Helping webmasters from user to user

You have to have some kind of super-powers to keep up with all of the issues posted in our Webmaster Help Forum—that's why we call our Top Contributors the "Bionic Posters." They're able to leap through tall questions in a single bound, providing helpful and solid information all around. We're thankful to the Bionics for tackling problems both hard and easy (well, easy if you know how). Our current Bionic Posters are: Webado (Christina), Phil Payne, Red Cardinal (Richard), Shades1 (Louis), Autocrat, Tim Abracadabra, Aaron, Cristina, Robbo, John, Becky Sharpe, Sasch, BbDeath, Beussery (Brian), Chibcha (Terry), Luzie (Herbert), 奥宁 (Andy), Ashley, Kaleh and Redleg!

With thousands of webmasters visiting the English Help Forum every day, some questions naturally pop up more often than others. To help catch these common issues, the Bionic Posters have also helped to create and maintain a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions and their answers. These FAQs cover everything from "Why isn't my site indexed?" to diagnosing difficult issues with the help of Google Webmaster Tools, often referring to our Webmaster Help Center for specific topics. Before you post in the forum, make sure you've read through these resources and do a quick search in the forum; chances are high that your question has been answered there already.

Besides the Bionic Posters, we're lucky to have a number of very active and helpful users in the forum, such as: squibble, Lysis, yasir, Steven Lockey, seo101, RickyD, MartinJ and many more. Thank you all for making this community so captivating and—most of the time—friendly.

Here are just a few (well, a little more than a few) of the many comments that we've seen posted in the forum:

• "Thank you for this forum... Thank you to those that take the time to answer and care!"
• "I've only posted one question here, but have received a wealth of knowledge by reading tons of posts and answers. The time you experts put into helping people with their problems is very inspiring and my hat's off to each of you. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that your services aren't going unnoticed and I truly appreciate the lessons."
• "Thank you very much cristina, what you told me has done the trick. I really appriciate the help as this has been bugging me for a while now and I didn't know what was wrong."
• "thank you ssssssssssoooo much kaleh. "
• "OK, Phil Payne big thanks to You! I have made changes and maybe people are starting to find me in G! Thanks to Ashley, I've started to make exclusive and relevant content for people."
• "If anything, it has helped me reflect on the sites and projects of days gone by so as to see what I could have done better - so that I can deliver that much more and better results going forward. I've learned that some things I had done right, were spot on, and other issues could have been handled differently, as well as a host of technical information that I've stored away for future use. Bottom Line: this forum rocks and is incredibly helpful."
• "I asked a handful of questions, got GREAT help while doing a whole lot of lurking, and now I've got a site that rocks!! (...) Huge thanks to all the Top Contributors, and a very special mention to WEBADO, who helped me a TON with my .htaccess file."
• "Over the years of reading (and sometimes contributing) to this forum I think it has helped to remove many false assumptions and doubts over Google's ranking systems. Contrary to what many have said I verily believe Google can benefit small businesses. Keep up the good work. "
• "The forum members are awesome and are a most impressive bunch. Their contribution is immeasurable as it is huge. Not only have they helped Google in their success as a profitable business entity, but also helped webmasters both aspiring and experienced. There is also an engender(ment) of "family" or "belonging" in the group that has transcended the best and worst of times (Current forum change still TBD :-) ). We can agree, disagree and agree to disagree but remain respectful and civil (Usually :-) )."
• "Hi Redleg, Thank you very much for all of the information. Without your help, I don't think I would ever have known how to find the problem. "
• "What an amazing board. Over the last few days I have asked 1 question and recieved a ton of advice mainly from Autocrat. "
• "A big thank you to the forum and the contributors that helped me get my site on Google . After some hassle with my web hosters and their naff submission service, issues over adding pages Google can see, issues over Sitemaps, I can now say that when I put my site name into the search and when i put in [custom made watch box], for instance, my site now comes up."
• "Thank you Autocrat! You are MAGNIFICENT! (...) I am your biggest fan today. : ) Imagine Joe Cocker singing With a Little Help from My Friends...that's my theme song today."
• "I've done a lot of reading since then and I've learned more in the last year than I learned in the previous 10. When I stumbled into this forum I had no idea what I was getting into but finding this forum was a gift from God! Words cannot express the amount of gratitude I feel for the help you have given me and I wish I could repay you some how.... I don't mean to sound so mushy, but I write this with tears in my eyes and I am truly, truly grateful..."

