Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: events

Answering the top questions from government webmasters

Friday, September 14, 2012

Webmaster level: Beginner - Intermediate

Government sites, from city to state to federal agencies, are extremely important to Google Search. For one thing, governments have a lot of content — and government websites are often the canonical source of information that’s important to citizens. Around 20 percent of Google searches are for local information, and local governments are experts in their communities.

That’s why I’ve spoken at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) national conference for the past few years. It’s always interesting speaking to webmasters about search, but the people running government websites have particular concerns and questions. Since some questions come up frequently I thought I’d share this FAQ for government websites.

Question 1: How do I fix an incorrect phone number or address in search results or Google Maps?

Although managing their agency’s site is plenty of work, government webmasters are often called upon to fix problems found elsewhere on the web too. By far the most common question I’ve taken is about fixing addresses and phone numbers in search results. In this case, government site owners really can do it themselves, by claiming their Google+ Local listing. Incorrect or missing phone numbers, addresses, and other information can be fixed by claiming the listing.

Most locations in Google Maps have a Google+ Local listing — businesses, offices, parks, landmarks, etc. I like to use the San Francisco Main Library as an example: it has contact info, detailed information like the hours they’re open, user reviews and fun extras like photos. When we think users are searching for libraries in San Francisco, we may display a map and a listing so they can find the library as quickly as possible.

If you work for a government agency and want to claim a listing, we recommend using a shared Google Account with an email address at your .gov domain if possible. Usually, ownership of the page is confirmed via a phone call or post card.

Question 2: I’ve claimed the listing for our office, but I have 43 different city parks to claim in Google Maps, and none of them have phones or mailboxes. How do I claim them?

Use the bulk uploader! If you have 10 or more listings / addresses to claim at the same time, you can upload a specially-formatted spreadsheet. Go to www.google.com/places/, click the "Get started now" button, and then look for the "bulk upload" link.

If you run into any issues, use the Verification Troubleshooter.

Question 3: We're moving from a .gov domain to a new .com domain. How should we move the site?

We have a Help Center article with more details, but the basic process involves the following steps:

Make sure you have both the old and new domain verified in the same Webmaster Tools account.
Use a 301 redirect on all pages to tell search engines your site has moved permanently.

Don't do a single redirect from all pages to your new home page — this gives a bad user experience.
If there's no 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to redirect to a new page with similar content.
If you can't do redirects, consider cross-domain canonical links.

Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools.
Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site's move.
Have a look at the Links to Your Site in Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your new location.
We recommend not implementing other major changes at the same time, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates.
To help Google pick up new URLs faster, use the Fetch as Google tool to ask Google to crawl your new site, and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
To prevent confusion, it's best to retain control of your old site’s domain and keep redirects in place for as long as possible — at least 180 days.

What if you’re moving just part of the site? This question came up too — for example, a city might move its "Tourism and Visitor Info" section to its own domain.

In that case, many of the same steps apply: verify both sites in Webmaster Tools, use 301 redirects, clean up old links, etc. In this case you don't need to use the Change of Address form in Webmaster Tools since only part of your site is moving. If for some reason you’ll have some of the same content on both sites, you may want to include a cross-domain canonical link pointing to the preferred domain.

Question 4: We've done a ton of work to create unique titles and descriptions for pages. How do we get Google to pick them up?

First off, that's great! Better titles and descriptions help users decide to click through to get the information they need on your page. The government webmasters I’ve spoken with care a lot about the content and organization of their sites, and work hard to provide informative text for users.

Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Changes are picked up as we recrawl your site. But you can do two things to let us know about URLs that have changed:

Submit an updated XML Sitemap so we know about all of the pages on your site.
In Webmaster Tools, use the Fetch as Google feature on a URL you’ve updated. Then you can choose to submit it to the index.

You can choose to submit all of the linked pages as well — if you’ve updated an entire section of your site, you might want to submit the main page or an index page for that section to let us know about a broad collection of URLs.

