Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: november 2010

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

woensdag, november 24, 2010

Controlling crawling and indexing

Webmaster Help ForumPosted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Petits fours in your search results

woensdag, november 17, 2010

show more results from a domainmoma

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

Written by Harvey Jones, Software Engineer

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

donderdag, november 11, 2010

significantly improvedexternal resource loadingSitemapGoogle Webmaster ToolsWritten by Jifeng Situ and Sverre Sundsdal, Software Engineers

Instant Previews

dinsdag, november 09, 2010

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.

Posted by Jeremy Silber, Software Engineer

A Chrome extension for reporting webspam

maandag, november 08, 2010

Note: The information in this post may be outdated. See our latest post about reporting spam.Webmaster Guidelinesspam report formGoogle Webmaster Toolshow to identify webspamChrome extension for reporting spam

Google Webspam Report Chrome extension

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

presentationChrome Extensions Gallery pagepublishedPosted by Manuel Holtz, Support Engineer, Search Quality team

How to help Google identify web spam

donderdag, november 04, 2010

Note: The information in this post may be outdated. See our latest post about reporting spam.Why report spam to Google?Chrome extension to report spamWhich sites should I report?URL removal toolsmalware report formpaid links reporting formhow to report linkspamcopyright processGoogle Webmaster Guidelines

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

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

Help ForumWhat should I include in a 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.

What happens next?submit spam reportsHelp ForumWritten by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist & John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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

woensdag, november 03, 2010

Page Speedmod_pagespeed

Comparison of the AdSense blog site with and without mod_pagespeed

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.

Go Daddy"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.”Cotendomod_pagespeedmailing listRichard Rabbat, Product Manager, ‘Make the Web Faster’ initiative

Rich snippets for shopping sites

dinsdag, november 02, 2010

rich snippetsoffice lava lamp

Product rich snippets help pageOption 1: Provide a Merchant Center feed.Merchant Center feedsGoogle Product Searchrel=”canonical” link elementUpdate on November 4, 2010:feedreviews partnersfull-length reviewsOption 2: Add markup to your site.product markup formathProductGoodRelationsrich snippets testing toolrich snippets formatsworld-wide in various languagesFAQsWebmaster Help ForumQ&AWhich should I provide -- a Merchant Center feed or markup?If I add markup to my site, will Google show product rich snippets for my pages?rich snippets testing toolI’ve already done reviews markup for my product offer pages. Should I add product/offer markup as well?Written by Nitin Shetti and Mircea Ciurumelea, Search Quality team

Best practices for running multiple sites

maandag, november 01, 2010

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

Webmaster Central Blog

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

Petits fours in your search results

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

Instant Previews

A Chrome extension for reporting webspam

How to help Google identify web spam

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

Rich snippets for shopping sites

Best practices for running multiple sites

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