Are you new to the Webmaster Help Forum? Tell us a little bit about yourself and then join us to learn more and help others!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication

Webmaster level: Intermediate

We've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we're announcing our support of the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element.



Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

• Choose your preferred domain
  When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves.

• Reduce in-site duplication
  Before starting on cross-site duplicate content questions, make sure to handle duplication within your site first.

• Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
  Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don't forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.

• Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element
  There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

Still have questions?

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine.

Q: For technical reasons I can't include a 1:1 mapping for the URLs on my sites. Can I just point the rel="canonical" at the homepage of my preferred site?
A: No; this could result in problems. A mapping from old URL to new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to use rel="canonical".

Q: I'm offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel="canonical"?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel="canonical", if both parties agree.

Q: My server can't do a 301 (permanent) redirect. Can I use rel="canonical" to move my site?
A: If it's at all possible, you should work with your webhost or web server to do a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that we treat rel="canonical" as a hint, and other search engines may handle it differently. But if a 301 redirect is impossible for some reason, then a rel="canonical" may work for you. For more information, see our guidelines on moving your site.

Q: Should I use a noindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element?
A: No, since those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing - one would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Additionally, it's important that these pages are not disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, otherwise search engine crawlers will not be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

We hope this makes it easier for you to handle duplicate content in a user-friendly way. Are there still places where you feel that duplicate content is causing your sites problems? Let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum!


Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Your site's performance in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster level: Intermediate

Let's take a quick look at the individual sections in the Google Webmaster Tools' Site Performance feature:

Performance overview



The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don't have to worry about us testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, we may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools.

The line between the red and the green sections on the chart is the 20th percentile — only 20% of the sites we check are faster than this. This website is pretty close to the 20% mark, which pages would we have to work on first?

Example pages with load times



In this section you can find some example pages along with the average, aggregated load times that users observed while they were on your website. These numbers may differ from what you see as they can come from a variety of different browsers, internet connections and locations. This list can help you to recognize pages which take longer than average to load — pages that slow your users down.

As the page load times are based on actual accesses made by your users, it's possible that it includes pages which are disallowed from crawling. While Googlebot will not be able to crawl disallowed pages, they may be a significant part of your site's user experience.

Keep in mind that you may see occasional spikes here, so it's recommended that you watch the load times over a short period to see what's stable. If you consistently see very large load times, that probably means that most of your users are seeing very slow page loads (whether due to slow connections or otherwise), so it's something you should take seriously.

Page Speed suggestions



These suggestions are based on the Page Speed Firefox / Firebug plugin. In order to find the details for these sample URLs, we fetch the page and all its embedded resources with Googlebot. If we are not able to fetch all of embedded content with Googlebot, we may not be able to provide a complete analysis. Similarly, if the servers return slightly modified content for Googlebot than they would for normal users, this may affect what is shown here. For example, some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics' "ga.js").

When looking at flagged issues regarding common third-party code such as website analytics scripts, one factor that can also play a role is how wide-spread these scripts are on the web. If they are common across the web, chances are that the average user's browser will have already cached the DNS lookup and the content of the script. While these scripts will still be flagged as separate DNS lookups, in practice they might not play a strong role in the actual load time.

We offer these suggestions as a useful guideline regarding possible first performance improvement steps and recommend using the Page Speed plugin (or a similar tool) directly when working on your website. This allows you to better recognize the blocking issues and makes it easy to see how modifications on the server affect the total load time.