Question 5: How do I get into the YouTube government partner program?

For this question, I have bad news, good news, and then even better news. On the one hand, the government partner program has been discontinued. But don’t worry, because most of the features of the program are now available to your regular YouTube account. For example, you can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes.

Did I say I had even better news? YouTube has added a lot of functionality useful for governments in the past year:

You can now broadcast live streaming video to YouTube via Hangouts On Air (requires a Google+ account).
You can link your YouTube account with your Webmaster Tools account, making it the "official channel" for your site.
Automatic captions continue to get better and better, supporting more languages.

I hope this FAQ has been helpful, but I’m sure I haven’t covered everything government webmasters want to know. I highly recommend our Webmaster Academy, where you can learn all about making your site search-engine friendly. If you have a specific question, please feel free to add a question in the comments or visit our really helpful Webmaster Central Forum.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Webmaster forums' Top Contributors rock

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Webmaster level: All
The TC Summit was a blast! As we wrote in our announcement post, we recently invited more than 250 Top Contributors from all over the world to California to thank them for being so awesome and to give them the opportunity to meet some of our forum guides, engineers and product managers in person.
Our colleagues Adrianne and Brenna already published a recap post on the Official Google Blog. As for us, the search folks at Google, there's not much left to say except that we enjoyed the event and meeting Top Contributors in real life, many of them for the first time. We got the feeling you guys had a great time, too. Let’s quote a few of the folks who make a huge difference on a daily basis:
Sasch Mayer on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English):

"For a number of reasons this event does hold a special place for me, and always will. It's not because I was one of comparatively few people to be invited for a Jolly at the ‘Plex, but because this trip offered the world's TCs a unique opportunity to finally meet each other in person."

Herbert Sulzer, a.k.a. Luzie on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English, German and Spanish):

“Hehehe! Fun, fun fun, this was all fun :D Huhhh”

Aygul Zagidullina on Google+ (Web Search TC in English):

“It was a truly fantastic, amazing, and unforgettable experience meeting so many other TCs across product forums and having the chance to talk to and hear from so many Googlers across so many products!”

Of course we did receive lots of constructive feedback, too. Transparency and communication were on top of the list, and we're looking into increasing our outreach efforts via Webmaster Tools, so stay tuned! By the way, if you haven’t done so yet, please remember to use the forwarding option in the Webmaster Tools Message Center to get the messages straight to your email inbox. In the meantime please keep an eye on our Webmaster Central Blog, and of course keep on contributing to discussions in the Google Webmaster Forum.
On behalf of all Google guides who participated in the 2011 Summit we want to thank you. You guys rock! :)

That’s right, TCs & Google Guides came from all over the world to convene in California.

TCs & Google Guides from Webmaster Central and Search forums after one of the sessions.

After a day packed with presentations and breakout sessions...

...we did what we actually came for...

...enjoyed a party, celebrated and had a great time together.

Posted by Esperanza Navas, Yves Taquet, Uli Lutz, & Kaspar Szymanski, Google Search Quality

Recognizing Top Contributors in Google's Help Forums

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

The communities around Google products and services have been growing tremendously over the last couple of years. It is inspiring and motivating for us to see how many users like you contribute to Google Forums. For some time, we´ve been thinking of ways to thank our Top Contributors -- our most the passionate, helpful, friendly, and active users. These TCs have demonstrated incredible commitment to our communities and continue to share their profound knowledge by answering user questions within the forums.

TCs from all over the world will attend our first global summit in California.

We decided to give the online world a break for a moment and meet in real life to celebrate our past success and work on future endeavours. Google Forum Guides, Googlers that participate in the forums, and Top Contributors will convene for the first global Top Contributor Summit on September 13th and 14th in Santa Clara and Mountain View, California. During the Google-organized two-day event, Top Contributors will meet guides, engineers and product managers in order to get to know each other, provide feedback and share new ideas. We’ll be sharing some of the insights and takeaways after the event too, so stay tuned. And if you would like to follow the events online, look out for the #TCsummit tag on Twitter and our updates on Google+.

