Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Using RSS/Atom feeds to discover new URLs
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Webmaster Level: Intermediate
Google uses numerous sources to find new webpages, from links we find on the web to
submitted URLs
. We aim to discover new pages quickly so that users can find new content in Google search results soon after they go live. We recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for the discovery of new webpages.
RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as
PubSubHubbub
to identify updated items.
In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it's important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your
robots.txt
. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the
robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools
.
Written by Raymond Lo, Guhan Viswanathan, and Dave Weissman, Crawl and Indexing Team
Help us make the web better: An update on Rich Snippets
Monday, October 26, 2009
Webmaster Level: All
In May this year we
announced
Rich Snippets which makes it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google's search results.
We're convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we've worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have
review
or
people/social networking
content on your site, it's easier than ever to mark up your content using microformats or RDFa so that Google can better understand it to generate useful Rich Snippets. Here are a few helpful improvements on our end to enable you to mark up your content:
Testing tool
. See what Google is able to extract, and preview how microformats or RDFa marked-up pages would look on Google search results. Test your URLs on the
Rich Snippets Testing Tool
.
Google Custom Search users can also use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test markup usable in their
Custom Search engine
.
Better documentation.
We've extended our documentation to include a new section containing
Tips & Tricks
and
Frequently Asked Questions
. Here we have responded to common points of confusion and provided instructions on how to maximize the chances of getting Rich Snippets for your site.
Extended RDFa support.
In addition to the
Person
RDFa format, we have added support for the corresponding fields from the
FOAF
and
vCard
vocabularies for all those of you who asked for it.
Videos.
If you have videos on your page, you can now mark up your content to
help Google find those videos
.
As before, marking up your content does not guarantee that Rich Snippets will be shown for your site. We will continue to expand this feature gradually to ensure a great user experience whenever Rich Snippets are shown in search results.
Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Othar Hansson
Verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools
Thursday, October 22, 2009
This post is outdated. For the latest information on verifying your Blogger blog, please see our
Webmaster Help Center article for Blogger
.
Webmaster Level: All
You may have seen our recent announcement of changes to the verification system in Webmaster Tools. One side effect of this change is that blogs hosted on Blogger (that haven't yet been verified) will have to use the meta tag verification method rather than the "one-click" integration from the Blogger dashboard. The "Webmaster Tools" auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard is no longer working and will soon be removed. We're working to reinstate an automated verification approach for Blogger hosted blogs in the future, but for the time being we wanted you to be aware of the steps required to verify your Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.
Step-By-Step Instructions:
In Webmaster Tools
1. Click the "Add a site" button on the Webmaster Tools Home page
2. Enter your blog's URL (for example, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) and click the "Continue" button to go to the Manage verification page
3. Select the "Meta tag" verification method and copy the meta tag provided
In Blogger
4. Go to your blog and sign in
5. From the Blogger dashboard click the "Layout" link for the blog you're verifying
6. Click the "Edit HTML" link under the "Layout" tab which will allow you to edit the HTML for your blog's template
7. Paste the meta tag (copied in step 3) immediately after the <head> element within the template HTML and click the "SAVE TEMPLATE" button
In Webmaster Tools
8. On the Manage Verification page, confirm that "Meta tag" is selected as the verification method and click the "Verify" button
Your blog should now be verified. You're ready to start using Webmaster Tools!
Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst
One million YouTube views!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Earlier this year,
we launched
our very own
Webmaster Central channel
on YouTube. Just today, we saw our total video views exceed one million! On the road to this milestone, we uploaded 154 videos, for a total of nearly 11 hours of webmaster-focused media. These videos have brought you
conference presentations
,
updates on tools for webmasters
,
general tips
, and of course answers to your
"Grab bag" questions
for Matt Cutts.
To celebrate our one million views, we're sharing a fun video with you in which Matt Cutts shows us what happened when he lost a bet with his team:
We're also pleased to announce that we've added
captions
to all of our videos and plan to do so for our future videos as well. Thank you to everyone who has watched, shared, and commented on our videos. We look forward to the next million views!
Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team
Dealing with low-quality backlinks
Friday, October 16, 2009
Webmaster level: Intermediate/Advanced
Webmasters who check their incoming links in Webmaster Tools often ask us what they can do when they see low-quality links. Understandably, many site owners are trying to build a good reputation for their sites, and some believe that having poor-quality incoming links can be perceived as "being part of a bad neighbourhood," which over time might harm their site's ranking.
If your site receives links that look similarly dodgy, don't be alarmed... read on!
While it's true that linking is a significant factor in Google's ranking algorithms, it's
just one of many
. I know we say it a lot, but having something that people want to look at or use—unique, engaging content, or useful tools and services—is also a
huge
factor. Other factors can include how a site is structured, whether the words of a user's query appear in the title, how close the words are on the page, and so on. The point is, if you happen to see some low quality sites linking to you, it's important to keep in mind that linking is just one aspect among many of how Google judges your site. If you have a well-structured and regularly maintained site with original, high-quality content, those are the sorts of things that users will see and appreciate.
That having said, in an ideal world you could have your cake and eat it too (or rather, you could have a high-quality site
and
high-quality backlinks). You may also be concerned about users' perception of your site if they come across it via a batch of spammy links. If the number of poor-quality links is manageable, and/or if it looks easy to opt-out or get those links removed from the site that's linking to you, it may be worth it to try to
contact the site(s)
and ask them to remove their links. Remember that this isn't something that Google can do for you; we index content that we find online, but we don't control that content or who's linking to you.
If you run into some uncooperative site owners, however, don't fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don't have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other
factors that influence indexing and ranking
. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a
website testing tool
to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site's overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.
Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google knows about these links and is valuing them appropriately, feel free to bring them to our attention using either our
spam report
or our
paid links report
.
Posted by
Kaspar Szymanski
, Search Quality Strategist, Dublin &
Susan Moskwa
, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Kirkland
Let's make the mobile web faster
Friday, October 16, 2009
(Cross-posted on the
Google Code Blog
)
This week, we've been
celebrating all things mobile
across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to
make the web faster
. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our
Make the mobile web faster article
.
Posted by Jeremy Weinstein, Google Webmaster
Managing your reputation through search results
Thursday, October 15, 2009
(Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
)
A few years ago I couldn't wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah; but more importantly, so that I could take my husband's name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.
After a few years of working here, though, I've learned that you don't have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results. Below are some tips for "reputation management": influencing how you're perceived online, and what information is available relating to you.
Think twice
The first step in reputation management is preemptive:
Think twice before putting your personal information online
. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you're publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don't normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don't assume that just because your mom doesn't read your blog, she'll never see that post about the new tattoo you're hiding from her.
Tackle it at the source
If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to
try to remove it from the site where it's appearing
. Rather than immediately contacting Google, it's important to first remove it from the site where it's being published. Google doesn't own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what's already out there on the web. Whether or not the content appears in Google's search results, people are still going to be able to access it — on the original site, through other search engines, through social networking sites, etc. — if you don't remove it from the original site. You need to tackle this at the source.
If the content in question is on a site you own, easy — just remove it. It will naturally drop out of search results after we recrawl the page and discover the change.
It's also often easy to remove content from sites you don't own if you put it there, such as photos you've uploaded, or content on your profile page.
If you can't remove something yourself, you can
contact the site's webmaster
and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.
After you or the site's webmaster has removed or edited the page, you can expedite the removal of that content from Google using
our
URL removal tool
.
Proactively publish information
Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site's webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by
proactively publishing useful, positive information
about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you
want
people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:
Create
a Google profile
. When people search for your name, Google can display
a link to your Google profile in our search results
and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.
If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we've gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)
Hope these tips have been helpful! Feel free to stop by our Web Search Forum and
share your own advice or stories
about how you manage your reputation online.
Posted by
Susan Moskwa
, Webmaster Trends Analyst
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