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35 items tagged "webmaster"

Related tags: guidelines [+], quiz [+], tools [+]

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

• 

  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:
  

  1. 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:
  
  
  2. 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.
  
  
  3. 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
• 

  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 Webmaster 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:
  

  • Susan outlined a few ways to ensure your site is being indexed by Google.
    
  • John answered some questions about spam reporting and reconsideration requests.
  • John also wrote a blog post that is a great resource for meta tags.
    
  • Wysz provided some clarification on hidden text.
  • Matt detailed appropriate uses of the nofollow tag.

  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!