Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: joulukuuta 2010

"It's on Google! YAY!" - Getting webmaster help in our forum

tiistaina, joulukuuta 28, 2010

Webmaster Help ForumBionic Posters

"Thank you for the time you have spent helping me. It is genuinely appreciated."

"Thank you to everyone who helped with my problem! My creaky old 1996 era website is all cleaned up and doing just fine now! Good Guys Rule!"

"WOW!!!!!!!! Thank you so much for your help! I was reluctant to post because I thought you guys might think my site is too small, too insignificant, etc. Thanks so much! To me, it's a BIG deal!"

"My traffic has doubled and I am now either top or close to the top in search terms"

"Thanks. Hopefully my late night paid off then, all the help and information has been great!!!!!!!"

"Wow Webado Thank You Again.. You Really Know Your stuff! (…) You Are a True professional and Seriously The Only Person That Could Even Figure This out. I even Spoke to Other Top Specialists and YOU were the Only one who told me what to do and what was wrong."

"You are AMAZING! Thank you so much!"

"Finally, thanks so much for your concern and prompt reply, Squibble. Can't imagine a person would deligated his efforts to someones you don't even know and met. (…) Thanks for your help!! It means everything to me!"

"Wow thanks so much! I have just been to the hot springs in Banos Ecuador, the volcano is rumbling and the town has evacuated but I am still here talking Apache, now that is dedication, I will test your helpfulness out 2moro! Thanks so much!!!"

"THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU! YOU ARE SOOOO AMAZING! MY BLOG IS GONE FROM GOOGLE AND ALL THE OLD POSTS ASSOCIATED WITH THAT TOO! THANK YOU! I LOVE YOU!"

"It worked! Thank you very much for your help Cristina :)"

"I could NEVER have seen what's possible without this forum. I am so grateful."

"Thank you so much for your detailed response to my questions. In 10 years of me having a website, no one has explained these concepts better to me than you did."

"IT WORKED!!! Thank you so much for saving me the grief and embarrassment of this problem. I truly appreciate both your knowledge and guidance."

"Thank you so much for such a detailed answer and putting into terms I can easily understand. (…) Where shall I send the batch of brownies?"

"Thank you so much Squibble you are a hero. I have done what it says and i will check to see if i appear in google! Thanks again!"

"you guys are amazing! thank you so much redleg! (…) and if you happen to ever be in san carlos give me a shout - you deserve at least a beer and a lunch! "

"Thank you Squibble, Vanessa, Cristina, and Ishigaki for weighing in on this and helping me. I hope I can pay it forward one day."

"Great info Guys. I really appreciate it. It was awesome of y'all to help me out. I really appreciate it. Thank you."

"Your amazing :-) i love you lol xx im sorted now thanks and never in a million years would i have found that out!"

"THANK YOU! I love Google and appreciate that they have these safety precautions in place for those nasty hackets - especially when we can fix the problem! Thanks so much for your help. Whew."

"Thank you very much, Robbo! With a little tweaking it worked perfectly!"

"yay!!! I think it finally went through - THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!"

forumsfrequently asked questionssearch the forumabout yourselfPosted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Sending Video Sitemaps Q&A holiday cheer

lauantaina, joulukuuta 25, 2010

Video Sitemap webinarVideo Sitemaps

Our entire webinar covers the basics of Video Sitemaps and best practices -- nearly everything you’d need to know when submitting a video feed.

Can the source/content of the video (perhaps a third-party vendor) be hosted on another site? For example, can I host my videos on YouTube and still be eligible for Video Search traffic?

Yes, you can use a third party to host videos. Only the play page--the URL within the <loc> tag--needs to be on your site. <video:content_loc> and <video:player_loc> can list URLs on a different site or subdomain.

For example, here’s a snippet from a valid Video Sitemap that shows content hosted on a different subdomain from the play page:

<url> 
  <loc>http://www.example.com/videos/some_video_landing_page.html</loc> 
    <video:video> 
      <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>  
      <video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title> 
      <video:description>Alkis shows you how to get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description> 
      <video:content_loc>http://video-hoster.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc> 
      <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
    </video:video> 
</url>

If I’m using YouTube to host my videos, can Google verify that I’m the legitimate owner?

Currently, there doesn’t exist functionality that allows you, as the uploader, to verify that you’re the owner of a video. The issue of authorship is a hard problem on the web, not just for videos, but nearly all types of content.