For questions about Webmaster Tools and this new feature, feel free to read the Help Center article, search and post in the Webmaster Help Forums or in the Page Speed discussion group. We hope this information helps you make your website even faster!

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

How fast is your site?

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.



The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. We only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.

This is a Labs product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your feedback through the Webmaster Tools Forum.

Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this feature. Check out JohnMu's latest post on Site Performance!

Posted by Sreeram Ramachandran, Software Engineer & Arvind Jain, Director, Faster Web program

New User Agent for News

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Today we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.

Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.

Here are a few examples for publishers:

Include pages in both Google web search and News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.

For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.

We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Region Tags in Google Search Results

Webmaster Level: All

Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.

This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:

None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.

Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):

As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.

As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.

We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag.

We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.

Written by Piyush Prahladka, Software Engineer

Changes in First Click Free

Webmaster level: Intermediate

We love helping publishers make their content available to large groups of readers, and working on ways to make the world's information useful and accessible through our search results. At the same time, we're also aware of the fact that creating high-quality content is not easy and, in many cases, expensive. This is one of the reasons why we initially launched First Click Free for Google News and Google Web Search -- to allow publishers to sell access to their content in general while still allowing users to find it through our search results.

While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content. As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google's Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!

Questions and answers about First Click Free

Q: Do the rest of the old guidelines still apply?
A: Yes, please check the guidelines for Google News as well as the guidelines for Web Search and the associated blog post for more information.

Q: Can I apply First Click Free to only a section of my site / only for Google News (or only for Web Search)?
A: Sure! Just make sure that both Googlebot and users from the appropriate search results can view the content as required. Keep in mind that showing Googlebot the full content of a page while showing users a registration page would be considered cloaking.

Q: Do I have to sign up to use First Click Free?
A: Please let us know about your decision to use First Click Free if you are using it for Google News. There's no need to inform us of the First Click Free status for Google Web Search.

Q: What is the preferred way to count a user's accesses?
A: Since there are many different site architectures, we believe it's best to leave this up to the publisher to decide.

(Please see our related blog post for more information on First Click Free for Google News.)

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Best practices for Product Search

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:

• Attributes to include in your feed
• FAQs
• Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
• Do product listings expire after 30 days?
• How often should I submit my feed?

More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 8th - 12th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Matt Cutts answered a few new questions from the Grab Bag:

• What if a search for my business triggers "Did you mean?"
• Why do big brands rank so well?
• Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO?

Matt also went over a great example of whitehat linkbait:



And if you've ever thought about hiding text, here's one technique that didn't fool Google:



Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

An Update on Sitemaps at Google

Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It's no wonder: the secret is out - as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn't guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better.

Together with the Webmaster Tools design update, we've been working on Sitemaps as well:

• Google and the other search engines which are a part of Sitemaps.org now support up to 50,000 child Sitemaps for Sitemap index files (instead of the previous 1,000). This allows large sites to submit a theoretical maximum of 2.5 billion URLs with a single Sitemap Index URL (oh, and if you need more, you can always submit multiple Sitemap index files). 
• The Webmaster Tools design update now shows you all Sitemap files that were submitted for your verified website. This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file.
• The indexed URL count in Webmaster Tools for your Sitemap files is now even more precise.
• For the XML developers out there, we've updated the XSD schemas to allow Sitemap extensions. The new schema helps webmasters to create better Sitemaps by verifying more features. By validating Sitemap files with the new schema, you can be more confident that the Sitemap files are correct.
• Do I need to mention that Sitemap file processing is much faster than ever before? We've drastically reduced the average time from submitting a Sitemap file to processing it and showing some initial data in Webmaster Tools. 

For more information about using Sitemaps, make sure to check out our blog post about frequently asked questions on Sitemaps and our Help Center. If you have any questions that aren't covered here, don't forget to search our Help Forum and start a thread in the Sitemaps section for more help.

Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Out with the old, in with the new

Webmaster Level: All

We launched a preview of our new Webmaster Tools interface three weeks ago, and received a lot of valuable feedback. Most of you liked the update, appreciating features such as the one-stop dashboard, more top search query data, and the improved menu and navigation.

