Google Webmaster Central Blog

Controlling crawling and indexing now documented on code.google.com

2010-11-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

Webmaster level: All

Do you know how Google's crawler, Googlebot, handles conflicting directives in your robots.txt file? Do you know how to prevent a PDF file from being indexed? Do you know Googlebot’s favorite song? The answers to these questions (except for the last one :)), along with lots of other information about controlling the crawling and indexing of your site, are now available on code.google.com:

Controlling crawling and indexing

Now site owners have a comprehensive resource where they can learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directives. Please share your comments, and if you have questions you can post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Petits fours in your search results

2010-11-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

Webmaster Level: All

Recently we made a change to show more results from a domain for certain types of queries -- this helped searchers get to their desired result even faster. Today we’re expanding the feature so that, when appropriate, more queries show additional results from a domain. As a webmaster, you’ll appreciate the fact that these results may bring targeted visitors directly to the pages they’re interested in.

Here’s an example: in the past, the query [moma] (the Museum of Modern Art), might have triggered two results from the official site:

With this iteration, our search results may show:

Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact

As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.

Like all the hundreds of changes we make a year, we’re trying to help users quickly reach their desired result. Even though we’re constantly improving our algorithms, our general advice still holds true: create compelling, search-engine friendly sites in order to attract users, buzz, and often targeted traffic!

Written by Harvey Jones, Software Engineer

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

2010-11-11T17:20:00.000-08:00

Webmaster Level: All

We often get questions from webmasters about how we index content designed for Flash Player, so we wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our latest progress.

About two years ago we announced that through a collaboration with Adobe we had significantly improved Google’s capability to index Flash technology based content. Last year we followed up with an announcement that we had added external resource loading to our SWF indexing capabilities. This work has allowed us to index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, from Flash buttons and menus to self-contained Flash technology based websites. Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

While we’ve made great progress indexing SWF content over the past few years, we’re not done yet. We are continuing to work on our ability to index deep linking (content within a Flash technology based application that is linked to from the same application) as well as further improving indexing of SWF files executed through JavaScript. You can help us improve these capabilities by creating unique links for each page that is linked from within a single Flash object and by submitting a Sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools.

We’re excited about the progress we’ve made so far and we look forward to keeping you updated about further progress.

Written by Jifeng Situ and Sverre Sundsdal, Software Engineers

Instant Previews

2010-11-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Today Google introduced Instant Previews, a new search feature that helps people find information faster by showing a visual preview of each result. Traditionally, elements of the search results like the title, URL, and snippet—the text description in each result—help people determine which results are best for them. Instant Previews achieves the same goal with a visual representation of each page and where the relevant content is, instead of a text description. For our webmaster community, this presents an opportunity to reveal the design of your site and why your page is relevant for a particular query. We'd like to offer some thoughts on how to take advantage of the feature.

First of all, it's important to understand what the new feature does. When someone clicks on the magnifying glass on any result, a zoomed-out snapshot of the underlying page appears to the right of the results. Orange highlights indicate where highly relevant content on the page is, and text call outs show search terms in context.

Here’s the Instant Preview for the Google Webmaster Forum.

These elements let people know what to expect if they click on that result, and why it's relevant for their query. Our testing shows that the feature really does help with picking the right result—using Instant Previews makes searchers 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Many of you have put a lot of thought and effort into the structure of your sites, the layout of your pages, and the information you provide to visitors. Instant Previews gives people a glimpse into that design and indicates why your pages are relevant to their query. Here are some details about how to make good use of the feature.

Keep your pages clearly laid out and structured, with a minimum of distractions or extraneous content. This is always good advice, since it improves the experience for visitors, and the simplicity and clarity of your site will be apparent via Instant Previews.
Try to avoid interstitial pages, ad pop-ups, or other elements that interfere with your content. In some cases, these distracting elements may be picked up in the preview of your page, making the screenshots less attractive.
Many pages have their previews generated as part of our regular crawl process. Occasionally, we will generate screenshots on the fly when a user needs it, and in these situations we will retrieve information from web pages using a new "Google Web Preview" user-agent.
Instant Previews does not change our search algorithm or ranking in any way. It's the same results, in the same order. There is also no change to how clicks are tracked. If a user clicks on the title of a result and visits your site, it will count as a normal click, regardless of whether the result was previewed. Previewing a result, however, doesn't count as a click by itself.
Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.
Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

We hope you're as excited about this next step in the search results as we are. We're looking forward to many more improvements to Instant Previews in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Silber, Software Engineer

A Chrome extension for reporting webspam

2010-11-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

Webmaster Level: All

At Google, we continually strive to improve our algorithms to keep search results relevant and clean. You have been supporting us on this mission by sending spam reports for websites that violate our Webmaster Guidelines, using the spam report form in Google Webmaster Tools. While you might not see changes right away, we take your reports seriously and use them to fine-tune our algorithms -- the feedback is much appreciated and helps us to protect the integrity of our search results. We also take manual action on many of these spam reports. A recent blog post covers more information on how to identify webspam.