Because Google owns YouTube, should users who embed YouTube videos still submit Video Sitemaps or is it unnecessary?

Google treats YouTube as just another source for video content -- though you don’t need to submit a Video Sitemap if you only want your YouTube-hosted videos indexed. If, however, you’re using YouTube as a online video platform (i.e., with play pages on your own site), then we do recommend Sitemap submission.

How long does it take for Google to accept and verify a Video Sitemap?

Video Sitemap submission is a two-part process:

We fetch the Sitemap and parse it for syntax errors. This happens within minutes.

We fetch the assets referenced in the Sitemap, perform checks, validate metadata, do more cool stuff, and last, index the video. This step can require varied amounts of time depending on your site and our system load.

What tags and categories are most important in Video Sitemaps or mRSS? Should I create my own categories or is there a list that I should conform to?

Currently, the most important metadata to include is title and description -- both are required. The category tag is optional, and there isn’t a list from which to select.

Do I have to use HTML5 to use Video Sitemaps?
Does HTML5 help with discovery?
Or, if my site is HTML5 compliant, do I still need to submit a Video Sitemap?

None of the Video Search principles change with HTML5. We still recommend using a Video Sitemap regardless of the markup on your site. HTML5 can be helpful, though, because tags like <video> make it easier for our systems to verify that video exists on the page.

If I use an iframe rather than embedding my videos, can Google still find it?

We do not recommend using iframes to embed video content on your pages.

Can I have multiple videos on one URL?

You can. We’ve found, however, that users may not consider it the best experience. When users click on a video search result, they most often don’t like being forced to locate the correct video among multiple videos on the resulting page.

Do I need to specifically create a robots.txt file that allows Googlebot, or do I just need to make sure Googlebot isn’t blocked?

Just make sure that Googlebot isn’t blocked.

I provided a thumbnail, but it’s not being used. Does Google create their own thumbnails from my videos?

We try to use the thumbnail you provide if it’s valid. If not, we’ll try to generate a thumbnail ourselves. We recommend that you provide thumbnails that are at least 120x90 pixels. We also accept many thumbnail formats, such as PNG and JPEG.

Any video filesize limitations?

At this time, there aren’t video filesize limitations on content submitted through VIdeo Sitemaps.

Is there any way to indicate a transcript or closed captioning for a video?

Currently there isn’t, but perhaps down the road.

What if I’m using Lightbox or a popup to display a video; can it still be indexed?

Depends on the use case and how it’s rendered, but if indexing by search engines is important to you, it’s not the safest method. In the Webmaster Help Center, we explain that “When designing your site, it's important to configure your video pages without any overly complex JavaScript or Flash setup.” Most often, for bots, simpler is safer.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Improving our help content: stocking stuffers in our Help Center

torstaina, joulukuuta 23, 2010

Webmaster Level: All
We provide lots of information for webmasters across many different channels — you can stay up to date with the latest features here on our blog, browse articles in our Help Center, have discussions in our forums (in 17 languages!), watch videos on our YouTube channel, or even read in-depth interviews (in English, Portuguese, and other languages).
There’s no shortage of useful information, but sometimes the relevant bits may be a bit difficult to locate, especially for novice webmasters. We see the same questions popping up over and over again, so we’ve tried to make our most frequently searched information as accessible and visible as possible: We analysed the questions asked over the past year and a half and identified the issues you are most interested in. We then picked out the relevant bits from across our different resources and collected the answers to those questions in one new convenient FAQ page in our Help Center (available in 20 languages).
We also frequently get questions on how to get in touch with us, so we’ve put together all the different ways you can: ...tell us about a page you want to remove from our search results; ...tell us about spam you found; ...let us know when you’ve fixed issues on your website;...and many more! All of these contact channels are now listed conveniently in one article with direct links to the relevant forms: Webmaster help and contacts (available from the homepage of our Help Center, also in 20 languages).
Now isn’t that a nice stocking stuffer (-:? Happy webmastering in 2011, and keep the feedback coming!

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team, Dublin

Video Sitemaps & mRSS vs. Facebook Share & RDFa

keskiviikkona, joulukuuta 22, 2010

Video SitemapsmRSSFacebook Share and RDFaFunctionality of feeds vs. on-page markup

While both feeds and on-page markup give search engines metadata, Video Sitemaps/mRSS also help with crawl discovery. We may find a new URL through your feed that we wouldn’t have easily discovered otherwise.