You offered some constructive feedback as well:

• You missed the option to switch listing 25, 50, or 100 rows in features such as links to your site. We did not add the option back to select how many rows you would like to see but increased our default to 100!
• Top search query information differed between the old and new versions. We expected this since we went through a lot of re-engineering to improve the new top search queries backend. We reviewed many of the issues posted on our forums, and verified that the new backend is far more accurate and reliable.
• Initially, the Sitemaps downloaded and indexed URL counts differed between the two versions. We resolved this issue quickly.
• Backlinks numbers between the old and the new user interface (UI) may differ since our new UI shows the original anchor (not following redirects) as it's linked on the web. Let's say example.com links to http://google.com, then http://google.com 301s to http://www.google.com/:
• In the new UI -- only verified site owners of google.com will see examples.com's backlink (because we show the original link prior to any redirects)
• In the old UI -- verified site owners of www.google.com could see example.com's backlink
• The new site switcher lists only five sites, and some of you who manage a large number of sites found this limiting. We appreciate the feedback and will work on addressing this limitation in a future release.

From today, only the new user interface will be available (http://google.com/webmasters/tools)! You'll see that in addition to fixing many of the issues users addressed, we took some time to launch a new feature: Change of Address. The Change of Address feature lets you notify Google when you are moving from one domain to another, enabling us to update our index faster and hopefully creating a smoother transition for your users.

Thanks to all the users that took time to give us feedback on the new user interface. To those users using it for the first time today, we hope you enjoy it. As always, your feedback is appreciated.

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team

Message Forwarding

To make Webmaster Tools' Message Center more accessible, we've just made it possible to forward messages to your personal email. The Webmaster Tools Message Center is used to communicate confidential information about sites you've verified. This may be anything related to your site, from details about potential issues with Google's Webmaster Guidelines to confirmations of actions taken within Webmaster Tools like changes to site-wide settings. To enable the feature, simply update your settings on the Home page.

Messages can be forwarded in any of our 40 supported languages to any email associated with your Google Account. To associate another email address with your Google Account, simply click on the "My Account" link at the top of the page and verify the new email address. All emails will be sent from <wmt-noreply@google.com>, so update your spam filters to make sure you don't miss these emails.

Posted By Tanya Gupta, Software Engineer

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 1st - 5th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag:

• Are shortened URLs treated differently than other redirects?
• How can I make sure Google reaches my deeper pages?
• What impact does server location have on rankings?
• Will a "coming soon" page negatively impact my site?
• How many pages can Google index from a single site?

In response to questions we've been getting about the videos themselves, we created a behind the scenes look at our setup. And just to throw in some more variety, Matt took a break from SEO questions for a few minutes to show off a fun use of a barcode scanner with Google Book Search. You can read more about it on the Inside Google Book Search blog.

For your instant viewing pleasure, here's the answer to the question about URL shortners:


And now a peek behind the scenes:


Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

SEO Starter Guide now available in 40 languages

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Since the release of our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide last November, we've steadily been adding localized versions for our international users. Today, we're happy to announce that the guide is now available in 40 languages, which covers 98% of the global Internet audience. We hope that webmasters around the world can use the guide to improve their sites' crawlability and indexing in search engines.

We'd also like to thank everyone for their continued feedback on the guide. We're taking notes on what you liked and what you thought was missing for use in future updates and possibly a version for advanced users.

Here's a list of the languages available:

• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• English (GB)
• Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hindi
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (BR)
• Portuguese (PT)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

Introducing Page Speed

At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user's experience and helps them become more productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we've used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page Speed.

Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages -- it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug. When you run Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve their speed. For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn't actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.

Page Speed's suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement. To help you understand the suggestions and rules, we have created detailed documentation to describe the rationale behind each of the rules. We look forward to your feedback on the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team

Webmaster Central YouTube update for May 26-29

In February, we launched the Webmaster Central YouTube channel, and since then we've been busy keeping it fresh with new content. We're not yet uploading 20 hours every minute, but did you know that we've been releasing a new video almost every weekday? You can keep up with the latest updates by subscribing to our channel in YouTube, or by adding our feed to your RSS reader.