For those of you who regularly report spam, or would like to do so, we’ve now published a Chrome extension for reporting spam that makes the process more convenient and simple. The extension adds “Report spam” links to search results and your Web History, taking you directly to the spam report form and autocompleting some form fields for you. With this extension, Google’s spam report form is always just one click away.

The Google Webspam Report Chrome extension provides further tools to help you quickly fill out a spam report:

a browser button to report the currently viewed page
an option to retrieve recent Google searches from your Chrome history
an option to retrieve recently visited URLs from your Chrome history

As before, you need to be logged into your Google Account to report spam. You can find a more detailed walkthrough of the use cases and features in this presentation and on the Chrome Extensions Gallery page, where you can also provide feedback and suggestions. We hope that you find this extension useful and that you continue to help us fight spam.

The extension is available in 16 languages. If your Chrome browser is set to a language supported by the extension, it will automatically use the localized version, otherwise defaulting to English.

Note: We care about your privacy. The Google Webspam Report Chrome extension allows you to access your personal Chrome history for the purpose of reporting spam, but does not send data retrieved from it to our servers. The source code of the extension has been published under an open source license.

Posted by Manuel Holtz, Support Engineer, Search Quality team

How to help Google identify web spam

2010-11-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

Webmaster level: All

Everyone who uses the web knows how frustrating it is to land on a page that sounds promising in the search results but ends up being useless when you visit it. We work hard to make sure Google’s algorithms catch as much as possible, but sometimes spammy sites still make it into search results. We appreciate the numerous spam reports sent in by users like you who find these issues; the reports help us improve our search results and make sure that great content is treated accordingly. Good spam reports are important to us. Here’s how to maximize the impact of any spam reports you submit:

Why report spam to Google?

Google’s search quality team uses spam reports as a basis for further improving the quality of the results that we show you, to provide a level playing field for webmasters, and to help with our scalable spam fighting efforts. With the release of new tools like our Chrome extension to report spam, we’ve seen people filing more spam reports and we have to allocate appropriate resources to the spam reports that are mostly likely to be useful.

Spam reports are prioritized by looking at how much visibility a potentially spammy site has in our search results, in order to help us focus on high-impact sites in a timely manner. For instance, we’re likely to prioritize the investigation of a site that regularly ranks on the first or second page over that of a site that only gets a few search impressions per month. A spam report for a page that is almost never seen by users is less likely to be reviewed compared to higher-impact pages or sites. We generally use spam reports to help improve our algorithms so that we can not only recognize and handle this particular site, but also cover any similar sites. In a few cases, we may additionally choose to immediately remove or otherwise take action on a site.

Which sites should I report?

We love seeing reports about spammy sites that our algorithms have missed. That said, it’s a poor use of your time to report sites that are not spammy. Sites submitted through the spam report form are reviewed for spam content only. Sites that you think should be tackled for other reasons should be submitted to us through the appropriate channels: for example, for those that contain content which you have removed, use our URL removal tools; for sites with malware, use the malware report form; for paid links that you find on sites, use the paid links reporting form. If you want to report spammy links for a page, make sure that you read how to report linkspam. If you have a complaint because someone is copying your content, we have a different copyright process--see our official documentation pages for more info. There’s generally no need to report sites with technical problems or parked domains because these are typically handled automatically.

The same applies to redirecting legitimate sites from one top level domain to another, e.g. example.de redirecting to example.com/de. As long as the content presented is not spammy, the technique of redirecting one domain to another does not automatically violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

If you happen to come across a gibberish site similar to this one, it’s most likely spam.

The best way to submit a compelling spam report is to take a good look at the website in question and compare it against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. For instance, these would be good reasons to report a site through the spam report form:

the cached version contains significantly different (often keyword-rich) content from the live version
you’re redirected to a completely different domain with off-topic, commercial content
the site is filled with auto-generated or keyword-stuffed content that seems to make no sense

These are just a few examples of techniques that might be potentially spammy, and which we would appreciate seeing in the form of a spam report. When in doubt, please feel free to discuss your concerns on the Help Forum with other users and Google guides.

What should I include in a spam report?

Some spam reports are easier to understand than others; having a clear and easy-to-understand report makes it much easier for us to analyze the issue and take appropriate actions. Here are some things to keep in mind when submitting the spam report:

Submit the URLs of the pages where you see spam (not just the domain name). This makes it easy for us to verify the problem on those specific pages.
Try to specify the issue as clearly as possible using the checkboxes. Don’t just check every single box--such reports are less likely to be reviewed.
If only a part of the page uses spammy techniques, for example if it uses cloaking or has hidden text on an otherwise good page, provide a short explanation on how to look for the spam you’re seeing. If you’re reporting a site for spammy backlinks rather than on-page content, mention that.

