance in Webmaster Tools

Posted: December 4th, 2009, 3:26pm CET by John Mueller

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: Intermediate

Let's take a quick look at the individual sections in the Google Webmaster Tools' Site Performance feature:

Performance overview

The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don't have to worry about us testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, we may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools.

The line between the red and the green sections on the chart is the 20th percentile — only 20% of the sites we check are faster than this. This website is pretty close to the 20% mark, which pages would we have to work on first?

Example pages with load times

In this section you can find some example pages along with the average, aggregated load times that users observed while they were on your website. These numbers may differ from what you see as they can come from a variety of different browsers, internet connections and locations. This list can help you to recognize pages which take longer than average to load — pages that slow your users down.

As the page load times are based on actual accesses made by your users, it's possible that it includes pages which are disallowed from crawling. While Googlebot will not be able to crawl disallowed pages, they may be a significant part of your site's user experience.

Keep in mind that you may see occasional spikes here, so it's recommended that you watch the load times over a short period to see what's stable. If you consistently see very large load times, that probably means that most of your users are seeing very slow page loads (whether due to slow connections or otherwise), so it's something you should take seriously.

Page Speed suggestions

These suggestions are based on the Page Speed Firefox / Firebug plugin. In order to find the details for these sample URLs, we fetch the page and all its embedded resources with Googlebot. If we are not able to fetch all of embedded content with Googlebot, we may not be able to provide a complete analysis. Similarly, if the servers return slightly modified content for Googlebot than they would for normal users, this may affect what is shown here. For example, some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics' "ga.js").

When looking at flagged issues regarding common third-party code such as website analytics scripts, one factor that can also play a role is how wide-spread these scripts are on the web. If they are common across the web, chances are that the average user's browser will have already cached the DNS lookup and the content of the script. While these scripts will still be flagged as separate DNS lookups, in practice they might not play a strong role in the actual load time.

We offer these suggestions as a useful guideline regarding possible first performance improvement steps and recommend using the Page Speed plugin (or a similar tool) directly when working on your website. This allows you to better recognize the blocking issues and makes it easy to see how modifications on the server affect the total load time.

For questions about Webmaster Tools and this new feature, feel free to read the Help Center article, search and post in the Webmaster Help Forums or in the Page Speed discussion group. We hope this information helps you make your website even faster!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

How fast is your site?

Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 3:04pm CET by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.

The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. We only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.

This is a Labs product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your feedback through the Webmaster Tools Forum.

Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this feature. Check out JohnMu's latest post on Site Performance!

Posted by Sreeram Ramachandran, Software Engineer & Arvind Jain, Director, Faster Web program

'New software version' notifications for your site

Posted: November 20th, 2009, 10:30am CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster level: All

One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on.

This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website. For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded. There are a few reasons a webmaster might not upgrade to the newer version and one of the reasons could be that they just don't know a new version exists. This is where we think we can help. We hope to let webmasters know about new versions of their software by sending them a message via Webmaster Tools. This way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they would like to upgrade.

One of the ways we identify sites to notify is by parsing source code of web pages that we crawl. For example, WordPress and other CMS applications include a generator meta tag that specifies the version number. This has proven to be tremendously helpful in our efforts to notify webmasters. So if you're a software developer, and would like us to help you notify your users about newer versions of your software, a great way to start would be to include a generator meta tag that tells the version number of your software. If you're a plugin or a widget developer, including a version number in the source you provide to your users is a great way to help too.

We've seen divided opinions over time about whether it's a good security practice to include a version number in source code, because it lets hackers or worm writers know that the website might be vulnerable to a particular type of exploit. But as Matt Mullenweg pointed out, "Where [a worm writer's] 1.0 might have checked for version numbers, 2.0 just tests [a website's] capabilities...". Meanwhile, the advantage of a version number is that it can help alert site owners when they need to update their site. In the end, we tend to think that including a version number can do more good than harm.

We plan to begin sending out the first of these messages soon and hope that webmasters find them useful! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment here.

Posted by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team

Out with the old, in with the new

Posted: June 10th, 2009, 7:00pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All
We launched a preview of our new Webmaster Tools interface three weeks ago, and received a lot of valuable feedback. Most of you liked the update, appreciating features such as the one-stop dashboard, more top search query data, and the improved menu and navigation.
You offered some constructive feedback as well:

You missed the option to switch listing 25, 50, or 100 rows in features such as links to your site. We did not add the option back to select how many rows you would like to see but increased our default to 100!
Top search query information differed between the old and new versions. We expected this since we went through a lot of re-engineering to improve the new top search queries backend. We reviewed many of the issues posted on our forums, and verified that the new backend is far more accurate and reliable.
Initially, the Sitemaps downloaded and indexed URL counts differed between the two versions. We resolved this issue quickly.
Backlinks numbers between the old and the new user interface (UI) may differ since our new UI shows the original anchor (not following redirects) as it's linked on the web. Let's say example.com links to http://google.com, then http://google.com 301s to http://www.google.com/:

In the new UI -- only verified site owners of google.com will see examples.com's backlink (because we show the original link prior to any redirects)
In the old UI -- verified site owners of www.google.com could see example.com's backlink

The new site switcher lists only five sites, and some of you who manage a large number of sites found this limiting. We appreciate the feedback and will work on addressing this limitation in a future release.

