Rich snippets guidelines

Webmaster level: All

Traditional, text-only, search result snippets aim to summarize the content of a page in our search results. Rich snippets (shown above) allow webmasters to help us provide even better summaries using structured data markup that they can add to their pages. Today we're introducing a set of guidelines to help you implement high quality structured data markup for rich snippets.

Once you've correctly added structured data markup to you site, rich snippets are generated algorithmically based on that markup. If the markup on a page offers an accurate description of the page's content, is up-to-date, and is visible and easily discoverable on your page and by users, our algorithms are more likely to decide to show a rich snippet in Google’s search results.

Alternatively, if the rich snippets markup on a page is spammy, misleading, or otherwise abusive, our algorithms are much more likely to ignore the markup and render a text-only snippet. Keep in mind that, while rich snippets are generated algorithmically, we do reserve the right to take manual action (e.g., disable rich snippets for a specific site) in cases where we see actions that hurt the experience for our users.

To illustrate these guidelines with some examples:

• If your page is about a band, make sure you mark up concerts being performed by that band, not by related bands or bands in the same town.
• If you sell products through your site, make sure reviews on each page are about that page's product and not the store itself.
• If your site provides song lyrics, make sure reviews are about the quality of the lyrics, not the quality of the song itself.

In addition to the general rich snippets quality guidelines we're publishing today, you'll find usage guidelines for specific types of rich snippets in our Help Center. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jeremy Lubin, Consumer Experience Specialist, & Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Google Webmaster Guidelines updated

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re happy to announce an updated version of our Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Both our basic quality guidelines and many of our more specific articles (like those on links schemes or hidden text) have been reorganized and expanded to provide you with more information about how to create quality websites for both users and Google.

The main message of our quality guidelines hasn’t changed: Focus on the user. However, we’ve added more guidance and examples of behavior that you should avoid in order to keep your site in good standing with Google’s search results. We’ve also added a set of quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets, as structured markup is becoming increasingly popular.

We hope these updated guidelines will give you a better understanding of how to create and maintain Google-friendly websites.

Posted by Betty Huang & Eric Kuan, Google Search Quality Team

Keeping you informed of critical website issues

Webmaster level: All

Having a healthy and well-performing website is important, both to you as the webmaster and to your users. When we discover critical issues with a website, Webmaster Tools will now let you know by automatically sending an email with more information.

We’ll only notify you about issues that we think have significant impact on your site’s health or search performance and which have clear actions that you can take to address the issue. For example, we’ll email you if we detect malware on your site or see a significant increase in errors while crawling your site.

For most sites these kinds of issues will occur rarely. If your site does happen to have an issue, we cap the number of emails we send over a certain period of time to avoid flooding your inbox.  If you don’t want to receive any email from Webmaster Tools you can change your email delivery preferences.

We hope that you find this change a useful way to stay up-to-date on critical and important issues regarding your site’s health. If you have any questions, please let us know via our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Structured Data Testing Tool

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re excited to share the launch of a shiny new version of the rich snippet testing tool, now called the structured data testing tool. The major improvements are:

• We’ve improved how we display rich snippets in the testing tool to better match how they appear in search results.

• The brand new visual design makes it clearer what structured data we can extract from the page, and how that may be shown in our search results.

• The tool is now available in languages other than English to help webmasters from around the world build structured-data-enabled websites.

Here’s what it looks like:
The new structured data testing tool works with all supported rich snippets and authorship markup, including applications, products, recipes, reviews, and others.

Try it yourself and, as always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Yong Zhu on behalf of the rich snippets testing tool team

Answering the top questions from government webmasters

Webmaster level: Beginner - Intermediate

Government sites, from city to state to federal agencies, are extremely important to Google Search. For one thing, governments have a lot of content — and government websites are often the canonical source of information that’s important to citizens. Around 20 percent of Google searches are for local information, and local governments are experts in their communities.

That’s why I’ve spoken at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) national conference for the past few years. It’s always interesting speaking to webmasters about search, but the people running government websites have particular concerns and questions. Since some questions come up frequently I thought I’d share this FAQ for government websites.