Posted by Esperanza Navas and Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team

Webinar: Implementing the +1 Button

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Webmaster Level: All

A few weeks ago, we launched the +1 button for your site, allowing visitors to recommend your content on Google search directly from your site. As people see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your search results, you could see more, better qualified traffic from Google.

But how do you make sure this experience is user friendly? Where should you position the +1 button? How do you make sure the correct URL is getting +1’d?

On Tuesday, June 21 at 3pm ET, please join Timothy Jordan, Google Developer Advocate, to learn about how to best implement the +1 button on your site. He’ll be talking through the technical implementation details as well as best practices to ensure the button has maximum impact. During the webinar, we’ll review the topics below:

Getting started
Best practices
Advanced options
Measurement
And, we’ll save time for Q&A

If you would like to attend, please register here. To download the code for your site, visit our +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central.

Posted by Kari Wilson, Product Marketing Manager

Sharing advice from our site clinic

Monday, March 15, 2010

Anu IlomäkiAdel SaoudFili WieseKaspar SzymanskiUli Lutzslides

I have 3 blogs with the same content, is that a problem?

If the content is identical, it's likely only one of the blogs will rank for it. Also, with this scattered of an effortwith this scattered of an effort chances are your incoming links will be distributed across the different blogs, instead of pointing to one source. Therefore you're running the risk of both users and search engines not knowing which of your blogs is the definitive source. You can mitigate that by redirecting to the preferred version or using the cross domain canonical to point to one source.

Should I believe SEO agencies that promise to make my site rank first in Google in a few months and with a precise number of links?

No one can make that promise; therefore the short answer is no, you should not. However, we have some great tips on how to find a trustworthy SEO in our Help Center.

There are keywords that are relevant for my website, but they're inappropriate to be shown in the content e.g. because they could be misunderstood, slang or offensive. How can I show the relevance to Google?

Depending on the topic of your site and expectations of the target group, you might consider actually using these keywords in a positive way, e.g. explaining their meaning and showing your users you're an authority on the subject. However if the words are plain abusive and completely inappropriate for your website, it's rather questionable whether the traffic resulting from these search queries is interesting for your website anyway.

Would you advise to use the rewrite URL function?

Some users may like seeing descriptive URLs in the search results. However, it's quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs. That's why, generally speaking, we don't recommend rewriting them. If you still want to give it a try, please be sure to remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL and have a close look at our blog post on this topic. And if you don't, keep in mind that we might still make your URLs look readable in our search results no matter how weird they actually are.

If I used the geo-targeting tool for Ireland, is Northern Ireland included?

Google Webmaster Tools geo-targeting works on a country basis, which means that Northern Ireland would not be targeted if the setting was Republic of Ireland. One possible solution is to create a separate site or part of a website for Northern Ireland and to geo-target this site to the United Kingdom in Webmaster Tools.

Is there any preference between TLDs like .com and .info in ranking?

No, there is none. Our focus is on the content of the site.

I have a website on a dot SO (.so) domain name with content meant for the Republic of Ireland. Will this hurt my rankings in the Irish search results?

.so is the Internet country code top-level domain for Somalia. This is one factor we look into not pointing to the desired destination. But we do look at a larger number of factors when ranking your website. The extension of the domain name is just one of these. Your website can still rank in the Irish search results if you have topic-specific content. However, keep in mind that it may take our algorithms a little bit longer to fully understand where to best serve your website in our search results.

community on our GWHFPosted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin

Get your site ready for the holidays: Webmasters - make your list and check it twice!

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

you're in good shapeHoliday Webmaster WebinarFriday, November 13, 200910:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco) https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdfhttps://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mcWritten by Lauren Dolmyer, Evan Tang, and Derrick Djang

Traffic drops and site architecture issues

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Webmaster Level: Intermediate.