By following these guidelines, your spam reports will be reproducible and clear, making them easier to analyze on our side.

What happens next?

After reviewing the feedback from these reports (we want to confirm that the reported sites are actually spammy, not just sites that someone didn’t like), it may take a bit of time before we update our algorithms and a change is visible in the search results. Keep in mind that sometimes our algorithms may already be treating those techniques appropriately; for instance, perhaps we’re already ignoring all the hidden text or the exchanged links that you have reported. Submitting the same spam report multiple times is not necessary. Rest assured that we actively review spam reports and take appropriate actions, even if the changes are not immediately visible to you.

With your help, we hope that we can improve the quality of and fairness in our search results for everyone! Thank you for continuing to submit spam reports and feel free to post here or in our Help Forum should you have any questions.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist & John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Make your websites run faster, automatically -- try mod_pagespeed for Apache

2010-11-03T09:00:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier -- ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.

So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.

Comparison of the AdSense blog site with and without mod_pagespeed

Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:

Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself,
Recompressing an image when its HTML context changes to serve only the bytes required (typically tedious to optimize manually), and
Extending the cache lifetime of the logo and images of your website to a year, while still allowing you to update these at any time.

We’re working with Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for many of its 8.5 million customers. Warren Adelman, President and COO of Go Daddy, says:

"Go Daddy is continually looking for ways to provide our customers the best user experience possible. That's the reason we partnered with Google on the 'Make the Web Faster' initiative. Go Daddy engineers are seeing a dramatic decrease in load times of customers' websites using mod_pagespeed and other technologies provided. We hope to provide the technology to our customers soon - not only for their benefit, but for their website visitors as well.”

We’re also working with Cotendo to integrate the core engine of mod_pagespeed as part of their Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.

mod_pagespeed integrates as a module for the Apache HTTP Server, and we’ve released it as open-source for Apache for many Linux distributions. Download mod_pagespeed for your platform and let us know what you think on the project’s mailing list. We hope to work with the hosting, developer and webmaster community to improve mod_pagespeed and make the web faster.

Richard Rabbat, Product Manager, ‘Make the Web Faster’ initiative

Rich snippets for shopping sites

2010-11-02T13:50:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

In time for the holiday season, we now support rich snippets for shopping (e-commerce) sites! As many of you know, rich snippets are search results that have been enhanced using structured data from your web pages. Our new format shows price, availability, and product reviews on pages offering a product for sale. Here’s a result for [office lava lamp]:

As a webmaster, there are two ways that you can provide the information needed for product rich snippets to show up for your site, both described on the Product rich snippets help page:

Option 1: Provide a Merchant Center feed.

Many sites already provide Merchant Center feeds for use in Google Product Search, which means that most of the work needed for rich snippets is already done. For Google to make use of Merchant Center feeds for rich snippets, you should also use the rel=”canonical” link element on your product pages. By adding rel=”canonical” to your pages, Google can match the URLs in your feed to the pages found by our crawler.

Update on November 4, 2010: In order to have your product review information in your rich snippets, you can submit your product ratings directly in your feed, or you can work with one of our reviews partners to submit this information. If you work with a partner, your reviews information will appear in rich snippets, and shoppers on Google Product Search will be able to see your full-length reviews on relevant product pages, branded with your logo.

Option 2: Add markup to your site.

If prices for your products tend to change only infrequently, then adding markup is an alternative method to provide product data for rich snippets. We’ve updated our product markup format to allow a variety of different types of shopping sites to participate. In addition to the Google format, we support two other standards: the hProduct microformat and GoodRelations. You can use the rich snippets testing tool to test your markup and make sure it’s being parsed correctly.

This feature is currently available to merchants located in the US, but we will be rolling it out in more markets soon. Additionally, there are a number of rich snippets formats that can be used world-wide in various languages—make your snippets compelling and useful! Should you have any questions about the use of rich snippets, check out our FAQs and feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Q&A

Which should I provide -- a Merchant Center feed or markup?

For most merchants, providing a Merchant Center feed is the best bet. That way your product prices and availability are updated quickly, and the data can be shown in rich snippets as well as in other applications like Google Shopping and Product Ads. If prices and availability change only infrequently, and you don’t want to set up a feed, then adding markup is also a valid option.

If I add markup to my site, will Google show product rich snippets for my pages?

We can’t guarantee that providing a feed or adding markup will result in rich snippets being shown. Note also that it may take a few weeks after providing data for rich snippets to be shown. If you mark up your pages, we encourage you to make sure that the data is parsed correctly by Google by using the rich snippets testing tool. The testing tool updates are rolling out over the next few days, so in this interim period the testing tool may not show previews for some types of markup.

I’ve already done reviews markup for my product offer pages. Should I add product/offer markup as well?

Yes, absolutely. Rich snippets are shown if the information provided accurately represents the main focus of the page. Therefore, for product pages you should add markup using the relevant offer/product fields which can include nested reviews.

