Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: de febrer 2007

Traveling Down Under: GWC at Search Engine Room and Search Summit Australia

dimarts, de febrer 27, 2007

Webmaster CentralSearch SummitSearch Engine RoomSearch Summit
Thursday, March 1st
Site Architecture, CSS and Tableless Design 14:45 - 15:30
Peeyush Ranjan, Engineering Manager

Friday, March 2nd
Bot Obedience 09:45 - 10:00
Dan Crow, Product Manager, Crawl Systems

Web 2.0 & Search 11:15 - 12:00
Dan Crow, Product Manager, Crawl Systems

Google Linking Clinic 12:00 - 12:45
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Lunch with Google Webmaster Central 12:45 -13:30

Sitemap Clinic 13:30 - 14:15
Maile Ohye, Developer Support Engineer

Google Webmaster Central Q&A 14:15 - 15:00

Living the Non 9-5 Life, Tips for Achieving Balance, Sanity... 15:00 - 15:45
Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist
Search Engine Room Tuesday, March 20th
Google Breakfast 07:30 - 09:00
Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Don't Be Evil 09:30 - 10:30
Richard Kimber, Managing Director of Sales and Operations

Better badware notifications for webmasters

dilluns, de febrer 26, 2007

In the fight against badware, protecting Google users by showing warnings before they visit dangerous sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. It's even more important to help webmasters protect their own users, and we've been working on this with StopBadware.org. A few months ago we took the first step and integrated malware notifications into webmaster tools. I'm pleased to announce that we are now including more detailed information in these notifications, and are also sending them to webmasters via email.

Webmaster tools notifications
Now instead of simply informing webmasters that their sites have been flagged and suggesting next steps, we're also showing example URLs that we've determined to be dangerous. This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find. For example, a common occurrence with compromised sites is the insertion of a 1-pixel iframe causing the automatic download of badware from another site. By providing example URLs, webmasters are one step closer to diagnosing the problem and ultimately re-securing their sites.

Email notifications
In addition to notifying webmaster tools users, we've also begun sending email notifications to some of the webmasters of sites that we flag for badware. We don't have a perfect process for determining a webmaster's email address, so for now we're sending the notifications to likely webmaster aliases for the domain in question (e.g., webmaster@, admin@, etc). We considered using whois records, but these often contain contact information for the hosting provider or registrar, and you can guess what might happen if a web host learned that one of its client sites was distributing badware. We're planning to allow webmasters to provide a preferred email address for notifications through webmaster tools, so look for this change in the future.

Update: For more information, please see our Help Center article on malware and hacked sites.

Tips on using feeds and information on subscriber counts in Reader

dimarts, de febrer 20, 2007

News sources such as the New York Times publish feeds of their latest stories

Companies like Apple publish feeds of their press releases, as well as a few other feeds.

Blogs including the Official Google Blog publish feeds with their latest posts

Shopping sites like Buy.com publish feeds with noteworthy deals

Find out how many readers are subscribed to your feed
Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribersFeedburnerfind this numberUser-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=1794595805790851116)Making your feed available to Googlesubmit your feed as a Sitemap<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.example.com/atom.xml" />
Don't yet have a feed?SettingsSite FeedPublish Site FeedYesMore tips from the Google Reader teamtips for feed publishersget in touch

Our Valentine's day gift: out of beta and adding comments

dimecres, de febrer 14, 2007

webmaster centrallove the webmaster communityBye, bye betaSitemaps protocolchanged our nameyear of great progressSitemaps protocolMicrosoft and Yahoo have joined usHello, commentsdiscussion forum

Update on Public Service Search

dimarts, de febrer 13, 2007

stopped accepting new Public Service Search accountsGoogle Custom Search Enginecreate a Custom Search EngineOverview pageFAQdiscussion group

Come see us at SES London and hear tips on successful site architecture

dilluns, de febrer 12, 2007

Search Engine Strategies LondonSuccessful Site ArchitectureMake sure visitors and search engines can access the content

Check the Crawl errors section of webmaster tools for any pages Googlebot couldn't access due to server or other errors. If Googlebot can't access the pages, they won't be indexed and visitors likely can't access them either.

Make sure your robots.txt file doesn't accidentally block search engines from content you want indexed. You can see a list of the files Googlebot was blocked from crawling in webmaster tools. You can also use our robots.txt analysis tool to make sure you're blocking and allowing the files you intend.

Check the Googlebot activity reports to see how long it takes to download a page of your site to make sure you don't have any network slowness issues.

