Tag Archives: Google Webmaster Blog

Coding guidelines for HTML and CSS

Wednesday, May 02, 2012 at 8:46 AM

Webmaster level: All

Great code has many attributes. It’s effective, efficient, maintainable, elegant. When working on code with many developers and teams and maybe even companies, great code needs to also be consistent and easy to understand. For that purpose there are style guides. We use style guides for a lot of languages, and our newest public style guide is the Google HTML and CSS Style Guide.

Our HTML and CSS Style Guide, just like other Google style guides, deals with a lot of formatting-related matters. It also hints at best practices so to encourage developers to go beyond indentation. Many style guide authors know the underlying motivation from the question whether to describe the code they write—or to prescribe what code they want to write. Not surprisingly then, in our HTML and CSS style guide you’ll find both (as much as you’ll still find a lot of different development styles in our not entirely small code base).

At this time we only want to introduce you to this new style guide. We hope to share more about its design decisions and future updates with you. In the meantime please share your thoughts and experiences, and as with the other style guides, feel free to use our style guide for your own projects, as you see fit.

Written by Jens O. Meiert, Senior Web Architect, Google Webmaster Team

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/9R05sp7fkRs/coding-guidelines-for-html-and-css.html

How to move your content to a new location

Tuesday, April 24, 2012 at 11:38 PM

Webmaster level: Intermediate

While maintaining a website, webmasters may decide to move the whole website or parts of it to a new location. For example, you might move content from a subdirectory to a subdomain, or to a completely new domain. Changing the location of your content can involve a bit of effort, but it’s worth doing it properly.

To help search engines understand your new site structure better and make your site more user-friendly, make sure to follow these guidelines:

  • It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects. To highlight the relationship between the two locations, make sure that each old URL points to the new URL that hosts similar content. If you’re unable to use 301 redirects, you may want to consider using cross domain canonicals for search engines instead.
  • Check that you have both the new and the old location verified in the same Google Webmaster Tools account.
  • Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Googlebot feature. It’s important to make sure Google can actually access your content in the new location. Also make sure that the old URLs are not blocked by a robots.txt disallow directive, so that the redirect or rel=canonical can be found.
  • If you’re moving your content to an entirely new domain, use the Change of address option under Site configuration in Google Webmaster Tools to let us know about the change.

Change of address option in Google Webmaster ToolsTell us about moving your content via Google Webmaster Tools

What’s new with Sitemaps

Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 12:18 PM

Webmaster level: All

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:


The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type were submitted (if any), and for some content types, we also show how many items have been indexed. With these enhancements, the new Sitemaps page replaces the Video Sitemaps Labs feature, which will be retired.

Another improvement is the ability to test a Sitemap. Unlike an actual submission, testing does not submit your Sitemap to Google as it only checks it for errors. Testing requires a live fetch by Googlebot and usually takes a few seconds to complete. Note that the initial testing is not exhaustive and may not detect all issues; for example, errors that can only be identified once the URLs are downloaded are not be caught by the test.

In addition to on-the-spot testing, we’ve got a new way of displaying errors which better exposes what types of issues a Sitemap contains. Instead of repeating the same kind of error many times for one Sitemap, errors and warnings are now grouped, and a few examples are given. Likewise, for Sitemap index files, we’ve aggregated errors and warnings from the child Sitemaps that the Sitemap index encloses. No longer will you need to click through each child Sitemap one by one.

Finally, we’ve changed the way the “Delete” button works. Now, it removes the Sitemap from Webmaster Tools, both

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/D-4mvh6bIpA/whats-new-with-sitemaps.html

More Options for Google+ Badges

Thursday, January 26, 2012 at 1:53 PM

Webmaster Level: All

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we’re adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You’ll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.


If you’re still considering whether to add a Google+ badge on your website, consider this: We recently looked at top sites using the badge and found that, on average, the badge accounted for an additional 38% of followers. When you add the badge visitors to your website can discover your Google+ page and connect in a variety of ways: they can follow your Google+ page, +1 your site, share your site with their circles, see which of their friends have +1’d your site, and click through to visit your Google+ page.

The Google+ Badge makes it easy for your fans to find and follow you on Google+. With these additional options, we hope it’s even easier to create a badge that fits your website.

Follow the conversation on Google+.

Posted by Lucy Hadden, Software Engineer, Google+

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/cz8fpcIdFYQ/new-google-badges.html

Website user research and testing on the cheap

Tuesday, December 20, 2011
at
5:51 PM

Webmaster level: Intermediate

As the team responsible for tens of thousands of Google’s informational web pages, the Webmaster Team is here to offer tips and advice based on their experiences as hands-on webmasters.