Written by Nitin Shetti and Mircea Ciurumelea, Search Quality team

Best practices for running multiple sites

2010-11-01T14:11:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Running a single compelling, high quality site can be time- and resource-consuming, not to mention the creativity it requires to make the site a great one. At times–particularly when it comes to rather commercial topics like foreign currency exchange or online gambling–we see that some webmasters try to compete for visibility in Google search results with a large

number of sites on the same topic. There are a few things to keep in mind when considering a strategy like this for sites that you want to have listed in our search results.

Some less creative webmasters, or those short on time but with substantial resources on their hands, might be tempted to create a multitude of similar sites without necessarily adding unique information to any of these. From a user’s perspective, these sorts of repetitive sites can constitute a poor user experience when visible in search results. Luckily, over time our algorithms have gotten pretty good at recognizing similar content so as to serve users with a diverse range of information. We don’t recommend creating similar sites like that; it’s not a good use of your time and resources.

If all of your sites offer essentially the same content, additional sites are not contributing much to the Internet.

While you’re free to run as many sites as you want, keep in mind that users prefer to see unique and compelling content. It is a good idea to give each site its own content, personality and function. This is true of any website, regardless of whether it’s a single-page hobby-site or part of a large portfolio. When you create a website, try to add something new or some value to the Internet; make something your users have never seen before, something that inspires and fascinates them, something they can’t wait to recommend to their friends.

When coming up with an idea for a website, scan the web first. There are many websites dealing with common and popular services like holiday planning, price comparisons or foreign exchange currency trading. It frequently doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel and compete with existing broad topic sites. It’s often more practical and rewarding to focus on smaller or niche topics where your expertise is best and where competition for user attention might be less fierce.

A few webmasters choose to focus their resources on one domain but make use of their domain portfolio by creating a multitude of smaller sites linking to it. In some situations these sites may be perceived as doorways. Without value of their own, these doorway sites are unlikely to stand the test of time in our search results. If you registered several domains but only want to focus on one topic, we recommend you create unique and compelling content on each domain or simply 301 redirect all users to your preferred domain. Think of your web endeavour as if it were a restaurant: You want each dish to reflect the high quality of the service you provide; repeat the same item over and over on your menu and your restaurant might not do so well. Identify and promote your strength or uniqueness. Ask yourself the following questions: What makes you better than the competition? What new service do you provide that others don’t? What makes your sites unique and compelling enough to make users want to revisit them, link to them or even recommend them to their friends?

We suggest not spreading out your efforts too broadly, though. It can be difficult to maintain multiple sites while keeping the content fresh and engaging. It’s better to have one or a few good sites than a multitude of shallow, low value-add sites. As always, we encourage you to share your thoughts via comments as well as by contributing to the Google Webmaster community.

Posted by Tomer Honen & Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team

Website clinic: Call for submissions

2010-10-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog

Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google’s Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic right here on this blog. In future posts, we’ll be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.

This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that our advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like us to consider your site, read on for submission instructions.

How to Submit Your Site:

To register your site for our clinic, fill in the information requested on our form. From there, we will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. Our analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit us to use your site as an example in our follow-up site clinic posts.

We have a few guidelines:

Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.
In order to ensure that you’re the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.
To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets our webmaster quality guidelines. We will be using the same principles as a basis for our analysis.

All set? Submit your site for consideration here.

The site clinic goes live today, and submissions will be accepted until Monday, November 8, 2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when we review the sites.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Team

Optimizing sites for TV

2010-10-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

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

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

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

YouTube desktop version on the left, YouTube Leanback on the right

See our Spotlight Gallery for more examples of TV-optimized sites.

What does "optimized for TV" mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How can you learn more?

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

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Tools - Links to your site updated

2010-10-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

The "Links to your site" feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you'll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site.

Who links the most
Clicking the “More »” link under the “Who links the most” section will take you to a new view that shows a listing of all the domains that link to your site. Each domain in the list can be expanded to display a sample of pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.

The "More »" link under each specific domain lists all the pages linked to by that domain. At the top of the page there's a total count of links from that domain and a total count of your site's pages linked to from that domain.

Your most linked content
If you drill into the “Your most linked content” view from the overview page, you’ll see a listing of all your site’s most important linked pages. There's also a link count for each page as well as a count of domains linking to that page. Clicking any of the pages listed will expand the view to show you examples of the leading domains linking to that page and the number of links to the given page from each domain listed. The data used for link counts and throughout the "Links to your site" feature is more comprehensive now, including links redirected using 301 or 302 HTTP redirects.

Each page listed in the "All linked pages" view has an associated "More »" link which displays all the domains linking to that specific page on your site.

Each domain listed leads to a report of all the pages from that domain linking to your specific page.