From today, only the new user interface will be available ([google.com])! You'll see that in addition to fixing many of the issues users addressed, we took some time to launch a new feature: Change of Address. The Change of Address feature lets you notify Google when you are moving from one domain to another, enabling us to update our index faster and hopefully creating a smoother transition for your users.
Thanks to all the users that took time to give us feedback on the new user interface. To those users using it for the first time today, we hope you enjoy it. As always, your feedback is appreciated.
Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team

Message Forwarding

Posted: June 10th, 2009, 2:53pm CEST by TG

Tags: webmaster tools

To make Webmaster Tools' Message Center more accessible, we've just made it possible to forward messages to your personal email. The Webmaster Tools Message Center is used to communicate confidential information about sites you've verified. This may be anything related to your site, from details about potential issues with Google's Web master Guidelines to confirmations of actions taken within Webmaster Tools like changes to site-wide settings. To enable the feature, simply update your settings on the Home page.

Messages can be forwarded in any of our 40 supported languages to any email associated with your Google Account. To associate another email address with your Google Account, simply click on the "My Account" link at the top of the page and verify the new email address. All emails will be sent from wmt-noreply@google.com>, so update your spam filters to make sure you don't miss these emails.

Posted By Tanya Gupta, Software Engineer

Spring time design refresh!

Posted: May 12th, 2009, 5:30pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar

Tags: webmaster tools

We've been listening to you at conferences, user studies, forums and blogs and we decided to start from the ground up with a brand new Webmaster Tools design! It was much needed, and the end result is beautiful in our eyes:

Highlights

One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and clickthrough! In addition, we've substantially improved data quality in this area.
Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we've streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We're always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.

Go ahead, get started

The new user interface is available at [www.google.com]. The old user interface will continue to be available for a couple of weeks to give you guys time to adjust and provide feedback.

We did our best to get the product localized; however, you may notice a few missing translations in some areas of the user interface. We apologize for the inconvenience and when we switch everyone over in a couple of weeks, we'll fully support 40 languages. The one exception will be our Help Center, which will be available in 21 languages going forward.

We're really excited about this launch, and hope you are as well. Tell us what you think and stay tuned for more updates!

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, and Josh Teague, Interaction Designer, Webmaster Tools Team

Survey says...

Posted: May 1st, 2009, 2:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

Many thanks to the more than 1,600 people who filled out our survey in February. You gave us your feedback on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster Help Forum, and our Webmaster Central videos on YouTube.

You told us what you like and want to see more of:

Webmaster Central gives users insight into Google: "[I like] being able to access, communicate, and see how my sites relate to Google."
Webmaster Central provides high quality information: "What I have enjoyed most of all, is reading Google's guidelines for webmasters, which is on-point with what I have been telling customers about SEO."
Webmaster Central collects several useful tools in one place: "It's an innovative central hub for all the tools supported and provided by the industry leader Google, for free."

We also learned about what you don't like and where we could be doing better. Our top finding is that beginner webmasters (about 20% of the survey respondents) are less satisfied than intermediate or advanced webmasters with Webmaster Central. Open-ended comments suggested that new webmasters want basic, less technical information from us. A common feedback that we received: "Many users like myself are not of the hi-tech, IT-savvy variety and prefer simplicity, whether we create a website for information or to generate revenue." Based on your responses, we've planned some new resources like a series of how-to videos especially for new webmasters (coming soon to YouTube).

We take your feedback seriously and will continue improving Webmaster Central and our other webmaster sites. Again, thanks for your participation in the survey. We want Webmaster Central to continue being a useful resource for you.

Written by Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher

One-line sitelinks

Posted: April 16th, 2009, 1:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Webmaster Level: All

You may be familiar with sitelinks, the links that show up underneath the first search result and which lead to specific pages deeper within the site. Sitelinks enable users to jump directly to important parts of a site, which is often useful for large, complex websites. Sitelinks have the additional advantage of giving users an overview of a website's content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site. For webmasters, sitelinks are also beneficial because they help to expose parts of your site that users may not know about. For instance, a search for NASA provides links to a gallery of images, a page about Space Shuttle and ISS missions, and so on:

Until now, sitelinks have only ever appeared on the first search result, and so at most one site could have sitelinks per query. We're now launching an expansion of sitelinks: a single row of links can now appear for results that didn't show sitelinks before, even for results that aren't in the first position. This means multiple results on one query can now have sitelinks. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result. Here's an example where the first three results each have one-line sitelinks:

These one-line sitelinks have many of the same benefits as the full two-column sitelinks, but on a smaller scale: they show users some relevant sub-pages in the site and give an idea of what the site is about. Comparing the sitelinks that appear for each result can even illustrate the difference between the sites. Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users.

For webmasters, this new feature means it's possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn't. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users. If, however, you absolutely would prefer not to have a particular sitelink show up, remember that you can always block a page from appearing as a sitelink for 90 days through Webmaster Tools. In fact, as part of our ongoing efforts at improving the Webmaster Tools experience, we're speeding up our response time to blocked pages, so you should see a blocked page get dropped as a sitelink even faster than before. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the sitelink blocking tool, take a look at this previous blog post. Currently you can only block sitelinks on your site's home page, but we're working on expanding this capability so you'll soon be able to remove them from any other page as well.

We hope you find these improvements to sitelinks and Webmaster Tools helpful for both your site and your visitors!

