Sharing advice from our site clinic

Monday, March 15, 2010 at 8:55 AM

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:

1. 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.


2. 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.


3. 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.


4. 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.


5. 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.


6. 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.


7. 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

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

Tuesday, November 03, 2009 at 2:25 PM

Webmaster Level: All

Are the holidays an important season for your website or online business? We think so! And to help make sure you're in good shape, we wanted to invite you to our Holiday Webmaster Webinar.

This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!

Topic: Holiday Webmaster Webinar
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Meeting Number: 574 659 815
Meeting Password: webmaster

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.

-------------------------------------------------------
To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)
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1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID;=0&PW;=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click "Join Now".

-------------------------------------------------------
To join the teleconference only
-------------------------------------------------------
Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf

-------------------------------------------------------
For assistance
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".

Written by Lauren Dolmyer, Evan Tang, and Derrick Djang

Traffic drops and site architecture issues

Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 3:39 AM

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?

• First off, check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and is not returning an error.
• Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new "Change of address" feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.
• Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.
• Finally, make good use of the rel="canonical" attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain. The example in the presentation shows how using this attribute helps Google understand that a duplicate can be clustered with the canonical and that the original, or canonical, page should be indexed.

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 at 7:47 PM

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 at 5:20 PM

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 at 12:17 PM

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 at 9:10 AM

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?

1. Mark the date on your calendar now:  Wednesday, October 22, at 9am PDT, noon EDT, and 5pm GMT
   
2. Register right now for this event.  Please note that you'll need to click on the "register" link on the bottom lefthand side.
   
3. Optionally post questions via Google Moderator one hour prior to the start of the event.  The link will be mailed to all registrants.
4. 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).
   
5. 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 at 4:23 PM

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 at 6:15 PM

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

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Last Thursday, many of you just couldn't get enough of us and joined our second live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune." It was an action-packed session with live presentations, questions and answers and chatting about cats and other important topics. Over the course of an hour and a half, we made four presentations, received over 600 questions and passed around close to 500 chat messages. It was great to see so many Googlers around the world involved: Adam, Bergy, Evan, Jessica, Maile, Matt (Cutts), Matt (Dougherty), Reid and Wysz in Mountain View; Jonathan and Susan in Kirkland; Alvar, Mariya, Pedro and Uli in Dublin; and me in Zürich. We had users from about as many places as Matt (Harding) has danced in: Alaska, Argentina, Arizona, Australia, Brazil, California, Canada, Chile, Colorado, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Florida, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, New Zealand, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vietnam and a bunch from Seattle, Washington - thank you all for joining us!

To help make the most out of this session, we'd like to make the transcripts and presentations available to everyone. We're also working on filling in the blanks and have started to answer many of the unanswered questions online in the Webmaster Help Group. You'll find the full (and just slightly cleaned up) questions and answers there as well.

I presented an overview of factors involved in personalized search at Google:



Maile gave a nice presentation of case sensitivity in web search in general:



The audio part of these presentations is in the audio transcript below. It also includes Jonathan's coverage of reasons why ranking may change, Wysz's presentation of ways to get URLs removed from our index, as well as everything else that happened on the phone! Enjoy :)

Audio transcript (MP3)

We hope to continue to improve on making these events useful to you, so don't forget to send us your feedback. We'll be back!

Making more housecalls

Saturday, May 24, 2008 at 11:23 AM

Written by Maile Ohye

All of us with Webmaster Central share one passion: a serious love for improving the Internet.

If you're organizing an event with an audience that would benefit from our discussing building search-engine friendly sites and maximizing the resources of Webmaster Central -- such as our Webmaster Tools, Help Center and Discussion Group -- please submit a speaker request. We'll work with our Corporate Communications team to see if we can add your event to our schedule.

With the intention of helping people make great content accessible on the web, we attended over 15 events this year -- including search conferences, business schools and marketing expos. We feel that we can be most helpful to:

• 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

Submitting a speaking request does not guarantee our attendance, but we'll definitely review each submission with our Communications team. Also, if we can't attend your event this time around, but we feel we could make a positive impact in the future, we'll keep the event on our radar.

Now I'd love to introduce two of our newest speakers who have been active in the Webmaster Help Group for some time: Michael Wyszomierski and Reid Yokoyama.

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 at 6:50 PM

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Many of us Webmaster Help Group guides have happily gotten to meet Group members at various functions around the world. Over sandwiches in San Jose. Salads in Stockholm. Sweets in Sydney. And it's been super!

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 at 8:05 AM

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.

It was a three-day marathon full of interesting talks - and of course, we heard a lot of good questions in between the sessions! If you didn't get a chance to talk with us, fear not: we've pulled together some of the best questions we encountered. You can find a few of them below, and an additional set in our Webmaster Help Group. Please join the discussion!

Why 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?