We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I'd like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let's gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we'll take a look at site design and architecture issues.

Understanding drops in traffic

As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our index. Improvements in our ability to understand our users' interests and queries also often lead to differences in how our algorithms select and rank pages. We realize, however, that such changes might be confusing and sometimes foster misconceptions, so we'd like to address a couple of these myths head-on.

Myth number 1: Duplicate content causes drops in traffic!
Webmasters often wonder if the duplicates on their site can have a negative effect on their site's traffic. As mentioned in our guidelines, unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. The second part of my presentation illustrates in greater detail how to deal with duplicate content using canonicalization.

Myth number 2: Affiliate programs cause drops in traffic!
Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it's essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn't in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.

Having reviewed a few of the most common concerns, I'd like to highlight two important sections of the presentation. The first illustrates how malicious attacks -- such as an injection of hidden text and links -- might cause your site to be removed from Google's search results. On a happier note, it also covers how you can use the Google cache and Webmaster Tools to identify this issue. On a related note, if we've found a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines such as the use of hidden text or the presence of malware on your site, you will typically find a note regarding this in your Webmaster Tools Message center.
You may also find your site's traffic decreased if your users are being redirected to another site...for example, due to a hacker-applied server- or page-level redirection triggered by referrals from search engines. A similar scenario -- but with different results -- is the case in which a hacker has instituted a redirection for crawlers only. While this will cause no immediate drop in traffic since users and their visits are not affected, it might lead to a decrease in pages indexed over time.

Site design and architecture issues
Now that we've seen how malicious changes might affect your site and its traffic, let's examine some design and architecture issues. Specifically, you want to ensure that your site is able to be both effectively crawled and indexed, which is the prerequisite to being shown in our search results. What should you consider?

In conclusion, remember that fluctuations in search results are normal but there are steps that you can take to avoid malicious attacks or design and architecture issues that might cause your site to disappear or fluctuate unpredictably in search results. Start by learning more about attacks by hackers and spammers, make sure everything is running properly at crawling and indexing level by double-checking the HTML suggestions in Webmaster Tools, and finally, test your robots.txt file in case you are accidentally blocking Googlebot. And don't forget about those "robots.txt unreachable" errors!

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Spookier than malware

Friday, October 31, 2008

hotdog

lion king

...and infinitely more fun: webmasters and their pets incognito! Happy Halloween, everyone! If you see any costumes that would pass the SafeSearch filter :), feel like sharing a gripe or telling a good story, please join the chat!

Take care, and don't forget to brush your teeth.
Yours scarily,
The Webmaster Central Team

Our glasses-wearing, no vampire-teeth vampire (Ryan), zoombie Mur, Holiday Fail (Tiffany Lane), Colbert Hipster (Dan Vanderkam), Rick Astley Cutts, Homeboy Ben D'Angelo, Me -- pinker & poofier, Investment Bank CEO Shyam Jayaraman (though you can't see the golden parachute in his backpack)

Chark as Juno, Wysz as Beah Burger (our co-worker), Adi and Matt Dougherty as yellow ninja, red ninja!

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes...

Powdered toast man, Mike Leotta

Adam Lasnik as, let me see if I get this right, a "secret service agent masquerading as a backstage tech" :)

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Reflections on the "Tricks and Treats" webmaster event

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

What featured over 750 webmasters and a large number of Googlers from around the world, hundreds of questions, and over one hundred answers over the course of nearly two hours? If you guessed "the Tricks and Treats webmaster event from this earlier this month!" well, you're either absolutely brilliant, you read the title of this post, or both!

How did it go?

It was an exhilarating, exhausting, and educational event, if we may say so ourselves, even though there were a few snafus. We're aware that the sound quality wasn't great for some folks, and we've also appreciated quite-helpful constructive criticisms in this feedback thread. Last but not least, we are bummed to admit that someone (whose name starts with 'A' and ends with 'M') uncharacteristically forgot to hit the record button (really!), so there's unfortunately no audio recording to share :-(.