If you're more of a weekly digest kind of person, we're here for you too. For every week that we have new videos available, we'll let you know here on the blog. In the videos uploaded in the past week, you'll find answers to these questions from Matt's Grab Bag:

Can product descriptions be considered duplicate content?
How can new pages get indexed quickly?
What are your views on PageRank sculpting?
Will you ever switch to a Mac?

Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Let visitors recommend your content

Webmaster Level: All

We recently posted about some of the engaging gadgets you can add to your site with Google Friend Connect. Here's one more that may be of interest if you're looking for another way to get feedback from your site's visitors:

The new Recommendation gadgets make it easy for your visitors to let you and the world know which parts of your site they like best. By placing recommendation buttons next to photos, articles or other content, visitors can recommend specific items to others with the click of a button. Your most popular items will surface to the top of the recommendation list.

To install a recommendation gadget on your site, or to check out the other gadgets that are available, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Spring time design refresh!

We've been listening to you at conferences, user studies, forums and blogs and we decided to start from the ground up with a brand new Webmaster Tools design! It was much needed, and the end result is beautiful in our eyes:



Highlights

• One-stop Dashboard: We redesigned our dashboard to bring together data you view regularly: Links to your site, Top search queries, Sitemaps, and Crawl errors.
• More top search queries: You now have up to 100 queries to track for impressions and clickthrough! In addition, we've substantially improved data quality in this area.
• Sitemap tracking for multiple users: In the past, you were unable to monitor Sitemaps submitted by other users or via mechanisms like robots.txt. Now you can track the status of Sitemaps submitted by other users in addition to yourself.
• Message subscription: To make sure you never miss an important notification, you can subscribe to Message Center notifications via e-mail. Stay up-to-date without having to log in as frequently.
• Improved menu and navigation: We reorganized our features into a more logical grouping, making them easier to find and access. More details on changes.
• Smarter help: Every page displays links to relevant Help Center articles and by the way, we've streamlined our Help Center and made it easier to use.
• Sites must be verified to access detailed functionality: Since we're providing so much more data, going forward your site must be verified before you can access any features in Webmaster Tools, including features such as Sitemaps, Test Robots.txt and Generate Robots.txt which were previously available for unverified sites. If you submit Sitemaps for unverified sites, you can continue to do so using Sitemap pings or by including the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file.
• Removal of the enhanced Image Search option: We're always iterating and improving on our services, both by adding new product attributes and removing old ones. With this release, the enhanced Image Search option is no longer a component of Webmaster Tools. The Google Image Labeler will continue to select images from sites regardless of this setting.

Go ahead, get started

The new user interface is available at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/new. The old user interface will continue to be available for a couple of weeks to give you guys time to adjust and provide feedback.

We did our best to get the product localized; however, you may notice a few missing translations in some areas of the user interface. We apologize for the inconvenience and when we switch everyone over in a couple of weeks, we'll fully support 40 languages. The one exception will be our Help Center, which will be available in 21 languages going forward.

We're really excited about this launch, and hope you are as well. Tell us what you think and stay tuned for more updates!

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, and Josh Teague, Interaction Designer, Webmaster Tools Team

Introducing Rich Snippets

Webmaster Level: All

As a webmaster, you have a unique understanding of your web pages and the content they represent. Google helps users find your page by showing them a small sample of that content -- the "snippet." We use a variety of techniques to create these snippets and give users relevant information about what they'll find when they click through to visit your site. Today, we're announcing Rich Snippets, a new presentation of snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages.

Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. We are currently supporting data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Now we're beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate. As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. For example, here are a few relevant lines of the HTML from Yelp's review page for "Drooling Dog BarBQ" before adding markup data:

and now with microformats markup:

or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:

By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google's search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we're excited about the possibilities.

