The anatomy of a search result

When Matt Cutts, who heads up Google's webspam team, dropped by our Kirkland offices a little while ago we found ourselves with a video camera and an hour to spare. The result? We quickly put together a few videos we hope you'll find useful.

In our first video, Matt talks about the anatomy of a search result, and gives some useful tips on how you can help improve how your site appears in our results pages. (Read more...)

A spider's view of Web 2.0

Many webmasters have discovered the advantages of using Ajax to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. But, like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully. As promised in our post answering questions about Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology, we've compiled some tips for creating Ajax-enhanced websites that are also understood by search engines.

How will Google see my site?

One of the main issues with Ajax sites is that while Googlebot is great at following and understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have a difficult time finding its way around sites which use JavaScript for navigation. While we are working to better understand JavaScript, your best bet for creating a site that's crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.

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Go Daddy and Google offer easy access to Webmaster Tools

Welcome Go Daddy webmasters to the Google Webmaster Tools family! Today, we're announcing that Go Daddy, the world's largest hostname provider in the web hosting space, is working with us as a pilot partner so that their customers can more easily access Google Webmaster Tools. Go Daddy is a great partner, and we hope to educate more webmasters on how to make their site more search engine-friendly.

Go Daddy users will now see our link right in their hosting control center, and can launch Google Webmaster Tools directly from their hosting account. And Go Daddy makes the Google Webmaster Tools account creation process faster by adding the site, verifying the site, and submitting Sitemaps on behalf of hosting customers. Our tools show users how Google views their site, give useful stats like queries and links, diagnose problems, and share information with us in order to improve their site's visibility in search results. (Read more...)

Bringing the conference to you

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. (Read more...)

A dozen ways to discuss "webmaster help"

Our goal for the Webmaster Help Group is to be an authoritative source for accurate, friendly information and discussion. There are many terrific members of the Webmaster Groups community, and we're glad to know them all. In our English discussion group, a big Webmaster Central (WMC) thank-you to our comrades and fellow webmasters for their helpful knowledge and insight: webado, Phil Payne, JLH, cass-hacks, cristina, Sebastian, and dockarl, just to name a few.

Webado and cass-hacks both speak several languages -- thankfully, some of us do as well. We now have Googlers posting to the Google Webmaster Help Group in 12 languages! Here's a brief introduction of the Googlers, most of whom work together at our European headquarters in Dublin, in the Non-English groups (several have been posting for months, but we'd still like to give them an intro). :)



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Sitemap cross-submissions

Since the launch of Sitemaps, webmasters have been asking if they could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host. A fair question -- and now you can!

Why would someone want to do this? Let's say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, e.g. sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml. Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would get an error because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from www.example.com. (Read more...)

Blast from the past

As you know, the queries used to find your website in search results can change over time. Your website content changes, as do the needs of all the busy searchers out there. Whether the queries associated with your site change subtly or dramatically, it's pretty useful to see how they transform over time.

Recognizing this, Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools now presents historical data and other enhancements. Let's take a closer look: (Read more...)

Introducing Code Search Sitemaps

The Sitemaps team is continuing its trend of extending the Sitemap Protocol for specific products and content types. Our latest work with the Google Code Search team now enables you to create Sitemaps that contain information about public source code you host and would like to include in Code Search. (Read more...)

Data freshness

Common feedback we hear from webmasters is that you want us to improve the freshness of the data in Webmaster Tools. Understood. :) We've increased the update frequency for your verified sites' data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site. If your content doesn't change very often, or if you're not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools. (Read more...)

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.



Why does Google care about meta descriptions?

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Quick security checklist for webmasters

In recent months, there's been a noticeable increase in the number of compromised websites around the web. One explanation is that people are resorting to hacking sites in order to distribute malware or attempt to spam search results. Regardless of the reason, it's a great time for all of us to review helpful webmaster security tips.

Obligatory disclaimer: While we've collected tips and pointers below, and we encourage webmasters to "please try the following at home," this is by no means an exhaustive list for your website's security. We hope it's useful, but we recommend that you conduct more thorough research as well. (Read more...)

Subscriber stats and more

We're unrolling some exciting new features in Webmaster Tools.

First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information. (Read more...)

Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you

How can URL parameters, like session IDs or tracking IDs, cause duplicate content?
When user and/or tracking information is stored through URL parameters, duplicate content can arise because the same page is accessible through numerous URLs. It's what Adam Lasnik referred to in "Deftly Dealing with Duplicate Content" as "store items shown (and -- worse yet -- linked) via multiple distinct URLs." In the example below, URL parameters create three URLs which access the same product page. (Read more...)

Webmaster Central gets a new look

We launched Webmaster Central back in August 2006, with a goal of creating a place for you to learn more about Google's crawling and indexing of websites, and to offer tools for submitting sitemaps and other content. Given all of your requests and recommendations, we've also been busy working behind the scenes to roll out exciting new features for Webmaster Tools, like internal/external links data and the Message Center, over the past year. (Read more...)

Update on penalty notifications

First, a brief recap: In late 2005, we started emailing webmasters to let them know that their site is violating our Webmaster Guidelines and that we have temporarily removed some of their pages from our index. A few months ago we put these emails on hold due to a number of spoofed messages being sent from outside Google, primarily to German webmasters. Then, in mid-July, we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners. (Read more...)

Register non-English domain names with Webmaster Tools

IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.

Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this: (Read more...)

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

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. (Read more...)

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

We've improved Webmaster Central's robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren't aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap's URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing. (Read more...)

Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.

If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results: (Read more...)

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

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. (Read more...)