But on more positive notes, we're delighted that so many of you enjoyed our presentations (embedded below), our many answers, and even some of our bad jokes (mercifully not to be repeated).

What next?

Well, for starters, all of us Webmaster Central Googlers will be spending quite some time taking in your feedback. Some of you have requested sessions exclusively covering particular (pre-announced) topics or tailored to specific experience levels, and we've also heard from many webmasters outside of the U.S. who would love online events in other languages and at more convenient times. No promises, but you can bet we're eager to please! Stay tuned on this blog (and, as a hint and hallo to our German-speaking webmasters, do make sure to follow our German webmaster blog ;-).

And finally, a big thank you!

A heartfelt thank you to my fellow Googlers, many of whom got up at the crack of dawn to get to the office early for the chat and previous day's runthrough or stayed at work late in Europe. But more importantly, major props to all of you (from New Delhi, New York, New Zealand and older places) who asked great questions and hung out with us online for up to two hours. You webmasters are the reason we love coming to work each day, and we look forward to our next chat!

* * *

The presentations...

We had presentations from John, Jonathan, Maile, and Wysz. Presentations from the first three are embedded below (Wysz didn't have a written presentation this time).

John's slides on "Frightening Webmastering Myths"

Jonathan's slides on "Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools"

Maile's slides on "Where We're Coming From"

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Edited on Wednesday, October 29 at 6:00pm to update number of participants

Webmaster chat event: Vote early and often!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

No matter where in the world you are, you can vote right now on webmaster-oriented questions by registering for our free Webmaster chat ("Tricks and Treats") which is scheduled for tomorrow at 9am PDT (5pm GMT). Even better: you can suggest your own questions that you'd like Webmaster Central Googlers to answer.

We're using the new Google Moderator tool, so posting questions and voting on your favorites is fun and easy; you'll receive an e-mail with a link to the webmaster chat questions right after you register. Click on the check mark next to questions you find particularly interesting and important. Click on the X next to questions that seem less relevant or useful. From your votes, Google Moderator will surface the best questions, helping us spend more time in the chat on issues you really care about.

Feel free to review our post from yesterday for more details on this event.

See you there!

P.S. - Speaking of voting: If you're an American citizen, we hope you're also participating in the upcoming presidential election! Our friends in Google Maps have even prepared a handy lookup tool to help you find your voting place -- check it out!

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist (and humble host of this event)

Join us for our third live online webmaster chat!

Monday, October 20, 2008

You know how some myths just won't die? Well, do we have some great news for you! A not-so-scary bunch of Gooooooooooooglers will be on hand to drive a stake through the most ghoulish webmastering myths and misconceptions in our live online "Tricks and Treats" chat this coming Wednesday.

That's right! You'll be treated to some brief presentations and then have the chance to ask lots of questions to Googlers ranging from Matt Cutts in Mountain View to John Mueller in Zurich to Kaspar Szymanski in Dublin (and many more folks as well).

Here's what you'll need

About an hour of free time
A computer with audio capabilities that is connected to the Internet and has these additional specifications
(We'll be broadcasting via the Internet tubes this time rather than over the phone lines)
A URL for the chat, which you can only get when you register for the event (don't worry -- it's fast and painless!)
Costumes: optional

What will our Tricks and Treats chat include?

INTRO: A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides
PRESO: A 15 minute presentation on "Frightening Myths and Misconceptions" by John Mueller
FAQs: A return of our popular "Three for Three," in which we'll have three different Googlers tackling three different issues we've seen come up in the Group recently... in under three minutes each!
And lots of Q&A! You'll have a chance to type questions during the entire session (actually, starting an hour prior!) using our hunky-dory new Google Moderator tool. Ask, then vote! With this tool and your insights, we expect the most interesting questions to quickly float to the top.