To ensure that this additional data is as helpful as possible to users, we'll be rolling this feature out gradually, expanding coverage to more sites as we do more experiments and process feedback from webmasters. We will make our best efforts to monitor and analyze whether individual websites are abusing this system: if we see abuse, we will respond accordingly.

To prepare your site for Rich Snippets and other benefits of structured data on the web, please see our documentation on structured data annotations.

Now, time for some Q&A with the team:

If I mark up my pages, does that guarantee I'll get Rich Snippets?

No. We will be rolling this out gradually, and as always we will use our own algorithms and policies to determine relevant snippets for users' queries. We will use structured data when we are able to determine that it helps users find answers sooner. And because you're providing the data on your pages, you should anticipate that other websites and other tools (browsers, phones) might use this data as well. You can let us know that you're interested in participating by filling out this form.

What about other existing microformats? Will you support other types of information besides reviews and people?

Not every microformat corresponds to data that's useful to show in a search result, but we do plan to support more of the existing microformats and define RDFa equivalents.

What's next?

We'll be continuing experiments with new types (beyond reviews and people) and hope to announce support for more types in the future.

I have too much data on my page to mark it all up.

That wasn't a question, but we'll answer anyway. For the purpose of getting data into snippets, we don't need every bit of data: it simply wouldn't fit. For example, a page that says it has "497 reviews" of a product probably has data for 10 and links to the others. Even if you could mark up all 497 blocks of data, there is no way we could fit it into a single snippet. To make your part of this grand experiment easier, we have defined aggregate types where necessary: a review-aggregate can be used to summarize all the review information (review count, average/min/max rating, etc.).

Why do you support multiple encodings?

A lot of previous work on structured data has focused on debates around encoding. Even within Google, we have advocates for microformat encoding, advocates for various RDF encodings, and advocates for our own encodings. But after working on this Rich Snippets project for a while, we realized that structured data on the web can and should accommodate multiple encodings: we hope to emphasize this by accepting both microformat encoding and RDFa encoding. Each encoding has its pluses and minuses, and the debate is a fine intellectual exercise, but it detracts from the real issues.

We do believe that it is important to have a common vocabulary: the language of object types, object properties, and property types that enable structured data to be understood by different applications. We debated how to address this vocabulary problem, and concluded that we needed to make an investment. Google will, working together with others, host a vocabulary that various Google services and other websites can use. We are starting with a small list, which we hope to extend over time.

Wherever possible, we'll simply reuse vocabulary that is in wide use: we support the pre-existing vCard and hReview types, and there are a variety of other types defined by various communities. Sites that use Google Custom Search will be able to define their own types, which we will index and present to users in rich Custom Search results pages. Finally, we encourage and expect this space to evolve based on new ideas from the structured data community. We'll notice and reach out when our crawlers pick up new types that are getting broad use.

Update on November 1, 2009: Check out our update on Rich Snippets!

Written by Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, and Othar Hansson

Google Trends for your website

Webmaster Level: All

In a recent post on the Official Google Blog, we mentioned our Google Trends gadget, and we thought it made sense to also post something here for all the webmasters that might be interested in having Trends on their website. Google Trends is a great way to see what's popular on the web -- people tend to search for what they care about -- and the Trends gadget makes it easy for you to put Trends on your website. Just cut and paste a small snippet of code, input your search terms, and you can show your readers how searches for Obama have changed during the last 30 days or who's the most popular American Idol contestant. So take a little piece of Google with you, and show your readers what's hot on the web.

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

More ways to engage your community

Webmaster Level: All

Over the last few weeks, Google Friend Connect has added several new ways for you to strengthen the community that visits your site. These gadgets help to make your site more engaging and gives your visitors a new way to interact with your content and other visitors.

Here is a quick overview of these new gadgets:

Event gadget - Have an upcoming event you want to promote to your community? Embed this gadget on your site to let members get details about the event, see a map, indicate if they're coming, and see who else is attending. They can even add the event to their personal Google Calendars with just a click.