If you’ve never tested or analyzed usage of your website, ask yourself if you really know whether your site is useful for your target audience. If you’re unsure, why not find out? For example, did you know that on average users scroll down 5.9 times as often as they scroll up, meaning that often once page content is scrolled past, it is “lost?” (See Jakob Nielsen’s findings on scrolling, where he advises that users don’t mind scrolling, but within limits.)

Also, check your analytics—are you curious about high bounce rates from any of your pages, or very short time-on-page metrics?

First, think about your user

The start of a web project—whether it’s completely new or a revamp of an existing site—is a great time to ask questions like:

  • How might users access your site—home, office, on-the-go?
  • How tech-savvy are your visitors?
  • How familiar are users with the subject matter of your website?

The answers to some of these questions can be valuable when making initial design decisions.

For instance, if the user is likely to be on the road, they might be short on time to find the information they need from your site, or be in a distracting environment and have a slow data connection—so a simple layout with single purpose would work best. Additionally, if you’re providing content for a less technical audience, make sure it’s not too difficult to access content—animation might provide a “wow” factor, but only if your user appreciates it and it’s not too difficult to get to the content.

Even without testing, building a basic user profile (or “persona”) can help

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/5sK9b3X_HoA/website-user-research-and-testing-on.html

Reorganizing internal vs. external backlinks

by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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 with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.

You can manage many different types of sites in Webmaster Tools: a plain domain name (example.com), a subdomain (www.example.com or cats.example.com), or a domain with a subfolder path (www.example.com/cats/ or www.example.com/users/catlover/). Previously, only links that started with your site’s exact URL would be categorized as internal links: so if you entered www.example.com/users/catlover/ as your site, links from www.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links. This also meant that if you entered www.example.com as your site, links from example.com would be considered external because they don’t start with the same URL as your site (they don’t contain www).

Most people think of example.com and www.example.com as the same site these days, so we’re changing it such that now, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. We’ve also extended this idea to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/gbGy47yUC-Q/reorganizing-internal-vs-external.html

Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

Written by Jonathan Simon Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Webmaster Level: All

The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.

This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.

How to submit a URL
First, use Diagnostics Fetch As Googlebot to fetch the URL you want to submit to Google. If the URL is successfully fetched you’ll see a new “Submit to index” link appear next to the fetched URL.

Once you click “Submit to index” you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to choose whether you want to submit

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/tyYb-oayJyQ/submit-urls-to-google-with-fetch-as.html

Work smarter, not harder, with site health

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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 redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to easily see what needs your attention the most, without having to click through all of the reports in Webmaster Tools for every site you manage.

Here’s what the new home page looks like:

You can see that sites with health problems are shown at the top of the list. (If you prefer, you can always switch back to listing your sites alphabetically.) To see the specific issues we detected on a site, click the site health icon

or the “Check site health” link next to that site:

This new home page is currently only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your Webmaster Tools account (either verified or unverified). We’re working on making it available to all accounts in the future. If you have more than 100 sites, you can see site health information at the top of the Dashboard for each of your sites.

Right now we include three issues in your site’s health check:

  1. Have we detected malware on the site?
  2. Have any important pages been removed via our URL removal tool?
  3. Are any of your important pages blocked from crawling in robots.txt?

You can click on any of these

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To read the full article:
Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/3ftulkOthEU/work-smarter-not-harder-with-site.html

View-all in search results

Written by Benjia Li Joachim Kupke, Software Engineers, Indexing Team

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 worse latency.
Therefore, to improve the user experience, when we detect that a content series (e.g. page-1.html, page-2.html, etc.) also contains a single-page version (e.g. page-all.html), we’re now making a larger effort to return the single-page version in search results. If your site has a view-all option, there’s nothing you need to do; we’ll work to do it on your behalf. Also, indexing properties, like links, will be consolidated from the component pages in the series to the view-all page.

However, high latency can make the view-all less preferred

Interestingly, the cases when users didn’t prefer the view-all page were correlated with high latency (e.g., when the view-all page took a while to load, say, because it contained many images). This makes sense because we know users are less satisfied with slow results. So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience.

Best practices for a series of content

  1. If your site includes view-all pagesWe aim to detect the view-all version of your content and, if available, its associated component pages. There’s nothing more you need to do! However, if you’d like to make it more explicit to us, you can include rel=”canonical” from your component pages to your view-all to increase the likelihood that we detect your series of

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To read the full article:
    Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/amDG/~3/Q1BX7ArCEA8/view-all-in-search-results.html

Webmaster Tools Search Queries data is now available in Google Analytics

Posted by Christina Chen, Product Manager – Tuesday, October 04, 2011
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 Analytics.

  • Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
  • Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
  • Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

All of these Search Engine Optimization reports offer Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. With the secondary dimensions, you can view your site’s data in ways that aren’t available in Webmaster Tools.


To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports for a web property, you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator of that Property. Once enabled, administrators can choose which profiles can see these reports.

If you have feedback or suggestions, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Christina Chen, Product Manager