We hope the updated “Links to your site” feature in Webmaster Tools will help you better understand where the links to your site are coming from and improve your ability to track changes to your site’s link profile. Please post any comments you have about this updated feature or post your questions in the Webmaster Help Forum. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us to continue to improve the functionality of Webmaster Tools.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Tools: Updates to Search queries, Parameter handling and Messages

2010-10-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

Webmaster level: All

We've just released updates to several features in Webmaster Tools to provide you with more detail and more control of how your site appears in search results.

Search queries: Time does not stand still and neither should your site. With that in mind we've added a "Change" column next to the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and position columns, making it easier to identify trends for each of these important metrics. The change column is tied to the date range you specify, which should help when you're trying to pinpoint when a particular change occurred.

Each query listed in Search queries now links to a query details page which includes a graph of impressions and clicks for that specific query, providing a quick visual of its performance in the search results over time. Below the graph is a table listing of the pages returned in search results for that query, along with impressions, clicks and CTR. Each column in the table is sortable, offering a quick way to re-sort the data based on what's most interesting to you. If you'd rather use your own favorite tool to slice and dice the data you can use the "Download this table" link to export all the information from the main Search queries page or from each individual query details page.

Better Parameter Handling: We've moved this feature under its own tab in the Settings section of Webmaster Tools, and introduced a new action to manage parameters. When we introduced Parameter Handling last year, we allowed you to specify URL parameters and whether they should be ignored or not. When you choose to ignore a parameter, you are telling us that this parameter has no impact on the displayed content. For example, consider a session id parameter, like “sid” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=1234
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=5678

Assuming that these three URLs display exactly the same product page for tasty Swedish fish candy, Google only needs to crawl and index one of them. You can simply select action “Ignore” for parameter “sid” in Webmaster Tools and Google will just crawl and index one of these URLs, avoiding duplicates.

In addition to the old functionality, you now have the ability to choose a specific value among the known values for a given URL parameter. This is important when a parameter is relevant to the content, but different values of this parameter lead to similar pages. For example, consider a sorting parameter, like “sort-by” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2

These four URLs show products in the candy category. There are enough items in this category to fill two pages, and the products shown can be sorted by price, in ascending or descending order. Selecting action “Ignore” for parameter “sort-by” would be incorrect and could potentially limit our indexing of the site. This is because, after ignoring “sort-by”, we would consider the first two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with ascending sort order. We would also consider the last two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with descending sort order. In this scenario, we would be indexing the candy category inconsistently, with some candy products appearing in both of the pages selected for the index, while other candy products not appearing in either of them. The right solution comes from the new action “Use specific value” now available in Webmaster Tools. To avoid duplicates but still keep our indexing consistent, you can simply select action “Use specific value” for parameter “sort-by” and choose one of the valid values, say “asc-price”. After this, our indexing would be fully consistent, as we would focus only on the pages with products sorted by ascending price.

Messages: Some sites receive lots of messages in the Webmaster Tools Message Center. With this update we've added the ability to "star" specific messages that you deem important. There's now a separate "Starred" view where you can see all the messages that you’ve starred, making tracking and finding the most important messages for your site a breeze.

We hope these updates make Webmaster Tools even more useful for your site. Please post a comment if you have feedback on any of these updates; or if you have questions, post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

SEO Starter Guide updated

2010-09-28T14:00:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Update on October 3, 2010: We have fixed the issue causing the highlighted text to be obscured on Linux PDF readers.

About two years ago we published our first SEO Starter Guide, which we have since translated into 40 languages. Today, we’re very happy to share with you the new version of the guide with more content and examples.

Here’s what’s new:

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

You may remember getting to see what Googlebot looks like in our “First date with Googlebot” post. In this version of the SEO Starter Guide, Googlebot is back to provide you with some more SEO tips.

You can download the new version here [PDF]. Entertain and impress your friends by leaving a printed copy on your coffee table.

Posted by Brandon Falls and Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Finding Places on the Web: Rich Snippets for Local Search

2010-09-22T11:08:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All
Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog.

We’re sharing some news today that we hope webmasters will find exciting. As you know, we’re constantly working to organize the world’s information - be it textual, visual, geographic or any other type of useful data. From a local search perspective, part of this effort means looking for all the great web pages that reference a particular place. The Internet is teeming with useful information about local places and points of interest, and we do our best to deliver relevant search results that help shed light on locations all across the globe.

Today, we’re announcing that your use of Rich Snippets can help people find the web pages you’ve created that may reference a specific place or location. By using structured HTML formats like hCard to markup the business or organization described on your page, you make it easier for search engines like Google to properly classify your site, recognize and understand that its content is about a particular place, and make it discoverable to users on Place pages.

You can get started by reviewing these tips for using Rich Snippets for Local Search. Whether you’re creating a website for your own business, an article on a newly opened restaurant, or a guide to the best places in town, your precise markup helps associate your site with the search results for that particular place. Though this markup does not guarantee that your site will be shown in search results, we’re excited to expand support for making the web better organized around real world places.