Polls gadget - Polls are a fun and easy way for your visitors to express themselves and a great tool for you to see what your users like. This gadget makes it easy to publish opinion polls and adds a social element by displaying the faces of the community members and friends who voted on each answer.

Get Answers gadget - Add the Get Answers gadget to your site to encourage visitors to ask questions of the community and answer questions posed by other community members. This gadget lets visitors browse questions, submit answers, and vote on answers they think are the best.

Comments gadget - Bring your site to life by adding the comments gadget to your pages. This gadget enables visitors to post comments and links to videos on your site. Visitors can even use the new translation feature to read comments in their preferred language.

Check out the Friend Connect gallery to see these gadgets along with all the other features Friend Connect has to offer. And keep an eye on the Social Web Blog for additional gadgets we'll soon be launching.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Survey says...

Webmaster Level: All

Many thanks to the more than 1,600 people who filled out our survey in February. You gave us your feedback on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster Help Forum, and our Webmaster Central videos on YouTube.

You told us what you like and want to see more of:

• Webmaster Central gives users insight into Google: "[I like] being able to access, communicate, and see how my sites relate to Google."
• Webmaster Central provides high quality information: "What I have enjoyed most of all, is reading Google's guidelines for webmasters, which is on-point with what I have been telling customers about SEO."
• Webmaster Central collects several useful tools in one place: "It's an innovative central hub for all the tools supported and provided by the industry leader Google, for free."

We also learned about what you don't like and where we could be doing better. Our top finding is that beginner webmasters (about 20% of the survey respondents) are less satisfied than intermediate or advanced webmasters with Webmaster Central. Open-ended comments suggested that new webmasters want basic, less technical information from us. A common feedback that we received: "Many users like myself are not of the hi-tech, IT-savvy variety and prefer simplicity, whether we create a website for information or to generate revenue." Based on your responses, we've planned some new resources like a series of how-to videos especially for new webmasters (coming soon to YouTube).

We take your feedback seriously and will continue improving Webmaster Central and our other webmaster sites. Again, thanks for your participation in the survey. We want Webmaster Central to continue being a useful resource for you.

Written by Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher

Google Webmaster Help Forums in more languages

Traditionally when we launch a new communication channel, we also give the shareholders a chance to introduce themselves. We did so when we opened webmaster help communities for European webmasters almost two years ago, and also more than a year ago, when we were able to expand and add groups in three more languages. Last December we were very happy to announce the re-launch of two of our Help Forums in a new and cool look and feel.

Today, we're happy to announce that we keep on increasing the global dialogue with webmasters, opening an Arabic and a Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help Forum. Furthermore, we would like to highlight the support we offer in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While we've offered support to Chinese webmasters for a little more than a year, the Japanese and Korean forums are only a few weeks old. Keeping with tradition, the guides monitoring our new forums would like to introduce themselves to the global webmaster family:

Arabic Webmaster Help Forum
مرحبا! My name is Adel and I'll be monitoring the Arabic Webmaster Help Forum. I'm originally from Beirut, Lebanon. After finishing computer science studies, I joined Google, some 18 months ago.

Besides working on search quality in Arabic and building a community on our forum, I enjoy traveling and listening to really loud heavy metal music; sometimes I get to do both at the same time! ;-)

I am looking forward to a lot of questions regarding Arabic Google Search and of course ranking and indexing issues on your sites to come. I hope I'll see you there soon!
- Adel

Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help Forum

Zdravím! I am Marcel, the Google Guide on the Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help Forum. I am originally from Slovakia. After graduating in New Media and Industrial Design, it took me some time and traveling around the globe before moving to Dublin and eventually joining Google some 3 years ago.

Ever since, I've been working in different teams. I was lucky to be part of the AdSense team where I participated in launching AdSense for Content for Czech and Slovak. Since my transition to Search Quality, I enjoy working on improving the quality of our natural search results in Czech, Slovak, and Polish.