Using Video Sitemaps/mRSS requires that the search engine support these formats and not all engines do. Because on-page markup is just that -- on the page -- crawlers can gather the metadata through organic means as they index the URL. No feed support is required.

	Feeds (Video Sitemaps & mRSS)	On-page markup (Facebook Share & RDFa)
Accepted by Google	⎷	⎷
Helps search engines discover new URLs with videos (improves discovery and coverage)	⎷
Provides structured metadata (e.g. video title and description)	⎷	⎷
Allows search engines without sitemap/mRSS support to still obtain metadata information (allows organic gathering of metadata)		⎷
Incorporates additional metadata like “duration”	⎷

All this said, if you’re going to start from scratch, Video Sitemaps is our recommended start.

	Video Sitemaps	mRSS
Accepted by Google	⎷	⎷
Been around for a long, long time and pretty widely accepted		⎷
Extremely quick for Google Video Search team to extend	⎷

Sitemaps sectionWritten by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Ring in the new year with accessible content: Website clinic for non-profits

keskiviikkona, joulukuuta 22, 2010

Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping -- just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they’ll know how to get around?
As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about.

So if you’ve resolved to boost your site’s user experience and online presence for the new year, improving your content accessibility is a great way to start. Thankfully, there are tons of features you can add to make your site more accessible. In this post, we’ll highlight three of them:

Intuitive navigation
Concise, descriptive anchor text for links
Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Intuitive navigation

Help users avoid confusion by providing them with intuitive navigation, so that when they arrive at your site, they’ll know where to click to find the information they’re looking for.

Here are three features you can implement in order to lead your users down the right path:

Navigational menu: Having a menu with links to the site’s most important pages is the fastest, easiest way to show users where to click next.
Text-based links: While drop-down menus, image-based links, and animation-based links can be appealing, keep in mind that users on text-only devices and some search engines may not be able to see or understand these links. Thus, many users prefer text-based links, which are also easier for search engines to crawl and interpret.
User-viewable site map: 59% of our submissions did not have a user-viewable site map. By providing one, you display the structure of your site and give the user easy one-click navigation. If users are having trouble finding specific pages on your site, a site map can help them find their way. Don’t send your users into the wild without a map!

Let’s explore how these features can make a site’s navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.

Thanks to this site’s clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site’s important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the “Home” button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site’s important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site’s content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.

Concise, descriptive anchor text for links

Anchor text -- the clickable text of a link -- can help users quickly decide which links they want to click on and find out more about. Meaningful anchor text makes it easier for users to navigate around your site and also helps search engines understand what the link’s destination page is about.

20% of our submissions could improve their sites by improving the anchor text used in some of their internal links. When writing anchor text, keep two things in mind:

Be descriptive: Use words that are relevant to the destination page, avoiding generic phrases like “click here” or “article.” Make sure the user can get a snapshot of the destination page’s overall content and functionality by reading the anchor text.
Keep it concise: Anchor text that contains a few words or a short phrase is more attractive and convenient for users to read than a sentence or paragraph-long link.

Let’s take a look at how anchor text played out in two user-submitted examples:

Organization	Anchor Text Examples	User Friendliness	Anchor Text Behavior
The Mosaic Project	Work for Mosaic Order Our Curriculum Guide Outdoor School	High: Users can get an accurate idea of the content on the links’ destination pages just by reading the anchor text.	Active verb phrases and rich nouns accurately describe the pages that the links are pointing to.
Asian Liver Center	Learn more here	Low: The anchor text is too generic and does not give users an idea of what the linked-to content is.	Generic phrases give little insight into the pages that the links are pointing to.

You can learn more about anchor text and internal linking strategies by checking out this blog post on the importance of link architecture.

Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Each page on your site is different, so flaunt your site’s diversity by giving a unique title to each page. Giving each page a unique title lets search engines know how that page is distinct from others within your site. In our analysis, over 28% of sites could have improved their site quality by adding unique page titles.

