Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: January 2010

Request visitors' permission before installing software

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Google Korea Blogmalwaremalware warningWebmaster Toolsmalware reviewWritten by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Webmaster Level: All
If you allow users to publish content on your website, from leaving comments to creating user profiles, you’ll likely see spammers attempt to take advantage of these mechanisms to generate traffic to their own sites. Having this spammy content on your site isn't fun for anyone. Users may be subjected to annoying advertisements directing them to low-quality or dangerous sites containing scams or malware. And you as a webmaster may be hosting content that violates a search engine's quality guidelines, which can harm your site's standing in search results.
There are ways to handle this abuse, such as moderating comments and reviewing new user accounts, but there is often so much spam created that it can become impossible to keep up with. Spam can easily get to this unmanageable level because most spam isn’t created manually by a human spammer. Instead, spammers use computer programs called “bots” to automatically fill out web forms to create spam, and these bots can generate spam much faster than a human can review it.
To level the playing field, you can take steps to make sure that only humans can interact with potentially spammable features of your website. One way to determine which of your visitors are human is by using a CAPTCHA , which stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." A typical CAPTCHA contains an image of distorted letters which humans can read, but are not easily understood by computers. Here's an example:

You can easily take advantage of this technology on your own site by using reCAPTCHA, a free service owned by Google. One unique aspect of reCAPTCHA is that data collected from the service is used to improve the process of scanning text, such as from books or newspapers. By using reCAPTCHA, you're not only protecting your site from spammers; you're helping to digitize the world's books.

Luis Von Ahn, one reCAPTCHA's co-founders, gives more details about how the service works in the video below:

If you’d like to implement reCAPTCHA for free on your own site, you can sign up here. Plugins are available for easy installation on popular applications and programming environments such as WordPress and PHP.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events

Friday, January 22, 2010

introduced Rich Snippetsreviewspeoplevideo

events documentationWritten by Mike Danylchuk and Nitin Shetti

Google SEO resources for beginners

Thursday, January 21, 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 interestAre 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 ToolsIt 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 siteStep 4: Research before you do anything drasticUsually 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

State of the Index 2009

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Webmaster Level: All
At PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009, I gave a "State of the Index" talk which covers what Google has done for users, web developers, and webmasters in the last year. I recently recreated it on video for those of you who didn't make it to the conference. You can watch it below:

And here are the slides if you'd like to follow along:
Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

Test your webmaster know-how!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

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

Answering your December Grab Bag questions

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Webmaster Level: All
You asked and Matt Cutts answered. It's time to answer the latest round of Grab Bag questions! Here's the first answer, complete with Matt's new hairstyle:

We have a lot of videos ready to share, so we're not currently taking new questions for the Grab Bag. If you have a question that you would like answered, your best bet as always is to head to our Webmaster Help Forum, where you'll find plenty of knowledgeable webmasters, including some Bionic Posters!
To be kept up-to-date on our latest video releases, you can follow @googlewmc on Twitter, where we'll announce new videos and blog posts as they're published.Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Central Blog

Request visitors' permission before installing software

Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA

Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events

Google SEO resources for beginners

State of the Index 2009

Test your webmaster know-how!

Answering your December Grab Bag questions

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