Posted by Doantam Phan, Software Engineer, and Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Sitelinks Team

Year in Review

Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 11:21am CET by Sagar Kamdar

Tags: webmaster tools

2008 was another great year for the Webmaster Central team. We experienced tremendous user growth with our blogs (97% increase in monthly pageviews), Help Center (25%), Help Forums (225%), and Webmaster Tools (35%). We would like to welcome our new users that joined us in '08, and thank our loyal and passionate user base that have been with us for the last couple of years. We focused on two basic goals for 2008, and here's how we think we did:

Goal #1: Educate and grow our webmaster community

We had our first ever online webmaster chat in February '08 to answer your top questions, and followed it up with three more. They have been incredibly successful, and we're planning for more this year.
We'd like to send a special thank you to our Bionic Posters, who have played a huge part in supporting our growing community.
Localization has been a big focus for us, so we launched our blog and Help Center in additional languages, and made Webmaster Tools available in 40 languages. We hope this makes it easier for people in other parts of the world to adopt our tools and gain a better understanding of how search works.
We launched a new Help Forum in English and Polish, with a broader rollout planned in other languages this year.
Our SEO starter guide was released and it has been one of our most successful articles to date.
We placed an emphasis on sharing material via YouTube and created seven video series totaling two hours of content. We kicked off '09 with a bang on the video front with Matt's "Virtual Blight" presentation.

Goal #2: Iterate early and often on Webmaster Tools

We launched GData APIs and iGoogle gadgets, allowing end users to access their data outside of Webmaster Tools in a way that makes sense to them.
Managing a robots.txt file can be complicated, especially for first time webmasters, so we launched a robots.txt generator.
In our effort to be more transparent and proactive, we enhanced our Message Center to send out messages such as the infinite spaces and hackable site warning notifications.
To simplify the process of getting up and running on Webmaster Tools, we launched the Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program.
To reduce frustration felt by users when trying to access a URL which does not exist on a site, we created a 404 widget.
We enabled webmasters to view details of "404 Not Found" crawl errors.
Sitemaps keep getting better, including integration with Custom Search Engine and simplified submissions.
4 new members of our product development team joined us in '08 to work on many of these efforts:
- Josh Teague, User Experience Designer, soon-to-be-dad, Southern gentleman
- Tanya Gupta, Software Engineer, passionate community services volunteer, thrill-seeking skydiver
- Pooja Shah, Software Engineer, nature lover, enthusiastic cook always looking to experiment
- Javier Tordable, Software Engineer and International Man of Mystery

Thank you once again and we hope for another exciting and eventful year!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Webmaster Tools Product Manager, in need of some Rock Band skillz

Seamless verification of Google Sites and Blogger with Webmaster Tools

Posted: January 14th, 2009, 5:00pm CET by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: webmaster tools

Verifying that you own a site is the first step towards accessing all of the great features Webmaster Tools has to offer, such as crawl errors and query statistics. The Google Sites and Blogger teams have worked hard to make site verification as simple as possible. In the following videos, I'll walk you through how to verify sites created in Google Sites and Blogger.

Google Sites:

Blogger:

These videos are available in our Help Center if you have additional questions about verifying a Google Site or Blogger blog with Webmaster Tools. And as always, you can find me and many other Googlers and webmasters in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

Webmaster Tools in 40 languages!

Posted: December 16th, 2008, 6:06pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

(Инструменти за уеб администратори, Eines per a administradors web de Google, Webmaster Tools, Googlen Verkkovastaavan työkalut, Εργαλεία για Webmasters, Alat WebMaster, Tīmekļa pārziņa rīki, Žiniatinkli valdytojo įrankiai, Ferramentas para o webmaster do Google, Алатке за вебмастере, Nástroje správcu webu, Orodja za spletne skrbnike, Інструменти для веб-майстра, Công cụ Quản trị Trang Web)

In our recent Webmaster Tools launch, we went live in 14 new languages, bringing our total language support count to 40! With the launch of Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese (Portugal), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, Webmaster Tools joins Google products such as Google.com, AdWords, Gmail and Toolbar to reach the 40 Language Initiative (Google's company-wide initiative to make sure Google products are available in the 40 languages read by more than 98% of Internet users).

Our team is very excited to reach so many of you by offering our tools in 40 languages. At the same time, both the Google Localization and Webmaster Tools teams know that there's more room for improvements in the features and quality of our service. We hope to hear your input in the comments below, especially on the linguistic quality of our new languages.

Written by Kidus Asfaw, Google Localization

Where's my data?

Posted: October 19th, 2008, 10:00pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

Tags: webmaster tools

Today we're going back to basics. We'll be answering the question: What is a website?

...Okay, not exactly. But we will be looking into what a "website" means in the context of Webmaster Tools, what kind of sites you can add to your Webmaster Tools account, and what data you can get from different types of sites.

Why should you care? Well, the following are all questions that we've gotten from webmasters recently:

"I know my site has lots of incoming links; why don't I see any in my Webmaster Tools account?"
"I see sitelinks for my site in Google's search results, but when I look in Webmaster Tools it says 'No sitelinks have been generated for your site.'"
"Why does my Top search queries report still say 'Data is not available at this time'? My site has been verified for months."

In each of these cases, the answer was the same: the data was there, but the webmaster was looking at the wrong "version" of their domain in Webmaster Tools.

A little background

The majority of tools and settings in Webmaster Tools operate on a per-site basis. This means that when you're looking at, say, the Top search queries report, you're only seeing the top search queries for a particular site. Looking at the top queries for www.example.com will show you different data than looking at the top queries for www.example.org. Makes sense, right?

Not all websites have URLs in the form www.example.com, though. Your root URL may not include the www subdomain (example.com); it may include a custom subdomain (rollergirl.example.com); or your site may live in a subfolder, for example if it's hosted on a free hosting site (www.example.com/rollergirl/). Since we want webmasters to be able to access our tools regardless of how their site is hosted, you can add any combination of domain, subdomain(s), and/or subfolder(s) as a "site" on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. Once you've verified your ownership of that site, we'll show you the information we have for that particular piece of the web, however big or small it may be. If you've verified your domain at the root level, we'll show you data for that whole domain; if you've only verified a particular subfolder or subdomain, we'll only show you data for that subfolder or subdomain. Take Blogger as an example—someone who blogs with Blogger should only be able to have access to the data for their own subdomain (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), not the entire blogspot.com domain.

