Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Sharing advice from our site clinic
Monday, March 15, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
Members of the Google Search Quality Team have participated in site clinic panels on a number of occasions. We receive a lot of positive feedback from these events and we've been thinking of ways to expand our efforts to reach even more webmasters. We decided to organize a small, free of charge pilot site clinic at Google in Dublin, and opened the invitation to webmasters from the neighborhood. The response we received was overwhelming and exceeded our expectations.
Meet the Googlers who hosted the site clinic:
Anu Ilomäki
, Alfredo Pulvirenti,
Adel Saoud
,
Fili Wiese
,
Kaspar Szymanski
and
Uli Lutz
.
It was fantastic to see the large turnout and we would like to share the
slides
presented as well as the takeaways.
These are some questions we came across, along with the advice shared:
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.
We would like to thank all participants for their time and effort. It was a pleasure to help you and we hope that it was beneficial for you, too. For any remaining questions, please don't hesitate to join the
community on our GWHF
.
Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin
Working with multi-regional websites
Friday, March 12, 2010
Webmaster Level: Intermediate
Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.
If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it
multilingual
when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.
Preparing for global websites
Expanding a website to cover multiple regions and/or languages can be challenging. By creating multiple versions of your website, any issues with the base version will be multiplied; make sure that you have everything working properly before you start. Given that this generally means you'll suddenly be working with a multiplied number of URLs, don't forget that you'll need appropriate infrastructure to support the website.
Planning multi-regional websites
When planning sites for multiple regions (usually countries), don't forget to research legal or administrative requirements that might come into play first. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.
All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:
ccTLDs
(country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
gTLDs
(generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the
Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting
.
Geotargeting factors
Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):
Use of a ccTLD
is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs
(this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our
blog post
and in the
Help Center
. With
region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results
, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
Server location
(through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
Other signals
can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).
Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.
URL structures
The first three elements used for geotargeting are strongly tied to the server and to the URLs used. It's difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting. Here are some of the possible URL structures with pros and cons with regards to geotargeting:
ccTLDs
eg: example.de, example.fr
Subdomains with gTLDs
eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc.
Subdirectories with gTLDs
eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc.
URL parameters
eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc.
pros (+)
- clear geotargeting
- server location is irrelevant
- easy separation of sites
- legal requirements (sometimes)
pros (+)
- easy to set up
- can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
- allows different server locations
- easy separation of sites
pros (+)
- easy to set up
- can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting
- low maintenance (same host)
pros (+)
(not recommended)
cons (-)
- expensive (+ availability)
- more infrastructure
- ccTLD requirements (sometimes)
cons (-)
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?)
cons (-)
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
- single server location
- separation of sites harder
cons (-)
- segmentation based on the URL is difficult
- users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
- geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible
As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.
Dealing with duplicate content on global websites
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a
robots.txt file
or by using a
"noindex" robots meta tag
. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to
redirect
(or use the
"rel=canonical" link element
) appropriately.
Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and
join the discussion
. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites.
Bis bald
!
Written by
John Mueller
, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland
Microdata support for Rich Snippets
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of
microdata
, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.
Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in
rich snippets
in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify
reviews
,
people profiles
, or
events
information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.
Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of “L’Amourita Pizza”:
Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author and date of the review, and the rating:
Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the
rich snippets testing tool
to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.
As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support -- including which item types and item properties are understood by Google -- is specified in our rich snippets documentation as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to ensure a great user experience.
To get started, here are some helpful links:
Rich snippets documentation
Overview of microdata
Official microdata specification
Rich snippets testing tool
Written by Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, Pravir Gupta, Othar Hansson
Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment - added to Webmaster Tools Labs!
Monday, March 08, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
Last October, we launched
Webmaster Tools Labs
and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.
Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:
Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry
Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)
After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)
Sidewiki
allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a
Chrome extension
. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a
page owner entry
, that appears above all entries written by users.
After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.
We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know
what you think
!
Written by
Sagar Kamdar
, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools
Sharing the verification love
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
Everything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to
Webmaster Tools Site Verification
to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.
In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to go through the meta tag or HTML file verification process. That works fine for some situations, but for others it can be challenging. For example, what if you have twenty people who need to be verified owners of your site? Adding twenty meta tags or HTML files could be pretty time consuming. Our new verification delegation feature makes adding new verified owners a snap.
Once you're a verified owner of a website, you can view the Verification Details page (linked from
Webmaster Tools
or the
Verification home page
). That page will show you information about the site as well as a list of any other verified owners. At the bottom of the list of owners, you'll now see a button labeled "Add a user...". Click that, enter the user's email address, and that person will instantly become a verified owner for the site! You can remove that ownership at any time by clicking the "Unverify" link next to the person's email address on the Details page.
There are a few important things to keep in mind as you use this feature. First, each site must always have at least one owner who has verified directly (via meta tag or HTML file). If all of the directly verified owners become unverified, the delegated owners may also become unverified. Second, you can only delegate ownership to people with
Google Accounts
. Finally, remember that anyone you delegate ownership to will have exactly the same access you have. They can delegate to more people, submit URL Removal requests and manage Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools, etc. Only delegate ownership to people you trust!
We hope this makes things a little easier for those of you who need more than one person to be a verified owner of your site. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.
Sean Harding, Software Engineer
Google's SEO Report Card
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.
Google's SEO Report Card
is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.
The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.
We hope you find our
SEO Report Card
useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the
Webmaster Central Help Forum
. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free
SEO Beginner's Guide
.
Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse
Monday, March 01, 2010
Webmaster Level: All
As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.
You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about
new software versions
via
Webmaster Tools
to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the
Message Center
.
Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:
Spammy or
abused user-generated content
Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of
comment spam
Suspected
hacking
These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.
A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:
We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.
Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and
retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date
. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the
email forwarding feature
to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our
Webmaster Help Forum
or leave your comments below.
Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team
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