Let’s check out a few more examples to see what a difference unique, accurate page titles can make:

Organization	Page Title Examples	User Friendliness	Page Title Behavior
VAMS International	Upcoming Events \| VAMS International Request Service \| VAMS International FAQ’s \| VAMS International	High: Each page’s content is relevant to its title, and the user can get a good idea of each page’s unique offerings and functionality.	Concise, rich language joined with the organization’s name accurately describes the corresponding pages. The titles show how each page is unique while also acknowledging that they are all associated with one organization.
MHCD Evaluation and Research	MHCD Evaluation and Research	Low: This site contains a lot of diverse content and rich functionality; however, the uniform page titles do not convey these strengths.	This page title is too general and does not accurately describe the content on each page. The same title is used across all the pages on this site.

Wrapping things up

We hope that this blog post has given you some ideas on how to ring in the new year with improved content accessibility, which can boost the user experience and online presence for your site.

To learn more about the features discussed here and in our previous two site clinic posts, check out our SEO Report Card and SEO Starter Guide.

This blog post wraps up our website clinic for non-profits. We send our warmest regards to all the great non-profit causes you are working on, and thanks to everyone who took the time to submit their sites and read our posts!

Posted by Jen Lee and Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Evaluation TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

Holiday source code housekeeping: Website clinic for non-profits

tiistaina, joulukuuta 21, 2010

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
As the holiday season comes around, we all have a bit of housekeeping to do. This is precisely why we wanted to focus the second post in our site clinic series on cleaning up your source code. Throughout our analysis of submitted non-profit websites, we noticed some confusion about what HTML markup, or tags, to use where, and what content to place within them, both of which could have significant impact on users and how your website looks on the search results page.
Before you deck the halls, deck out your <title> elementsOut of all the submitted non-profit websites, 27% were misusing their <title> elements, which are critical in letting both Google and users know what’s important to your website. Typically, a search engine will display ~60 characters from your title element; this is valuable real estate, so you should use it! Before getting into the actual code, let’s first take a look at how a great title element from one of our submitted sites, Sharp, will appear in the search results page:

Ideally, a great <title> element will include the name of the organization, along with a descriptive tag line. Let’s take a look at some submitted examples:

Organization	<title> source code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sharp	<title>Top San Diego Doctors and Hospitals - Sharp HealthCare</title>	Best	Includes organization’s name and a descriptive tag line
Interieur	<title>Interieur 2010 - 15-24 October Kortrijk, Belgium</title>	Good	Includes the organization’s name and a non-descriptive tag line
VAMS International	<title>Visual Arts and Music for Society \| VAMS International</title>	Okay	Includes only the organization’s name

If you don’t specify a <title> tag, then Google will try to create a title for you. You can probably do better than our best guess, so go for it: take control of your <title> tag! It’s a simple fix that can make a huge difference. Using specific <title> tags for your deeper URLs is also important, and we’ll address that in our next site clinic post.

Keep an eye on your description meta tags

Description meta tags weren’t being utilized to their full potential in 54% of submitted sites. These tags are often used to populate the two-line snippet provided to users in the search results page. With a solid snippet, you can get your potential readers excited and ready to learn more about your organization. Let’s take another look at a good example from among the submitted sites, Tales of Aussie Rescue:

If description meta tags are absent or not relevant, a snippet will be chosen from the page’s content automatically. If you’re lucky and have a good snippet auto-selected, keep in mind that search engines vary in the way that they select snippets, so it’s better to keep things consistent and relevant by writing a solid description meta tag.

Keep your <h> elements in their place

Another quick fix in your housekeeping is assuring your website makes proper use of heading tags. In our non-profit study, nearly 19% of submitted sites had room for improvement with heading elements. The most common problem in heading tags was the tendency to initiate headers with an <h2> or <h3> tag while not including an <h1> tag, presumably for aesthetic reasons.

Headings give you the opportunity to tell both Google and users what’s important to you and your website. The lower the number on your heading tag, the more important the text, in the eyes of Google and your users. Take advantage of that <h1> tag! If you don’t like how an <h1> tag is rendered visually, you can always alter its appearance in your CSS.