What some people overlook is the fact that www is actually a subdomain. It's a very, very common subdomain, and many sites serve the same content whether you access them with or without the www; but the fact remains that example.com and www.example.com are two different URLs and have the potential to serve different content. For this reason, they're considered different sites in Webmaster Tools. Since they're different sites—just like www.example.com and www.example.org—they can have different data. When you're looking at the data for www.example.com (with the www subdomain) you're not seeing the data for example.com (without the subdomain), and vice versa.

What can I do to make sure I'm seeing all my data?

If you feel like you're missing some data, add both the www and the non-www version of your domain to your Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at the data for both sites.
Do a site: search for your domain without the www (e.g. [site:example.com]). This should return pages from your domain and any of your indexed subdomains (www.example.com, rollergirl.example.com, etc.). You should be able to tell from the results whether your site is mainly indexed with or without the www subdomain. The version that's indexed is likely to be the version that shows the most data in your Webmaster Tools account.
Tell us whether you prefer for your site to be indexed with or without the www by setting your preferred domain.
Let everyone else know which version you prefer by doing a site-wide 301 redirect.

Even though example.com and www.example.com may look like identical twins, any twins will be quick to tell you that they're not actually the same person. :-) Now that you know, we urge you to give both your www and non-www sites some love in Webmaster Tools, and—as usual—to post any follow-up questions in our Webmaster Help Group.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Message Center warnings for hackable sites

Posted: October 16th, 2008, 10:28am CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Recently we've seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system (CMS) or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable. This is a test, so we're starting out by alerting five to six thousand webmasters. We will be leaving messages for owners of potentially vulnerable sites in the Google Message Center that we provide as a free service as part of Webmaster Tools. If you manage a website but haven't signed up for Webmaster Tools, don't worry. The messages will be saved and if you sign up later on, you'll still be able to access any messages that Google has left for your site.

One of the most popular pieces of software on the web is WordPress, so we're starting our test with a specific version (2.1.1) that is known to be vulnerable to exploits. If the test goes well, we may expand these messages to include other types of software on the web. The message that a webmaster will see in their Message Center if they run WordPress 2.1.1 will look like this:

Quick note from Matt: In general, it's a good idea to make sure that your webserver's software is up-to-date. For example, the current version of WordPress is 2.6.2; not only is that version more secure than previous versions, but it will also alert you when a new version of WordPress is available for downloading. If you run an older version of WordPress, I highly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version.

Written by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team and Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

Webmaster Tools API updated with Site Settings

Posted: October 13th, 2008, 4:18pm CEST by Javier Tordable

Tags: webmaster tools

The Webmaster Tools GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of Webmaster Tools, such as setting a geographic location or your preferred domain. For those of you that aren't familiar with GData, it's a protocol for reading and writing data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit Sitemaps programmatically. Now you can also access and update site-specific information. This is especially useful if you have a large number of sites. With the Webmaster Tools API, you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.

What can I do?

We've included four new features in the API. You can see and update these settings for each site that you have verified. The features are:

Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server's capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn't reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

How do I do it?

We provide you with Java code samples for all the current Webmaster Tools API functionality. Here's a sample snippet of code that takes a list of sites and updates the geographic location of all of them:

  // Authenticate against the Webmaster Tools service
  WebmasterToolsService service;
  try {
   service = new WebmasterToolsService("exampleCo-exampleApp-1");
   service.setUserCredentials(USERNAME, PASSWORD);
  } catch (AuthenticationException e) {
   System.out.println("Error while authenticating.");
   return;
  }

  // Read sites and geolocations from your database
  readSitesAndGeolocations(sitesList, geolocationsList);

  // Update all sites
  Iterator sites = sitesList.iterator();
  Iterator geolocations = geolocationsList.iterator();
  while (sites.hasNext() && geolocations.hasNext()) {
   // Create a blank entry and add the updated information
   SitesEntry updateEntry = new SitesEntry();
   updateEntry.setGeolocation(geolocations.next());

   // Get the URL to update the site
   String encodedSiteId = URLEncoder.encode(sites.next(),
   "UTF-8");
   URL siteUrl = new URL(
   "http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/feeds/sites/"
   + encodedSiteId);

   // Update the site
   service.update(siteUrl, updateEntry);
  }

Where do I get it?

The main page for the Webmaster Tools GData API explains all the details of the API. It has a detailed reference guide and also many code snippets that explain how to use the Java client library, which is available for download. You can find more details about GData and all the different Google APIs in the Google Data API homepage.

Written by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer

Your burning questions - Answered!

Posted: September 10th, 2008, 2:55pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: webmaster guidelines

In a recent blog post highlighting our Webmaster Help Group, I asked for your webmaster-related questions. In our second installment of Popular Picks, we hoped to discover which issues webmasters wanted to learn more about, and then respond with some better documentation on those topics. It looks like it was a success, so please get clicking:

Image Search ranking: Starting things off, JimAtArtsnovaDotCom asked about how Google indexes images. Evan details the factors that account for a site's images appearing in Google's image search.
Sitelinks and Webmaster Tools: Maile tackled Red Cardinal's request by providing a more detailed explanation of sitelinks, particularly what happens when they are blocked by a user.
Reconsideration Requests: Want to learn more about reconsideration requests? In response to Chibcha's message, Susan provides additional context on when you should file a reconsideration request and other tips to address your site's performance.
Redirects: In response to Cristina's question about site moves and redirects, John explains how Googlebot handles absolute and relative URLs in your redirect to a new domain.
Communication with webmasters: Finally, I responded to bluegill01's message, noting the scenarios when you can expect to receive a message from Google.