We blogged about our position on paid links and the use of nofollow a few months ago. You may also find it interesting to read this thread in our Help Group about appropriate uses of the nofollow attribute.

How 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!

A quick note to conclude: the lively, international environment of SES is always incredible. I have had a lot of interesting conversations in English, as well as in Italian, French and Spanish. Fellow Googlers chatted with webmasters in English, Danish, Dutch, German and Hungarian. That's amazing - and a great opportunity to get to know each other better, in the language you speak! So next time you wonder how Google Universal Search works in English or you're concerned about Google News Search in German, don't hesitate; grab us for a chat or write to us!

German Webmaster Blog turns one

Friday, March 14, 2008 at 8:32 AM

Written by Juliane Stiller, Search Quality

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 at 8:37 AM

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 at 11:15 AM

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality

Last month, several of us with Webmaster Central hit the "good times" jackpot at PubCon Vegas 2007. We realize not all of you could join us, so instead of returning home with fuzzy dice for everyone, we've got souvenir conference notes.

Listening to the Q&A, I was pleased to hear the major search engines agreeing on best practices for many webmaster issues. In fact, the presentations in the duplicate content session were mostly, well, duplicate. When I wasn't sitting in on one of the many valuable sessions, I was chatting with webmasters either at the Google booth, or at Google's "Meet the Engineers" event. It was exciting to hear from so many different webmasters, and to help them with Google-related issues. Here are a few things that were on the minds of webmasters, along with our responses:

Site Verification Files and Meta Tags
Several webmasters asked, "Is it necessary to keep the verification meta tag or HTML file in place to remain a verified owner in Webmaster Tools?" The answer is yes, you should keep your verification file or meta tag live to maintain your status as a verified owner. These verification codes are used to control who has access to the owner-specific tools for your site in Webmaster Tools. To ensure that only current owners of a site are verified, we periodically re-check to see if the verification code is in place, and if it is not, you will get unverified for that site. While we're on the topic:

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. Subdirectories
What's the difference between using subdomains and subdirectories? When it comes to Google, there aren't major differences between the two, so when you're making that decision, do what works for you and your visitors. Following PubCon, our very own Matt Cutts outlined many of the key issues in a post on his personal blog. In addition to those considerations, if you use Webmaster Tools (which we hope you do!), keep in mind that you'll automatically be verified for deeper subdirectories of any sites you've verified, but subdomains need to be verified separately.

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:

1. 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.
2. Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.
3. Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.
4. 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.
   
5. 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.

It was great talking with webmasters at the conference -- we hope those of you unable to join us found this post useful. If you want to continue to talk shop with me, other Googlers, and your fellow webmasters, join the follow-up conversation in the Webmaster Help Group.

Update: Additional PubCon notes from Jonathan Simon are available in our discussion group.

Bringing the conference to you

Monday, November 19, 2007 at 5:14 PM

Written by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We're fortunate to meet many of you at conferences, where we can chat about web search and Webmaster Tools. We receive a lot of good feedback at these events: insight into the questions you're asking and issues you're facing. However, as several of our Webmaster Help Group friends have pointed out, not everyone can afford the time or expense of a conference; and many of you live in regions where webmaster-related conferences are rare.

So, we're bringing the conference to you.

We've posted notes in our Help Group from conferences we recently attended:

• John Müller covers SMX Stockholm
• I recap the AMA's Search Engine Marketing conference

Next month, Jonathan and Wysz will post their notes from PubCon, while Bergy and I will cover SES Chicago.

If you can make it to one of these, we'd love to meet you face to face, but if you can't, we hope you find our jottings useful.

Happy Halloween to our spooktacular webmasters!

Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 1:40 PM

Written by Maile Ohye

With apologizes to Vic Mizzy, we've written short verse to the tune of the "Addams Family" theme (please use your imagination):

We may be hobbyists or just geeky,
Building websites and acting cheeky,
Javascript redirects we won't make sneaky,
Our webmaster fam-i-ly!

Happy Halloween everyone! Feel free to join the discussion and share your Halloween stories and costumes.


Magnum P.I., Punk Rocker, Rubik's Cube, Mr. T., and Rainbow Brite
a.k.a. Several members of our Webmaster Tools team: Dennis Geels, Jonathan Simon, Sean Harding, Nish Thakkar, and Amanda Camp


Panda and Lolcat
Or just Evan Tang and Matt Cutts?


7 Indexing Engineers and 1 Burrito


Cheese Wysz, Internet Repairman, Community Chest, Internet Pirate (don't tell the RIAA)
Helpful members of the Webmaster Help Group: Wysz, MattD, Nathan Johns (nathanj) , and Bergy


Count++
Webspam Engineer Shashi Thakur (in the same outfit he wore to Searchnomics)


Hawaiian Surfer Dude and Firefox
Members of Webmaster Central's communications team: Reid Yokoyama and Mariya Moeva


Napolean Dynamite and Raiderfan
Shyam Jayaraman (speaking at SES Chicago, hopefully doing the dance) and me

Join us at cool SES San Jose - it'll be hot!