When and how can you join in?

Mark the date on your calendar now: Wednesday, October 22, at 9am PDT, noon EDT, and 5pm GMT
Register right now for this event. Please note that you'll need to click on the "register" link on the bottom lefthand side.
Optionally post questions via Google Moderator one hour prior to the start of the event. The link will be mailed to all registrants.
Log in 5-10 minutes prior to the start of the chat, using the link e-mailed to you by WebEx (the service hosting the event).
Interact! During the event, you'll be able to chat (by typing) with your fellow attendees, and also post questions and vote on your favorite questions via Google Moderator.

We look forward to seeing you online! In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to post a note in this thread of our friendly Webmaster Help Group.

Edited on October 21st at 12:15pm and 12:29pm PDT to add:

We've decided to open up the Google Moderator page early. Everyone who registered for this event previously and everyone registering from this moment on will receive the link in e-mail. Also, the event is scheduled for *5pm* GMT (correctly listed on the registration page and in the followup e-mails).

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

silver_medal_count++

Friday, August 22, 2008

Since both tennis and table tennis are in the Olympics, perhaps you're wondering: if there's soccer, why not "table soccer?" Of course, we know table soccer by another name; and while foosball may not be an Olympic sport, we still cheered Nathan Johns and Jan Backes—two members of our Search Quality team—as they brought home the foosball silver medal at the search engine foosball smackdown at SES San Jose.

"Smackdown" doesn't quite equate to "Olympics," but check out the intensity—you could hear a pin drop!

The gold medal (cup) went to the search engine down the road. :)

Yahoo's first place winners Daniel Wong and Jake Rosenberg.

Just to be sure they weren't ringers, I quizzed Daniel and Jake, "How can you prevent a file from being crawled?" They correctly answered, "robots.txt."

Gold cup well deserved.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Free online seminar: The Google Trifecta

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Staying competitive in the online space can be hard if you don't have the proper tools at your disposal. That's why we offer solutions like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer to help you improve your site's effectiveness and functionality.

You may already use Google Webmaster Tools to help improve your site's visibility in Google's search results, but what can you do to optimize your pages for visitors who have already made it past the search results and into your site? Using Webmaster Tools in conjunction with Analytics and Website Optimizer, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your pages' visibility in Google, where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site, and what content will most effectively get them to take the action you want.

For the first time ever, the Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer teams will join forces to hold a free online seminar. I'll be there to talk about Webmaster Tools and discuss tips for using it with our other products for site owners. So if you enjoy live webmaster-focused events like our recent JuneTune live chat, check out the details below and register!

TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
TIME: 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC)
JOIN US: Register to attend

During this online seminar, team members will:

Provide brief introductions to their products

Highlight recent product updates and releases

Discuss the benefits of using all three products together

Answer common questions submitted by attendees

Upon registration, we also invite you to submit any specific topics you'd like us to cover. If you can't make that date or time, don't worry. We know that 9 a.m. for us isn't 9 a.m. for everyone! You'll be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL.

Update: A recording of the event is now available on YouTube.

Get the audio and Q&As from our recent live chat

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürichsecond live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune."about as many places as Matt (Harding) has danced inonline in the Webmaster Help Groupquestions and answerspersonalized search at Googlecase sensitivity in web search in generalAudio transcript (MP3)send us your feedback

Making more housecalls

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Written by Maile OhyeWebmaster CentralWebmaster ToolsHelp CenterDiscussion Groupspeaker request

Site owners/webmasters/bloggers who feature original, compelling content or tools, such as their...