Thanks again for your questions! See you around the group.

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

The Impact of User Feedback, Part 2 (and more Popular Picks!)

Posted: August 26th, 2008, 6:41pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: webmaster guidelines

As a follow-up to my recent post about how user reports of webspam and paid links help improve Google's search results for millions of users, I wanted to highlight one of the most essential parts of Google Webmaster Central: our Webmaster Help Group. With over 37,000 members in our English group and support in 15 other languages, the group is the place to get your questions answered regarding crawling and indexing or Webmaster Tools. We're thankful for a fabulous group of Bionic Posters who have dedicated their time and energy to making the Webmaster Help Group a great place to be. When appropriate, Googlers, including myself, jump in to clarify issues or participate in the dialogue. One thing to note: we try hard to read most posts in the group, and although we may not respond to each one, your feedback and concerns help drive the features we work on. Here are a few examples:

Sitemap details
Submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools is one way to let know Google know about what pages exist on your site. Users were quick to note that even though they submitted a Sitemap of all the pages on their site, they only found a sampling of URLs indexed through a site: search. In response, the Webmaster Tools team created a Sitemaps details page to better tell you how your Sitemap was processed. You can read a refresher about the Sitemaps details page in Jonathan's blog post.

Contextual help
One request we received early on with Webmaster Tools was for better documentation on the data displayed. We saw several questions about meta description and title tag issues using our Content Analysis tool, which led us to beef up our documentation on that page and link to that Help Center article directly from that page. Similarly, we discovered that users needed clarification on the distinction between "top search queries" and "top clicked queries" and how the data can be used. We added an expandable section entitled "How do I use this data?" and placed contextual help information across Webmaster Tools to explain what each feature is and where to get more information about it.

Blog posts
The Webmaster Help Group is also a way for us to keep a pulse on what overarching questions are on the minds of webmasters so we can address some of those concerns through this blog. Whether it's how to submit a reconsideration request using Webmaster Tools, deal with duplicate content, move a site, or design for accessibility, we're always open to hearing more about your concerns in the Group. Which reminds me...

It's time for more Popular Picks!
Last year, we devoted two weeks to soliciting and answering five of your most pressing webmaster-related questions. These Popular Picks covered the following topics:

Seeing as this was a well-received initiative, I'm happy to announce that we're going to do it again. Head on over to this thread to ask your webmaster-related questions. See you there!

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

Hey Google, I no longer have badware

Posted: August 21st, 2008, 7:10pm CEST by Evan

Tags: webmaster tools

This post is for anyone who has been emailed or notified by Google about badware, received a badware warning when browsing their own site using Firefox, or has come across malware-labeled search results for their own site(s). As you know, these warnings are produced by our automated scanning systems, which we've put in place to ensure the quality of our results by protecting our users. Whatever the case, if you are dealing with badware, here are a few recommendations that can help you out.

1. If you have badware, it usually means that your web server, your website, or a database used by your website has been compromised. We have a nifty post on how to handle being hacked. Be very careful when inspecting for malware on your site so as to avoid exposing your computer to infection.
2. Once everything is clear and dandy, you can follow the steps in our post about malware reviews via Webmaster Tools. Please note the screen shot on the previous post is outdated, and the new malware review form is on the Overview page and looks like this:

Other programs, such as Firefox, also use our badware data and may not recognize the change immediately due to their caching of the data. So even if the badware label in search is removed, it may take some time for that to be visible in such programs.

3. Lastly, if you believe that your rankings were somehow affected by the malware, such as compromised content that violated our Webmaster Guidelines [i.e. hacked pages with hidden pharmacy text links], you should fill out a reconsideration request. To clarify, reconsideration requests are usually used for when you notice issues stemming from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines and are separate from malware requests.
If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group with the URL of your site. We hope you find this updated feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems.
Written by Evan Tang, Search Quality Team

Helping yourself to Webmaster Tools

Posted: July 14th, 2008, 10:58am CEST by Liza Ma

Tags: webmaster tools

Written by: Peeyush Ranjan and Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools team

Since not every webmaster can come to us, we are coming to you. Last November, we announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now we're taking that program worldwide.

We are happy to announce the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program. Qualifying hosting service providers from around the world can now make use of Google APIs to provide Webmaster Tools accounts to your customers at no cost . Providers can be recognized by the nifty Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider badge that they can display on their sites.

With Google Webmaster Tools now available in 26 languages, hosting companies worldwide are invited to come on board. For example, IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb, and Strato customers just joined our webmaster community and now have direct access to the great tools we offer.

How can you get in on this?

Webmasters: Watch to see if your hoster joins this program, so that the next time you create a new site, everything will be all set for you. Better yet, send your hosters a link to this post and tell them we're here to help them help you.

Hosters: Check out the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider site and sign up today!

Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools

Posted: July 2nd, 2008, 11:49am CEST by Mariya Moeva

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team
If your site does not appear in Google Search results, you might be understandably worried. Here, we've put together some information to help you determine when and how to submit a reconsideration request for your site.
You can follow along as Bergy (the webmaster of example.com in our video) tries to find out whether he needs to submit a reconsideration request for his Ancient Roman Politics blog. Of course, not all webmasters' problems can be traced back to Wysz (-:, but the simple steps outlined below can help you determine the right solution for your particular case.