Besides my work I have a few more passions, such as listening to live music in Irish pubs, challenging my colleagues in occasional Soulcalibur skirmishes on Playstation and testing burger places all over the world :-) If you want to discuss any of these topics or maybe something about your sites, please join the community. I am looking forward to meeting you there :-)
- Marcel

Chinese Webmaster Help Forum

你好! Hi from the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum team! The Chinese Webmaster Help Forum has received great support from webmasters since its launch in March 2008. In March 2009, the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum moved to a new system with many more user-friendly features for better information sharing. It has become a good platform for webmasters to share their knowledge of Google search and Webmaster Tools and to communicate with Google.

The Chinese Forum now has 6 Google Guides: Xiang (降龙十巴掌), Eric (趙錢孫李), Marina (小馬過河), Chris (城镇), Hyson (草帽路飞), and Fa (法人戴表). We are from many different provinces of mainland China. When not spending time in the forum, we enjoy playing ping-pong and foosball in the office. A few of us are huge video game fans. You may learn more about us when you participate in the forum :)

A big thank you to everyone who has taken part in forum discussions! We hope to see both familiar faces and newcomers join in the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum!
- Xiang (降龙十巴掌), Eric (趙錢孫李), Marina (小馬過河), Chris (城镇), Hyson (草帽路飞), and Fa (法人戴表)

Japanese Webmaster Help Forum

こんにちは! Hello from the Japanese Webmaster Help Forum team! Our names are Nao ( なお ), Kaede ( 楓 ), Haru ( ハル ), and Kyotaro. We are the four guides working in Google Search Quality for Japanese. We've just launched our forum on March 6th.

All of us were born in Japan and grew up here. Nao has also lived in Greece, the Netherlands, and New York. Haru is from the west side of Japan, which is known for its talkative culture and traditional Japanese comedy. Maybe you will read Haru's unique communication on our forum :)

As for our interests, we love eating and drinking! Between posting on the forum, we enjoy Google's excellent lunches and sweets a lot. After working, of course, we sometimes go out for a drink with our team members :) Kaede knows all the nice bars in Tokyo.

Nao and Kyotaro love Sumo wrestling. We've watched two tournaments this year with Googlers from other locations. Haru, of course, loves watching comedies!

We are really excited and happy to see many users joining our forum and sharing tips with each other. Looking forward to seeing you there!
- Nao ( なお ), Kaede ( 楓 ), Haru ( ハル ), and Kyotaro

Korean Webmaster Help Forum

안녕하세요! Hello everyone, my name is Joowon and I work in Google Search Quality for Korean. I was born in Germany and lived in Korea for a few years before moving to Hawaii, California and New York to attend high school and college. After all that traveling, I'm only fluent in Korean and English, with a bit of proficiency in Japanese. Some of the interests I've developed over the years are design, wine, cooking, yoga, and sustainability issues.

Currently I'm back in Seoul and enjoying the dynamic atmosphere here, with lots of interesting people and great food. The Korean Webmaster Help Forum was launched only a few weeks ago, and I'm very much looking forward to talking to all of you. See you in the forum!
- Joowon

Hello world! ;) I am Andrew and I am part of the Search Quality team in Seoul. I grew up in a port city in the southern part of Korea. Ironically, I don't eat seafood because it looks scary to me :( Many of my friends and colleagues love to make jokes about that, but I still don't eat any seafood yet. Playing drums, traveling and photography are my main interests. Currently I'm a drummer of "Spring Fingers", the first band of Google Korea, and we'll have our first concert at the end of April!

I love playing around with web technologies/APIs and find it very exciting to exchange information and ideas on the web. The Korean Webmaster Help Forum was recently launched and I hope to see you there!
- Andrew

If you're curious about our Webmaster Help Forums in other languages, please feel free to peak in. Here's a list of our currently monitored Webmaster Help Forums: Arabic, Chinese, Czech/Slovak, Dutch, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Written by Joowon Ahn, Andrew Baek, Adel Saud, Kaspar Szymanski, Fa Wang, Reid Yokoyama, and Marcel Zavacky, Search Quality Team