Neighborhood store, restaurant, dentist office, etc.
Service or product (e.g. freelance photographer or online wizard for house decorating)
Passion, hobby, opinion (latest from the San Francisco music scene, perspectives on the upcoming election)

Web developers, web designers, SEOs/SEMs who build sites for others

Hi, I'm Michael, but I go by "Wysz" in the Webmaster Help Group. When I'm not talking to webmasters or doing other search-related work, I like to tinker with my personal blog, take photos, and edit videos. Blogs, videos, podcasts, and other online media often come to my rescue when I'm searching for information online, so I'd love to talk to fellow content providers about how to make sure their sites can be understood by Google.Hi, I'm Reid. I'm originally from St. Louis, Missouri, but have fallen in love with the weather, biking trails, and culture of the Bay Area. I studied to be a historian and even wrote a Senior honors thesis on Japanese American resettlement in San Francisco after WWII, but as an avid blogger, found myself increasingly interested in the transaction of knowledge and information through the Internet. I'm particularly passionate about helping small businesses build out high quality websites and helping them understand how Google's tools can help them in the process.

Join us for an online live chat this Friday!

Monday, March 24, 2008

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

But some of you are hard to find and so we haven't had the pleasure of chatting with you. Therefore, we've decided to visit you right through your beloved monitor screen.
On Friday, March 28 at 9am PDT / noon EDT / 16:00 GMT, we'll be having our first-ever all-group live chat, where you'll have a chance to hear and see us answer some of your most pressing questions. All that's required is a phone (we'll pay for the call), a sufficiently-modern web browser, and an internet connection.
We'll be posting a "sticky note" with more details in the Random Chitchat section of the Group a day or two before this online meetup, and we're looking forward to chatting with you soon!
Talkatively yours,Adam and the English Webmaster Help Guides
EDITED ON MARCH 26 TO ADD:More information about the chat is now available on this page.

SES London Calling!

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Team.

February is that time of the year: the Search Engine Strategies conference hits London! A few of us were there to meet webmasters and search engine representatives to talk about the latest trends and issues in the search engine world.

discussionWhy should I upload a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if my site is crawled just fine? All sites can benefit from submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. You may help us to do a better job of crawling and understanding your site, especially if it has dynamic content or a complicated architecture.

Besides, you will have access to more information about your site, for example the number of pages from your Sitemaps that are indexed by Google, any errors Google found with your Sitemap, as well as warnings about potential problems. Also, you can submit specialized Sitemaps for certain types of content including Video, Mobile, News and Code.
More information about the benefits of submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools can be found here. How do you detect paid links? If I want to stay on the safe side, should I use the "nofollow" attribute on all links?our position on paid links and the use of nofollowthis thread in our Help GroupHow do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?

The instructions in our Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.

If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don't support setting a geographical target for patterns that can't be verified such as, for example, www.example.com/?region=countrycode.

I have a news site and it is not entirely crawled. Why? Other crawlers had no problem crawling us...

First off, make sure that nothing prevents us from crawling your news site - the architecture of your site or the robots.txt file. Also, we suggest you sign up for Webmaster Tools and submit your content. We specifically have the News Sitemap protocol for sites offering this type of content. If you take advantage of this feature, we can give you more information on which URLs we had trouble with and why. It really rocks!
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German Webmaster Blog turns one

Friday, March 14, 2008

Our German Webmaster Central Blog celebrates its first birthday and we'd like to raise our glasses to 57 published posts in the last year! We enjoy looking back at an exciting first year of blogging and communicating with webmasters. It's the growing webmaster community that made this blog a success. Thanks to our readers for providing feedback on our blog posts and posting in the German Webmaster Help group. Over the past year, we published numerous articles specifically targeted for the German market - topics varying from affiliate programs to code snippets. We also translated many of the applicable English posts for the German blog. If you speak German (Hallo!) come check out the German Webmaster Blog and subscribe to our feed or email alert.
Hope to see you soon,
Juliane Stiller on behalf of the German Webmaster Communication Team

Leap day hackathon for Google Gadgets, Maps, and more

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Written by Ben Lisbakken, Google Developer Programs
If you've got JavaScript skills and you'd like to implement such things as Google Gadgets or Maps on your site, bring your laptops and come hang out with us in Mountain View.

