Grow your audience with Google+
Webmaster Level: All At Google, we help grow your audience by connecting you with new users. We introduced the +1 button so your site would stand out on search and your users could easily share your content on Google+. But, sometimes you want to join the conversation and post content directly to where people are sharing. Today we’re introducing Google+ for Business, a collection of tools...
Read MoreGET, POST, and safely surfacing more of the web
Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced As the web evolves, Google’s crawling and indexing capabilities also need to progress. We improved our indexing of Flash, built a more robust infrastructure called Caffeine, and we even started crawling forms where it makes sense. Now, especially with the growing popularity of JavaScript and, with it, AJAX, we’re finding more web pages requiring...
Read MoreRaising awareness of cross-domain URL selections
Webmaster level: Advanced A piece of content can often be reached via several URLs, not all of which may be on the same domain. A common example we’ve talked about over the years is having the same content available on more than one URL, an issue known as duplicate content. When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for...
Read MoreAccessing search query data for your sites
Webmaster level: All SSL encryption on the web has been growing by leaps and bounds. As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com. This change will be rolling out over the next few weeks. What is the impact of this change for webmasters?...
Read MoreCreate and manage Custom Search Engines from within Webmaster Tools
Webmaster level: All Custom Search Engines (CSEs) enable you to create Google-powered customized search experiences for your sites. You can search over one or more sites, customize the look and feel to match your site, and even make money with AdSense for Search. Now it’s even easier to get started directly from Webmaster Tools. If you’ve never created a CSE, just click on the “Custom...
Read MoreWebmaster forums’ Top Contributors rock
Webmaster level: All The TC Summit was a blast! As we wrote in our announcement post, we recently invited more than 250 Top Contributors from all over the world to California to thank them for being so awesome and to give them the opportunity to meet some of our forum guides, engineers and product managers in person. Our colleagues Adrianne and Brenna already published a recap post on the...
Read MoreWebmaster Tools Search Queries data is now available in Google Analytics
Webmaster level: All Earlier this year we announced a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search queries data from Webmaster Tools. Thanks to valuable feedback from our pilot users, we’ve made several improvements and are pleased to announce that the following reports are now publicly available in the Traffic Sources section of Google...
Read MoreWork smarter, not harder, with site health
Webmaster level: All We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve...
Read MorePagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”
Webmaster level: Intermediate to Advanced Much like rel=”canonical” acts a strong hint for duplicate content, you can now use the HTML link elements rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series. Throughout the web, a paginated series of content may take many shapes—it can be an article divided into several component pages, or...
Read MoreView-all in search results
Webmaster level: Intermediate to Advanced User testing has taught us that searchers much prefer the view-all, single-page version of content over a component page containing only a portion of the same information with arbitrary page breaks (which cause the user to click “next” and load another URL). Searchers often prefer the view-all vs. paginated content with arbitrary page breaks and...
Read MoreReconsideration requests get more transparent
Webmaster level: All If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had...
Read MoreIntroducing: Application Rich Snippets
Webmaster level: All Rich snippets help users determine more quickly if a particular web page has the information they’re interested in. We’ve previously introduced rich snippets for shopping, recipes, reviews, video, and events, and most recently music. Before you install a software application, users might want to check out what others think about it, and how much it costs. We...
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Webmaster level: Intermediate So you’re going global, and you need your website to follow. Should be a simple case of getting the text translated and you’re good to go, right? Probably not. The Google Webmaster Team frequently builds sites that are localized into over 40 languages, so here are some things that we take into account when launching our pages in both other languages and...
Read MoreRecognizing Top Contributors in Google’s Help Forums
The communities around Google products and services have been growing tremendously over the last couple of years. It is inspiring and motivating for us to see how many users like you contribute to Google Forums. For some time, we´ve been thinking of ways to thank our Top Contributors — our most the passionate, helpful, friendly, and active users. These TCs have demonstrated incredible...
Read MorePDFs in Google search results
Webmaster level: All Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. During this ambitious quest, we sometimes encounter non-HTML files such as PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Our algorithms don’t let different filetypes slow them down; we work hard to extract the relevant content and to index it appropriately for our search results. ...
Read MoreReorganizing internal vs. external backlinks
Webmaster level: All Today we’re making a change to the way we categorize link data in Webmaster Tools. As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site. Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns...
Read MoreGoogle News now crawling with Googlebot
Webmaster Level: intermediate (Cross-posted on the Google News Blog) Google News recently updated our infrastructure to crawl with Google’s primary user-agent, Googlebot. What does this mean? Very little to most publishers. Any news organizations that wish to opt out of Google News can continue to do so: Google News will still respect the robots.txt entry for Googlebot-News, our former...
Read MoreMaking the most of improvements to the +1 button
Webmaster level: All For the past few months, you might have used +1 buttons to help visitors recommend your content on Google Search and on their Google Profiles. We’ve just announced a few changes that make +1 even more useful. First, the +1 button now lets visitors share links to your pages on Google+. If someone wants to start a conversation about your content, it’s easy for them to do...
Read MoreHelp us improve Google Search
Webmaster level: Advanced Yes, we’re looking for help improving Google search—but this time we’re not asking you to submit more spam reports. Although we still appreciate receiving quality spam reports, today we’ve got a different opportunity for you to improve Google Search: how about YOU join our team and do the webspam fighting yourself? Interested? Here’s...
Read MoreA new rich snippets format for music
Webmaster level: All Since we introduced Rich Snippets back in 2009, we’ve created rich snippet formats for a variety of different content types, such as Events, People and Reviews, to show users relevant information about the content they can find on a site. Today, we announced the launch of rich snippets for music. With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly...
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