Posted by Carter Maslan, Director of Product Management, Local Search

Video Sitemaps: Is your video part of a gallery?

2010-09-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Often a website which hosts videos will have a common top-level page that groups conceptually related videos together. Such a page may be of interest to a user searching on that subject. Sites with many videos about a single subject can group these videos together on a top-level page, often known as a gallery. This can make it easier for users to find exactly what they're looking for. In this case, you can use a Sitemap to tell Google the URL of the gallery page on which each video appears.

You can specify the URL of the gallery level page using the optional tag <video:gallery_loc> on a per-video basis. Note that only one gallery_loc is allowed per video.

For more information on Google Videos, including Sitemap specifications, please visit our Help Center. To post questions and search for answers, check out our Help Forum.

Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search

Tips for getting help with your site

2010-09-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

As a search company, we at Google try to develop scalable solutions to problems. In fact, Webmaster Tools was born out of this instinct: rather than fighting the losing battle of trying to respond to questions via email (and in multiple languages!), we developed an automated, scalable product that gives webmasters like you information about your sites and lets you handle many requests yourself. Now you can streamline the crawling of your site, improve your sitelinks, or clean up after a malware attack all on your own.

Of course, our Help Forum still gets hundreds of questions from site owners every week — everything from "Why isn't my site in Google?" to very specific questions about a particular API call or a typo in our documentation. When we see patterns—such as a string of questions about one particular topic—we continue to use that information in scalable ways, such as to help us decide which parts of the product need work, or what new features we should develop. But we also still answer a lot of individual questions in our forum, on our blog, and at industry events. However, we can't answer them all.

So how do we decide which questions to tackle? We have a few guiding principles that help us make the most of the time we spend in places like our forum. We believe that there are many areas in which Google’s interests and site owners’ interests overlap, and we’re most motivated by questions that fall into these areas. We want to improve our search results, and improve the Internet; if we can help you make your site faster, safer, more compelling, or more accessible, that’s good for both of us, and for Internet users at large. We want to help as many people at a time as we can, so we like questions that are relevant to more than just one person, and we like to answer them publicly. We want to add value with the time we spend, so we prefer questions where we can provide more insight than the average person, rather than just regurgitating what’s already written in our Help Center.

The reason I tell you all this is because you can greatly increase your chances of getting an answer if you make it clear how your question helps us meet these goals. Here are some tips for increasing the likelihood that someone will answer your question:

Ask in public.
If you post your question in our forum, the whole world gets to see the answer. Then when Betty has the same question a week later, she benefits because she can find the answer instantly in our forum, and I benefit because it saves me from having to answer the same question twice (or ten times, or fifty times, or...). We have a very strong preference for answering questions publicly (in a forum, on a blog, at a conference, in a video...) so that many people can benefit from the answer.
Do your homework.
We put a lot of effort into writing articles, blog posts and FAQs to help people learn about search and site-building, and we strongly encourage you to search our Help Center, blog and/or forum for answers before asking a question. You may find an answer on the spot. If you don’t, when you post your question be sure to indicate what resources you’ve already read and why they didn’t meet your needs: for example, “I read the Help Center article on affiliate websites but I’m still not sure whether this particular affiliate page on my site has enough added value; can I get some feedback?” This shows that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves everyone from reiterating the obvious solutions if you’ve already ruled those out, and it will help get you a more specific and relevant answer. It can also help us improve our documentation if something’s missing.
Be specific.
If you ask a vague question, you’re likely to get a vague answer. The more details and context you can give, the more able someone will be to give you a relevant, personalized answer. For example, “Why was my URL removal request denied?” is likely to get you a link to this article, as removals can be denied for a variety of reasons. However, if you say what type of removal you requested, what denial reason you got, and/or the URL in question, you’re more likely to get personalized advice on what went wrong in your case and what you can do differently.
Make it relevant to others.
As I said earlier, we like to help as many people at a time as we can. If you make it clear how your question is relevant to more people than just you, we’ll have more incentive to look into it. For example: “How can site owners get their videos into Google Video search? In particular, I’m asking about the videos on www.example.com.”
Let us know if you’ve found a bug.
As above, the more specific you can be, the better. What happened? What page or URL were you on? If it’s in Webmaster Tools, what site were you managing? Do you have a screenshot? All of these things help us track down the issue sooner. We appreciate your feedback, but if it’s too vague we won’t understand what you’re trying to tell us!
Stay on-topic.
Have a question about Google Analytics? iGoogle? Google Apps? That’s great; go ask it in the Analytics / iGoogle / Apps forum. Not every Googler is familiar with every product Google offers, so you probably won’t get an answer if you’re asking a Webmaster Central team member about something other than Web Search or Webmaster Tools.
Stay calm.
Trust me, we’ve heard it all. Making threats, being aggressive or accusatory, YELLING IN ALL CAPS, asking for “heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!!!!!1!!,” or claiming Google is involved in a mass conspiracy against you & your associates because your sites aren’t ranked on page one... Rather than making others want to help you, these things are likely to turn people off. The best way to get someone to help is by calmly explaining the situation, giving details, and being clear about what you’re asking for.
Listen, even when it’s not what you wanted to hear.
The answer to your question may not always be the one you wanted; but that doesn’t mean that answer isn’t correct. There are many areas of SEO and website design that are as much an art as a science, so a conclusive answer isn’t always possible. When in doubt, feel free to ask people to cite their sources, or to explain how/where they learned something. But keep an open mind and remember that most people are just trying to help, even if they don’t agree with you or tell you what you wanted to hear.