Friday, August 17, 2007 at 3:53 PM

Written by Jonathan Simon

As summer inches towards fall and in many places the temperature is still rising, you're probably thinking the best place to be right now is on the beach, by a pool or inside somewhere that's air-conditioned. These are all good choices, but next week there's somewhere else to be that's both hot and cool: the Search Engines Strategies conference in San Jose. In addition to the many tantalizing conference sessions covering diverse topics related to search, there will be refreshments, food, and of course, air-conditioning.

Additionally, on Tuesday evening at our Mountain View ‘plex we're hosting the “Google Dance” -- where conference attendees can eat, drink, play, dance, and talk about search. During the Google Dance be sure to attend the “Meet the Engineers” event where you’ll be able to meet and have a conversation with 25 or more engineers including Webmaster Central’s own Amanda Camp. Also, if you get a spare minute from merry-making, head over to the Webmaster Tools booth, where you’ll find Maile Ohye offering lots of good advice.

If you’re a night owl, you’ll probably also be interested in the unofficial late-night SES after-parties that you only know about if you talk to the right person. To stem the potential barrage of “where’s the party” questions, I'd like to make it clear that I unfortunately am not the right person. But if you happen to be someone who’s organizing a late night party, please consider inviting me. ;)

"Enough about the parties -- what about the conference?," you ask. As you would expect, Google will be well-represented at the conference. Here is a sampling of the Search-related sessions at which Googlers will be speaking:

Universal & Blended Search
Monday, August 20
11:00am-12:30pm
David Baile

Personalization, User Data & Search
Monday, August 20
2:00 - 3:30pm
Sep Kamvar

Searcher Behavior Research Update
Monday, August 20
4:00 - 5:30pm
Oliver Deighton

Are Paid Links Evil?
Tuesday, August 21
4:45 - 6:00pm
Matt Cutts

Keynote Conversation
Wednesday, August 22
9:00 - 9:45am
Marissa Mayer

Search APIs
Wednesday, August 22
10:30am - 12:00pm
Jon Diorio

SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
Wednesday, August 22
10:30am - 12:00pm
Rick Klau

Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Wednesday, August 22
1:30 - 2:45pm
Greg Grothaus

CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
Wednesday, August 22
3:15 - 4:30pm
Amanda Camp

Search Engine Q&A On Links
Wednesday, August 22
4:45 - 6:00pm
Shashi Thakur

Meet the Crawlers
Thursday, August 23
10:45am - 12:00pm
Evan Roseman

We will also have a large presence in the conference expo hall where members of the Webmaster Central Team like Susan Moskwa and I will be present at the Webmaster Tools booth to answer questions, listen to your thoughts and generally be there to chat about all things webmaster related. Bergy and Wysz, two more of us who tackle tough questions in the Webmaster Help Groups, will be offering assistance at the Google booth (live and in person, not via discussion thread).

If you're reading this and thinking, "I should go and grab the last frozen juice bar in the freezer," I suggest that you save that frozen juice bar for when you return from the conference and find that your brain's overheating from employing all the strategies you've learned and networking with all the people you've met.

Joking aside, we are psyched about the conference and hope to see you there. Save a cold beverage for me!

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

Thursday, August 02, 2007 at 10:46 AM

Written by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Search Quality Team

Held on June 27th, Searchnomics 2007 gave us (Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur) a chance to meet webmasters and answer some of their questions. As we're both engineers focused on improving search quality, the feedback was extremely valuable. Here's our take on the conference and a recap of some of what we talked about there.

Shashi: While I've worked at Google for over a year, this was my first time speaking at a conference. I spoke on the "Search Engine Friendly Design" panel. The exchanges were hugely valuable, helping me grasp some of the concerns of webmasters. Greg and I thought it would be valuable to share our responses to a few questions:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, ".co.uk " domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

I have many different sites. Can I cross-link between them?

Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it.

Greg: Like Shashi, this was also my first opportunity to speak at a conference as a Googler. It was refreshing to hear feedback from the people who use the software we work every day to perfect. The session also underscored the argument that we're just at the beginning of search and have a long way to go. I spoke on the subject of Web 2.0 technologies. It was clear that many people are intimidated by the challenges of building a Web 2.0 site with respect to search engines. We understand these concerns. You should expect see more feedback from us on this subject, both at conferences and through our blog.

Any special guidance for DHTML/AJAX/Flash documents?

It's important to make sure that content and navigation can be rendered/negotiated using only HTML. So long as the content and navigation are the same for search crawlers and end users, you're more than welcome to use advanced technologies such as Flash and/or Javascript to improve the user experience using a richer presentation. In "Best uses of Flash," we wrote in more detail about this, and are working on a post about AJAX technology.