This Friday, my team (Google Developer Programs) is hosting a hackathon to get you started with our JavaScript APIs. There will be plenty of our engineers around to answer questions. We'll start with short introductions of the APIs and then break into groups for coding and camaraderie. There'll be food, and prizes too.

The featured JavaScript APIs:

Google Gears -- make your web applications work offline
Google AJAX Search/Feeds -- add Google search capabilities to your website
Google Gadgets -- create small programs that run on your iGoogle homepage
Google Maps -- embed and manipulate Google Maps on your web page
Google Calendar -- interact with Google Calendars on your website

When: Friday, February 29 - two sessions (you're welcome to attend both)

2-5:30 PM
6-10 PM

Where: The Googleplex
Building 40
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy
Mountain View, CA 94043
Room: Seville Tech Talk, 2nd floor

See our map for parking locations and where to check in. (Soon, you too, will be making maps like this! :)

Just say yes and RSVP!

And no worries if you're busy this Friday; future hackathons will feature other APIs and more languages. Check out the Developer Events Calendar for future listings. Hope to see you soon.

Feeling lucky at PubCon

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality

hit the "good times" jackpotconference notes
Site Verification Files and Meta Tags

Site Verification Best Practices

If you have multiple people working on your site with Webmaster Tools, it's a good idea to have each person verify the site with his or her own account, rather than using a shared login. That way, as people come and go, you can control the access appropriately by adding or removing verification files or meta tags for each account.

You may want to keep a list of these verification codes and which owner they are connected to, so you can easily control access later. If you lose track, you can always use the "Manage site verification" option in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to force all site owners to reverify their accounts.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectoriesoutlined many of the key issues
Underscores vs. Dashes
Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you're providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there's a good chance we'll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a "big leopard" and not a "bigle opard." While using separators is a good practice, it's likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

Keywords in URLs
We were also asked if it is useful to have relevant keywords in URLs. It's always a good idea to be descriptive across your site, with titles, ALT attributes, and yes, even URLs, as they can be useful signals for users and search engines. This can be especially true with image files, which otherwise may not have any text for a search engine to consider. Imagine you've taken a picture of your cat asleep on the sofa. Your digital camera will likely name it something like IMG_2937.jpg. Not exactly the most descriptive name. So unless your cat really looks like an IMG_2937, consider changing the filename to something more relevant, like adorable-kitten.jpg. And, if you have a post about your favorite cat names, it's much easier to guess that a URL ending in my-favorite-cat-names would be the relevant page, rather than a URL ending in postid=8652. For more information regarding issues with how Google understands your content, check out our new content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, as well as our post on the URL suggestions feature of the new Google Toolbar.
Moving to a new IP address
We got a question about changing a site's IP address, and provided a few steps you can take as a webmaster to make sure things go smoothly. Here's what you can do:

Change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS configuration to something short, like five minutes (300 seconds). This will tell web browsers to re-check the IP address for your site every five minutes.
Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.
Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.
Check your logs to see when Googlebot starts crawling your site on the new IP address. To make sure it's really Googlebot who's visiting, you can verify Googlebot by following these instructions. You can then log into Webmaster Tools and monitor any crawl errors. Once Googlebot is happily crawling on the new IP address, you should be all set as far as Google is concerned.
To make sure everyone got the message of your move, you may want to keep an eye out for visits to your old IP address before shutting it down.

Proxies
A few webmasters were concerned that proxy services are being indexed with copies of their content. While it's often possible to find duplicate copies of your content in our results if you look hard enough, the original source is most likely going to be ranked higher than a proxy copy. However, if you find this not to be the case, please drop us some URLs in the Webmaster Help Group. There are many Googlers including myself who monitor this group and escalate issues appropriately.

Webmaster Help GroupUpdateAdditional PubCon notes

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