Bonus tip: Are you more comfortable communicating in a language other than English? We have Webmaster Help Forums available in 18 other languages; you can find the list here.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Unifying content under multilingual templates

2010-09-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: Advanced

If you have a global site containing pages where the:

template (i.e. side navigation, footer) is machine-translated into various languages,
main content remains unchanged, creating largely duplicate pages,

and sometimes search results direct users to the wrong language, we’d like to help you better target your international/multilingual audience through:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />

As you know, when rel=”canonical” or a 301 response code is properly implemented, we become more precise in clustering information from duplicate URLs, such as consolidating their linking properties. Now, when rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” is included in conjunction with rel=”canonical” or 301s, not only will our indexing and linking properties be more accurate, but we can better serve users the URL of their preferred language.

Sample configuration that’s prime for rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

How does this all work? Imagine that you’re the proud owner of example.com, a site called “The Network” where you allow users to create their very own profile. Let’s say Javier Lopez, a Spanish speaker, makes his page at http://es.example.com/javier-lopez:

Because you’re trying to target a multilingual audience, once Javier hits “Publish,” his profile becomes immediately available in other languages with the translated templates. Also, each of the new language versions is served on a separate URL.

Two localized versions, http://en.example.com/javier-lopez in English and http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez in French

Background on the old issue: duplicate content caused by language variations

The configuration above allowed visitors speaking different languages to more easily interpret the content, but for search engines it was slightly problematic: there are three URLs (English, French, and Spanish versions) for the same main content in Javier’s profile. Webmasters wanted to avoid duplicate content issues (such as PageRank dilution) from these multiple versions and still ensure that we would serve the appropriate version to the user.

A new solution for localized templates

First of all, just to be clear, the strategy we’re proposing isn’t appropriate for multilingual sites that completely translate each page’s content. We’re trying to specifically improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants.

Before we get into the specific steps, our prior advice remains applicable:

Have one URL associated with one piece of content. We recommend against using the same URL for multiple languages, such as serving both French and English versions on example.com/page.html based on user information (IP address, Accept-Language HTTP header).

When multiple languages are at play, it’s best to include the language or country indication in the URL, e.g., example.com/en/welcome.html and example.com/fr/accueil.html (which specify “en” and “fr”) rather than example.com/welcome.html and example.com/accueil.html (which don’t contain an explicit country/language specification). More suggestions can be found in our blog posts about designing localized URLs and multilingual sites.

For the new feature:

Step 1: Select the proper canonical.
The canonical designates the version of your content you’d like indexed and returned to users.
The first step towards making the right content indexable is to pick one canonical URL that best reflects the genuine locale of the page’s main content. In the example above, since Javier is a Spanish-speaking user and he created his profile on es.example.com, http://es.example.com/javier-lopez is the logical canonical. The title and snippet in all locales will be selected from the canonical URL.

Once you have the canonical URL picked out, you can either:
A. 301 (permanent redirect) from the language variants to the canonical

As an example, if a French speaker visits fr.example.com/javier-lopez (not the canonical), have this page include a cookie to remember the user's language preference of French. Then permanently redirect from fr.example.com/javier-lopez to the canonical at es.example.com/javier-lopez. Because of the cookie, es.example.com/javier-lopez will still render its boilerplate in French (even on the es.example.com subdomain!). Similarly, en.example.com/javier-lopez would set the value of this cookie to English and then 301 redirect to es.example.com/javier-lopez.

Including a language selection link is also helpful should a multilingual user prefer a different experience of your site.

B. Use rel=”canonical”

On the other language variants, include a link rel=”canonical” tag pointing to your chosen canonical. In our example, since the canonical for Javier’s profile is the Spanish version, the English and French pages (and optionally even the Spanish page itself) would include <link rel=”canonical” href="http://es.example.com/javier-lopez" />.

Cookies are not involved in this setup. Therefore, a French speaker will be served es.example.com/javier-lopez with a Spanish template. Implement step 2 if you want the French speakers to be served the French version at fr.example.com/javier-lopez in Google search results.
Step 2: In the canonical URL, specify the various language versions via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its hreflang attribute.

rel=”alternate” URLs can be displayed in search results in accordance with a user’s language preference. The title and snippet, however, remain generated from the canonical URL (as is customary with rel=”canonical”), not from the content of any rel=”alternate”.
You can help Google display the correctly localized variant of your URL to our international users by adding the following tags to http://es.example.com/javier-lopez, the selected canonical:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />

rel=”alternate” indicates that the URL contains an alternate version located at the URI of the href value. hreflang identifies the language code of the alternate URL and can be specified with ISO-639.