Check for access issues
You may want to check if there are any access issues with your site - you can do this by logging in to your Webmaster Tools account. On the Overview page you'll be able to see when Googlebot last successfully crawled the home page of your site. Another way to do this is to check the cache date for your site's homepage. For more detailed information about how Googlebot crawls your site, you might want to check the crawl rate graphs (find them in Tools > Set crawl rate).
On the Overview page you can also check whether there are any crawling errors. For example, if your server was busy or unavailable when we tried to access your site, you would get a "URL unreachable" error message. Alternatively, there might be URLs in your site blocked by your robots.txt file. You can see this in "URLs restricted by robots.txt". If there are URLs listed there which you did not expect, you can go to Tools and select "Analyze robots.txt" - there you can make sure that your robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking the parts of your site which you don't want Google to crawl.
Other than the examples mentioned above, there are several more types of crawl errors - HTTP errors and URLs timed out errors, just to name a few. Even thought we haven't highlighted them here, you will still see alerts for all of them on the Overview page in your Webmaster Tools account.
Check for messages
If Google has no problems accessing your site, check to see if there is a message waiting for you in the Message Center of your Webmaster Tools account. This is the place Google uses to communicate important information to you regarding your Webmaster Tools account and the sites you manage. If we have noticed there is something wrong with your site, we may send you a message there, detailing some issues which you need to fix to bring your site into compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines.
Read the Webmaster Guidelines
If you don't see a message in the Message Center, check to see if your site is or has at some point been in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. You can find them, and much more, in our Help Center.
Fix your site
If your site is in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines and you think that this might have affected how your site is viewed by Google, this would be a good time to submit a reconsideration request. But before you do that, make changes to your site so that it falls within our guidelines.
Submit a reconsideration request
Now you can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Log in to your Webmaster Tools account. Under Tools, click on "Request reconsideration" and follow the steps. Make sure to explain what you think was wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.
Once you've submitted your request, you'll see a message from us in the Message Center confirming that we've received it. We'll then review your site for compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines.
We hope this post has helped give you an idea when and how to submit a reconsideration request. If you're not sure why Google isn't including your site, a great place to look for help is our Webmaster Help Group. There you will find many knowledgeable and friendly webmasters and Googlers, who would be happy to look at your site and give suggestions on how you could fix things. You can find links to both the Help Center and the Webmaster Group at google.com/webmasters.

Get Cooking with the Webmaster Tools API

Posted: June 20th, 2008, 3:22pm CEST by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Tools Team

As the days grow longer and summer takes full stage, many of us are flocking to patios and parks to engage in the time-honored tradition of grilling food. When it comes to cooking outdoors, the type of grills used span a spectrum from primitive to high tech. For some people a small campfire is all that's required for the perfect outdoor dining experience. For other people the preferred tool for outdoor cooking is a quad grill gas-powered stainless steel cooker with enough features to make an Iron Chef rust with envy.

An interesting off-shoot of outdoor cooking techniques is solar cooking, which combines primitive skills and modern ingenuity. At its most basic, solar cooking involves creating an "oven" that is placed in the sun and passively cooks the food it contains. It is simple to get started with solar cooking because a solar oven is something people can make themselves with inexpensive materials and a bit of effort. The appeal of simplicity, inexpensiveness and the ability to "do it yourself" has created a growing group of people who are making solar ovens themselves.How all this relates to webmasters is that the webmaster community is also made up of a diverse group of people who use a variety of tools in a myriad of ways. Just like how within the outdoor cooking community there's a contingent of people creating their own solar ovens, the webmaster community has a subgroup of people creating and sharing their own tools. From our discussions with webmasters, we've consistently heard requests to open Webmaster Tools for third-party integration. The Webmaster Tools team has taken this request to heart and I'm happy to announce that we're now releasing an API for Webmaster Tools. The supported features in the first version of the Webmaster Tools API are the following:

Managing Sites

Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools
Add your sites to Webmaster Tools
Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools
Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools

Working with Sitemaps

Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps
Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools
Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools

Although the current API offers a limited subset of all the functionality that Webmaster Tools provides, this is only the beginning. Get started with the Developer's Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API to begin working with the API.

Webmasters... fire up your custom tools and get cooking!

The Impact of User Feedback, Part 1

Posted: June 3rd, 2008, 1:55pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: webmaster guidelines

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

About a year ago, in response to user feedback, we created a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. User feedback, through reporting paid links, webspam, or suggestions in our Webmaster Help Group, has been invaluable in ensuring that the quality of our index and our tools is as high as possible. Today, I'd like to highlight the impact that reporting paid links and webspam has had on our index. In a future post, I'll showcase how user feedback and concerns in the Webmaster Help Group have helped us improve our Help Center documentation and Webmaster Tools.

Reporting Paid Links

As mentioned in the post Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank, Google reserves the right to take action on sites that buy or sell links that pass PageRank for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Even though we work hard to discount these links through algorithmic detection, if you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please let us know. Over the last year, users have submitted thousands and thousands of paid link reports to Google, and each report can contain multiple websites that are suspected of selling links. These reports are actively reviewed, and the feedback is invaluable to improve our search algorithms. We also are willing to take manual action on a significant fraction of paid link reports as we continue to improve our algorithms. More importantly, the hard work of users who have already reported paid links has helped improve the quality of our index for millions. For more information on reporting paid links, check out this Help Center article.