Use alt text for images

Everyone is always proud to display their family photos come holiday season, but don’t forget to tell us what they’re all about. Over 37% of analyzed sites were not making appropriate use of the image alt attribute. If used properly, this attribute can:

Help Google understand what your image is
Allow users on text-only browsers, with accessibility problems, or on limited devices to understand your images

Keep in mind, rich and descriptive alt text is the key here. Let’s take another look at some of our submitted sites and their alt attribute usage:

Organization	Source Code	User Friendliness	Tag Behavior
Sponsor A Puppy	<img alt="Sponsor a Puppy logo" src=...	Best: the alt text specifies the image is the organization’s main logo	Uses rich, descriptive alt text to describe images, buttons, and logos
Philanthropedia	<img alt="Logo" height=...	Good: the alt text specifies the image is a logo, but does not further describe it by the organization or its behavior	Uses non-descriptive alt text for images, buttons, and logos, or uses alt text only sporadically
Coastal Community Foundation	<img src="...”>	Not ideal: alt text not present	No use of alt text, or use of text that does not add meaning (often seen in numbering the images)

A little window shopping for your New Year’s resolution

Google has some great resources to further address best practices in your source code. For starters, you can use our HTML Suggestion Tool in Webmaster Tools. Also, it’s always a good practice to make your site accessible to all viewers.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

A helping holiday hand: Website clinic for non-profits

maanantaina, joulukuuta 20, 2010

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
A New Year’s resolutionIn the spirit of the holidays, here at Google we wanted to take the time to help out those who spend their days making our world a better place: non-profit organizations. A few weeks back, we asked webmasters of non-profits to submit their organization’s site to our Search Quality team for analysis. After some number crunching and trend analysis, we’re back to report on general areas for improvement and to guide you towards some useful resources!
Making our list, checking it twiceFirst, we’d like thank all of the amazing organizations who participated by submitting their sites. We got some great results, and are excited about all the diverse non-profit causes out there.
Our analysis will take place in the following two posts. The first post will focus on cleaning up HTML tags in your source code, while the second will examine improving user experience via better content accessibility.
Visions of... URLs... dancing in our headsThe great news is, every single site submitted had at least one or two areas to tweak to make it even better! So this information should be helpful to everyone out there, big or small. Just to whet your appetites, here’s a quick list of items that will not be addressed in our following posts, but that had some room for improvement in a large percentage of submitted sites:

Keep an eye on proper canonicalization: 56% of analyzed non-profit sites could improve their canonicalization practices. You can read more about canonicalization in this blog post from a previous site clinic.
Make sure your volunteer/support sections are visible: 29% of our submissions could improve their sites by making their support, volunteer, or donation sections easier to find. A great way to accomplish this is to add a donations tab to your navigation bar so it’s just one click away at all times.
Protect your confidential information: Lots of non-profits, especially those in the medical industry, deal with some very important and confidential information. Read up on how to control your crawled and indexed content, and remember to protect confidential content through proper authentication measures.
Make your Flash sites search engine friendly: We saw some beautiful sites running on Flash. Search engines have a hard time understanding Flash files, and we’re working to improve Flash comprehension on our end, but here are some discussion points on how you can help us understand your Flash content.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Evaluation TeamContributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

New hacked site notifications in search results

perjantaina, joulukuuta 17, 2010

Webmaster level: All

Today we’ve added a new notification to our search results that helps people know when a site may have been hacked. We’ve provided notices for malware for years, which also involve a separate warning page. Now we’re expanding the search results notifications to help people avoid sites that may have been hacked and altered by a third party, typically for spam. When a user visits a site, we want her to be confident the information on that site comes from the original publisher.

Here’s what the notification looks like:

Clicking the “This site may be hacked” link brings you to an article in our Help Center which explains more about the notice. Meanwhile, clicking the result itself brings you to the target website, as expected.

We use a variety of automated tools to detect common signs of a hacked site as quickly as possible. When we detect something suspicious, we’ll add the notification to our search results. We’ll also do our best to contact the site’s webmaster via their Webmaster Tools account and any contact email addresses we can find on the webpage. We hope webmasters will also appreciate these notices, because it will help you more quickly discover when someone may be abusing your site so you can correct the problem.

Of course, we also understand that webmasters may be concerned that these notices are impacting their traffic from search. Rest assured, once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from our search results, usually in a matter of days. You can also request a review of your site to accelerate removal of the notice.

If you see this notification appearing on your site’s listing, please take a look at the instructions in our Help Center to learn how you can begin to address the problem. Together, we can make the web a safer place.

Update (2:50pm PT, September 19th 2013): We've updated this post to reflect the change in the notification wording.

Posted by Gideon Wald, Associate Product Manager