Please note: If your site supports many languages and you’re worried about the increased file size when declaring numerous rel=”alternate” URLs, please see our Help Center article about configuring rel=”alternate” with file size constraints.

Once the steps are completed, the configuration on “The Network” would look like this:

http://en.example.com/javier-lopez
either 301s with a language cookie or contains <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” />
http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez
either 301s with a language cookie or contains <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” />
http://es.example.com/javier-lopez
is the canonical and contains
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />
and
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />

Results of the above implementation

When your content is returned in search results, users will likely see the URL that corresponds to their language preference, whether or not it’s the canonical. (Good news!) This is because with with rel=”canonical” or a 301 redirect, we can cluster the language variations with the canonical. With rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” at serve-time we can deliver the URL of the most appropriate language to the user: English speakers will be served en.example.com/javier-lopez as the result for the URL in Javier’s profile, French speakers will see fr.example.com/javier-lopez, Spanish speakers will see es.example.com/javier-lopez.

By implementing step 1, only content from the canonical version will be available for users in search results (i.e. content from the duplicate versions won’t be searchable). Because the Spanish version es.example.com/javier-lopez is the canonical, queries that include template content from this page, e.g. [Javier Lopez familia] -- when using any language preference -- may return his profile (content from the canonical version). On the other hand, queries that include template content of the “duplicate” version, e.g. [Javier Lopez family], are less likely to return his profile page. If you would like the other language versions indexed separately and searchable, avoid using rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate”.

Indexing properties, such as linking information, from the duplicate language variants will be consolidated with the canonical.

To recap (one more time, with feeling!)

For sites that have their template localized but the keep their pages’ main content untranslated:

Step 1: Once you have the canonical picked out you can use either rel=”canonical” or a 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL.

Step 2: On the canonical URL, specify the language-specific duplicated content with different boilerplate via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its hreflang attribute. This way, Google can show the correctly-localized variant of your URLs to our international users.

We realize this can be a little complicated, so if you have questions, please ask in our webmaster forum!

Written by Surabhi Gupta, Joachim Kupke & Jayesh Vyas, Search Localization and Indexing Teams

Google Instant: Impact on Search queries

2010-09-08T10:15:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

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

Rich snippets: testing tool improvements, breadcrumbs, and events

2010-09-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Since the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared to one year ago. Here are three recent product updates.

Testing tool improvements

Despite the healthy adoption rate by webmasters so far, implementing the rich snippets markup correctly can still be a major challenge. To help address this, we’ve added new error messages to the rich snippets testing tool to help you better identify and fix any problems with the markup.

If you’ve added markup in the past but haven’t seen rich snippets appear for your site, we encourage you to take a few minutes to try testing the markup again on the updated testing tool.

Rich snippets markup for breadcrumbs

Last year, Google announced a modification to search results to begin showing site hierarchies (typically referred to as "breadcrumbs") rather than standard URLs in cases where it helped users to better understand a website:

We are now adding support for a Breadcrumbs markup format that allows webmasters to explicitly identify the breadcrumb hierarchy on their pages.

If the breadcrumbs UI is already showing for your site, we'll continue to show it even if you don't do the markup, so don't worry about any existing UI disappearing. Note that this new format is experimental. Based on feedback and on other available standards, this format may be modified or replaced in the future. As with other rich snippet types, while markup helps us to better understand the content on your site, it does not guarantee that the breadcrumbs UI will be shown for your web pages in search results.

Events

In January, we added support for rich snippets for events. If a web page containing events listings showed up in search results, up to three links to specific events could be shown in the search result snippet.

This works well for general queries like [concerts in seattle], but we also wanted to improve the search experience when searching for a specific event. We will now show rich snippets when pages containing a single event show up in search results. Single event rich snippets now contain the date and location of the event:

For instructions on adding events markup, refer to the events page in the rich snippets documentation.

Posted by Kavi Goel and Pravir Gupta, Search Quality team

Google now indexes SVG

2010-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.

Posted by Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata, Software Engineers

Showing more results from a domain

2010-08-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:

Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

Written by Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer

Verification time savers — Analytics included!

2010-08-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Webmaster Level: All

Nobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you're ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They're very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today.

You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button.

This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript, so if you haven't migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven't set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It'll save you a little time — who doesn't like that? Just as with all of our other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet.

Don't forget that once you've verified ownership, you can add other verified owners quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There's no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved!

We've also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there's no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — we'll walk you through it.

The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Written by Sean Harding, Software Engineer

To err is human, Video Sitemap feedback is divine!

2010-08-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

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