Reporting Webspam

Google has also provided a form to report general webspam since November 2001. We appreciate users who alert us to potential abuses for the sake of the whole Internet community. Spam reports come in two flavors: an authenticated form that requires registration in Webmaster Tools, and an unauthenticated form. We receive hundreds of reports each day. Spam reports to the authenticated form are given more weight and are individually investigated more often. Spam reports to the unauthenticated form are assessed in terms of impact, and a large fraction of those are reviewed as well. As Udi Manber, VP of Engineering & Search Quality mentioned in his recent blog post on our Official Google Blog, in 2007 more than 450 new improvements were made to our search algorithms. A number of those improvements were related to webspam. It's not an understatement to say that users who have taken the time to report spam were essential to many of those algorithmic enhancements.

Going forward

As users' expectations of search increase daily, we know it's important to provide a high quality index with relevant results. We're always happy to hear stories in our Webmaster Help Group from users who have have reported spam with noticeable results in our Webmaster Help Group. Now that you know how Google uses feedback to improve our search quality, you may want to tell us about webspam you've seen in our results. Please use our authenticated form to report paid links or other types of webspam. Thanks again for taking the time to help us improve.

Webmaster Tools now in 26 languages

Posted: May 14th, 2008, 5:31pm CEST by Liza Ma

Tags: webmaster tools

Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team

Webmasters come from all corners of the world and we are working hard to reach each and everyone of you. A few months back we introduced you to Googlers who help monitor our Webmaster Help Groups in fifteen languages. Since then, that number has grown to sixteen with the addition of the Chinese Help Group. Today, we're happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is now available in four more languages:

Arabic
Hebrew
Hindi
Thai

Webmaster Tools is already available in 22 other languages: British English, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and US English.

We're thrilled to be engaging with such a diverse community of webmasters. Thank you again for your feedback and support!

Where in the world is your site?

Posted: April 23rd, 2008, 2:11pm CEST by Ríona MacNamara

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team

The Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools lets you associate your site with a specific region. We've heard a lot of questions from webmasters about how to use the tool, and here Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explains how it works and when to use it.

The [www.google.ca] example in the video is a little hard to see, so here's a screenshot:

Want to know more about setting a geographic target for your site? Check out our Help Center. And if you like this video, you can see more on our Webmaster Tools playlist on YouTube.

Improvements to iGoogle Gadgets for Webmaster Tools

Posted: April 2nd, 2008, 1:59pm CEST by John Blackburn, Webmaster Tools Team

Tags: webmaster tools

by John Blackburn and Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools team

We launched Webmaster Tools iGoogle Gadgets last month with excitement—and curiosity. Would you find them useful? We thought you might appreciate the ability to create better "dashboards" for your sites, but there's no better way to tell for sure other than to get it out so you can use it.

After our initial release, we saw clear interest in the gadgets, and plenty of suggestions for improvement. So we've spent the past several weeks working on various areas. The biggest improvements are probably for those of you with more than one site: when you add a new tab of gadgets, your gadgets will now default to the site you were viewing when you added them to your iGoogle page. Additionally, gadgets now retain settings as a group, so if you change the site for any gadget in a group, the next time you refresh that page, all the gadgets will show data for that site. And gadgets now resize dynamically, so they take up less room.

Other cosmetic and usability improvements will benefit everyone. We shortened the tab's title to "Webmaster Tools" to save space on your iGoogle page, and added a Google logo/watermark to each gadget to help distinguish them as a group. We think the gadgets look a lot better, with alternating background colors for table rows to make them easier to differentiate, and improved layout in general. The Top Search Queries gadget now shows each query's position, too.

Some of you did tell us you want a 4-column layout, but we feel that the information we display—including some fairly wide URLS—is better suited to 3 columns. If you do want 4 columns, remember that you can choose "edit this tab" yourself to select an alternate layout. Update: The 4-column layout is no longer available in iGoogle.

We really appreciate your feedback on these early gadgets, and hope these improvements make them even more useful.

As always, please let us know what you think.

Making harmonious use of Webmaster Tools and Analytics

Posted: March 31st, 2008, 7:28pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: tools webmaster

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality Team

Occasionally in the discussion group, webmasters ask, "Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?" Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools.

1. Make the most of your impressions
One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries. The data from the Top Search Queries allows you to quickly pinpoint what searches your site appears for and which of those searches are resulting in clicks. Let's look at last week's data for www.google.com/webmasters as an example.

As you can see, Google Webmaster Central is receiving a great number of impressions for the query [gadgets] but may not be fully capitalizing on these impressions with user clicks. Click on [gadgets] to see how your site appears in our search results. Does your title and snippet look appealing to users? As my colleague Michael recently wrote, it might be time to do some "housekeeping" on your website -- it's a great, low-to-no-cost way to catch the attention of your users. For example, we could work to improve our snippet from:

To something more readable such as "Use gadgets to easily add cool, dynamic content to your site..." by adding a meta description to the URL.

And what are users doing when they visit your site? Are they browsing your content or bouncing off your site quickly? To find out, Google Analytics will calculate your site's "bounce rate," or the percentage of single-page visits (e.g. someone just visiting your homepage and then leaving). This can be a helpful measure of the quality of your site's landing page and the traffic your site receives. After all, once you've worked hard to get your users to visit your site, you want to keep them there! Check out the Analytics blog for further information about "bounce rate."

2. Perform smart geo-targeting
Let's imagine you have a .com that you want to target at a Japanese market. Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target for your site, where you would probably pick Japan. But, doing so is not an immediate solution. You can confirm the location of your visitors using the map overlay of Analytics, right up to the city level. You can also discover what types of users are accessing your site - including their browser and connection speed. If users cannot access your website due to an incompatible browser or slower connection speeds, you may need to rethink your website's design. Doing so can go a long way toward achieving the level of relevant traffic you would like.