If pages of your site require a login and you want the content from those pages indexed, ensure you include a substantial amount of indexable content on pages that aren't behind the login. For instance, you can put several content-rich paragraphs of an article outside the login area, with a login link that leads to the rest of the article.

How accessible is your site? How does it look in mobile browsers and screen readers? It's well worth testing your site under these conditions and ensuring that visitors can access the content of the site using any of these mechanisms.

Make sure your content is viewable

Check out your site in a text-only browser or view it in a browser with images and Javascript turned off. Can you still see all of the text and navigation?

Ensure the important text and navigation in your site is in HTML, not in images, and make sure all images have ALT text that describe them.

If you use Flash, use it only when needed. Particularly, don't put all of the text from your site in Flash. An ideal Flash-based site has pages with HTML text and Flash accents. If you use Flash for your home page, make sure that the navigation into the site is in HTML.

Be descriptive

Make sure each page has a unique title tag and meta description tag that aptly describe the page.

Make sure the important elements of your pages (for instance, your company name and the main topic of the page) are in HTML text.

Make sure the words that searchers will use to look for you are on the page.

Keep the site crawlable

If possible, avoid frames. Frame-based sites don't allow for unique URLs for each page, which makes indexing each page separately problematic.

Ensure the server returns a 404 status code for pages that aren't found. Some servers are configured to return a 200 status code, particularly with custom error messages and this can result in search engines spending time crawling and indexing non-existent pages rather than the valid pages of the site.

Avoid infinite crawls. For instance, if your site has an infinite calendar, add a nofollow attribute to links to dynamically-created future calendar pages. Each search engine may interpret the nofollow attribute differently, so check with the help documentation for each. Alternatively, you could use the nofollow meta tag to ensure that search engine spiders don't crawl any outgoing links on a page, or use robots.txt to prevent search engines from crawling URLs that can lead to infinite loops.

If your site uses session IDs or cookies, ensure those are not required for crawling.

If your site is dynamic, avoid using excessive parameters and use friendly URLs when you can. Some content management systems enable you to rewrite URLs to friendly versions.

tips for creating a Google-friendly sitewebmaster guidelines
Tuesday, February 13th

Auditing Paid Listings & Clickfraud Issues 10:45 - 12:00
Wednesday, February 14thA Keynote ConversationSuccessful Site ArchitectureGoogle UniversityConverting Visitors into BuyersSearch Advertising ForumThursday, February 15thMeet the CrawlersWeb Analytics and Measuring Successful OverviewSearch Advertising ClinicSite Clinic

Discover your links

dilluns, de febrer 05, 2007

Update on October 15, 2008For more recent news on links, visit Links Week on our Webmaster Central Blog. We're discussing internal links, outbound links, and inbound links.You asked, and we listened: We've extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.
To make this data even more useful, we have divided the world of links into two types: external and internal. Let's understand what kind of links fall into which bucket.
What are external links?
External links to your site are the links that reside on pages that do not belong to your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for http://www.google.com/, all the links that do not originate from pages on any subdomain of google.com would appear as external links to your site.

What are internal links?

Internal links to your site are the links that reside on pages that belong to your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for http://www.google.com/, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of google.com, such as http://www.google.com/ or mobile.google.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

Viewing links to a page on your site

You can view the links to your site by selecting a verified site in your webmaster tools account and clicking on the new Links tab at the top. Once there, you will see the two options on the left: external links and internal links, with the external links view selected. You will also see a table that lists pages on your site, as shown below. The first column of the table lists pages of your site with links to them, and the second column shows the number of the external links to that page that we have available to show you. (Note that this may not be 100% of the external links to this page.)

Finding links to a specific page on your site
Find a pagehttp://www.google.com/?mainFind a pagehttp://www.google.com/?main

Viewing internal links
Internal Links

http://mobile.google.com/http://www.google.com

Downloading links data
There are three different ways to download links data about your site. The first: download the current view of the table you see, which lets you navigate to any summary or details table, and download the data in the current view. Second, and probably the most useful data, is the list all external links to your site. This allows you to download a list of all the links that point to your site, along with the information about the page they point to and the last time we crawled that link. Thirdly, we provide a similar download for all internal links to your site.

We do limit the amount of data you can download for each type of link (for instance, you can currently download up to one million external links). Google knows about more links than the total we show, but the overall fraction of links we show is much, much larger than the link: command currently offers. Why not visit us at Webmaster Central and explore the links for your site?