3. Control access to sensitive content
One day, you log into Analytics and look at your "Content by Title" data. You shockingly discover that users are visiting your /privatedata pages. Have no fear! Go into Webmaster Tools and use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from Google's search results. Modifying your robots.txt file will also block Googlebot from crawling that section of your site in the future.

For more tips and tricks on Analytics, check out the Analytics Help Center. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to comment below or in our Webmaster Help Group.

SES London Calling!

Posted: March 18th, 2008, 9:05am CET by Luisella Mazza

Tags: webmaster tools

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Team.

February is that time of the year: the Search Engine Strategies conference hits London! A few of us were there to meet webmasters and search engine representatives to talk about the latest trends and issues in the search engine world.

It was a three-day marathon full of interesting talks - and of course, we heard a lot of good questions in between the sessions! If you didn't get a chance to talk with us, fear not: we've pulled together some of the best questions we encountered. You can find a few of them below, and an additional set in our Webmaster Help Group. Please join the discussion!

Why should I upload a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if my site is crawled just fine?

All sites can benefit from submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. You may help us to do a better job of crawling and understanding your site, especially if it has dynamic content or a complicated architecture.

Besides, you will have access to more information about your site, for example the number of pages from your Sitemaps that are indexed by Google, any errors Google found with your Sitemap, as well as warnings about potential problems. Also, you can submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content including Video, Mobile, News and Code.
More information about the benefits of submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools can be found here.
How do you detect paid links? If I want to stay on the safe side, should I use the "nofollow" attribute on all links?

We blogged about our position on paid links and the use of nofollow a few months ago. You may also find it interesting to read this thread in our Help Group about appropriate uses of the nofollow attribute.

How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?

The instructions in our Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.

If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don't support setting a geographical target for patterns that can't be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.

I have a news site and it is not entirely crawled. Why? Other crawlers had no problem crawling us...

First off, make sure that nothing prevents us from crawling your news site - the architecture of your site or the robots.txt file. Also, we suggest you sign up for Webmaster Tools and submit your content. We specifically have the News Sitemap protocol for sites offering this type of content. If you take advantage of this feature, we can give you more information on which URLs we had trouble with and why. It really rocks!

A quick note to conclude: the lively, international environment of SES is always incredible. I have had a lot of interesting conversations in English, as well as in Italian, French and Spanish. Fellow Googlers chatted with webmasters in English, Danish, Dutch, German and Hungarian. That's amazing - and a great opportunity to get to know each other better, in the language you speak! So next time you wonder how Google Universal Search works in English or you're concerned about Google News Search in German, don't hesitate; grab us for a chat or write to us!

SEO News » Tags » webmaster

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49 items tagged "webmaster"

Posted: January 26th, 2012, 1:18pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted: January 25th, 2012, 3:00pm CET by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: December 14th, 2011, 4:36pm CET by Jonathan Simon

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Posted: October 18th, 2011, 1:18pm CEST by Anthony Chavez

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Posted: September 29th, 2011, 4:26pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: September 15th, 2011, 6:30am CEST by Wysz

Tags: webmaster guidelines

Posted: August 31st, 2011, 4:57pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: August 16th, 2011, 2:15pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: June 28th, 2011, 2:54pm CEST by Jonathan Simon

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Posted: June 7th, 2011, 12:00pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: May 18th, 2011, 3:21pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: February 3rd, 2011, 3:08pm CET by Gary Illyes

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Posted: January 26th, 2011, 12:00pm CET by Wysz

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Posted: December 10th, 2010, 2:21pm CET by Jonathan Simon

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Posted: September 8th, 2010, 12:15pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: September 3rd, 2010, 12:15pm CEST by Jonathan Simon

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Posted: August 17th, 2010, 12:06am CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: June 21st, 2010, 12:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster guidelines

Posted: March 8th, 2010, 1:03pm CET by Jonathan Simon

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted: March 2nd, 2010, 5:47pm CET by Sean Harding

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Posted: February 2nd, 2010, 5:25pm CET by Chark

Tags: webmaster quiz

Posted: January 22nd, 2010, 12:30am CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: January 19th, 2010, 11:00am CET by Chark

Tags: webmaster quiz

Posted: December 4th, 2009, 3:26pm CET by John Mueller

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Posted: December 2nd, 2009, 3:04pm CET by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: November 20th, 2009, 10:30am CET by Maile Ohye

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Posted: June 10th, 2009, 7:00pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar

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Posted: June 10th, 2009, 2:53pm CEST by TG

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Posted: May 12th, 2009, 5:30pm CEST by Sagar Kamdar

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Posted: May 1st, 2009, 2:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: April 16th, 2009, 1:00pm CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: January 22nd, 2009, 11:21am CET by Sagar Kamdar

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Posted: January 14th, 2009, 5:00pm CET by Reid Yokoyama

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Posted: December 16th, 2008, 6:06pm CET by Maile Ohye

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted: October 19th, 2008, 10:00pm CEST by Susan Moskwa

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Posted: October 16th, 2008, 10:28am CEST by Maile Ohye

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Posted: October 13th, 2008, 4:18pm CEST by Javier Tordable

Tags: webmaster tools

Posted: September 10th, 2008, 2:55pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama

Tags: webmaster guidelines

Posted: August 26th, 2008, 6:41pm CEST by Reid Yokoyama