Question 1: How do I fix an incorrect phone number or address in search results or Google Maps?

Although managing their agency’s site is plenty of work, government webmasters are often called upon to fix problems found elsewhere on the web too. By far the most common question I’ve taken is about fixing addresses and phone numbers in search results. In this case, government site owners really can do it themselves, by claiming their Google+ Local listing. Incorrect or missing phone numbers, addresses, and other information can be fixed by claiming the listing.

Most locations in Google Maps have a Google+ Local listing — businesses, offices, parks, landmarks, etc. I like to use the San Francisco Main Library as an example: it has contact info, detailed information like the hours they’re open, user reviews and fun extras like photos. When we think users are searching for libraries in San Francisco, we may display a map and a listing so they can find the library as quickly as possible.

If you work for a government agency and want to claim a listing, we recommend using a shared Google Account with an email address at your .gov domain if possible. Usually, ownership of the page is confirmed via a phone call or post card.

Question 2: I’ve claimed the listing for our office, but I have 43 different city parks to claim in Google Maps, and none of them have phones or mailboxes. How do I claim them?

Use the bulk uploader! If you have 10 or more listings / addresses to claim at the same time, you can upload a specially-formatted spreadsheet. Go to www.google.com/places/, click the "Get started now" button, and then look for the "bulk upload" link.

If you run into any issues, use the Verification Troubleshooter.

Question 3: We're moving from a .gov domain to a new .com domain. How should we move the site?

We have a Help Center article with more details, but the basic process involves the following steps:

• Make sure you have both the old and new domain verified in the same Webmaster Tools account.
• Use a 301 redirect on all pages to tell search engines your site has moved permanently.
• Don't do a single redirect from all pages to your new home page — this gives a bad user experience.
• If there's no 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to redirect to a new page with similar content.
• If you can't do redirects, consider cross-domain canonical links.
• Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site's move.
• Have a look at the Links to Your Site in Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your new location.
• We recommend not implementing other major changes at the same time, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates.
• To help Google pick up new URLs faster, use the Fetch as Google tool to ask Google to crawl your new site, and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
• To prevent confusion, it's best to retain control of your old site’s domain and keep redirects in place for as long as possible — at least 180 days.

What if you’re moving just part of the site? This question came up too — for example, a city might move its "Tourism and Visitor Info" section to its own domain.

In that case, many of the same steps apply: verify both sites in Webmaster Tools, use 301 redirects, clean up old links, etc. In this case you don't need to use the Change of Address form in Webmaster Tools since only part of your site is moving. If for some reason you’ll have some of the same content on both sites, you may want to include a cross-domain canonical link pointing to the preferred domain.

Question 4: We've done a ton of work to create unique titles and descriptions for pages. How do we get Google to pick them up?

First off, that's great! Better titles and descriptions help users decide to click through to get the information they need on your page. The government webmasters I’ve spoken with care a lot about the content and organization of their sites, and work hard to provide informative text for users.

Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Changes are picked up as we recrawl your site. But you can do two things to let us know about URLs that have changed:

• Submit an updated XML Sitemap so we know about all of the pages on your site.
• In Webmaster Tools, use the Fetch as Google feature on a URL you’ve updated. Then you can choose to submit it to the index.
• You can choose to submit all of the linked pages as well — if you’ve updated an entire section of your site, you might want to submit the main page or an index page for that section to let us know about a broad collection of URLs.

Question 5: How do I get into the YouTube government partner program?

For this question, I have bad news, good news, and then even better news. On the one hand, the government partner program has been discontinued. But don’t worry, because most of the features of the program are now available to your regular YouTube account. For example, you can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes.

Did I say I had even better news? YouTube has added a lot of functionality useful for governments in the past year:

• You can now broadcast live streaming video to YouTube via Hangouts On Air (requires a Google+ account).
• You can link your YouTube account with your Webmaster Tools account, making it the "official channel" for your site.
• Automatic captions continue to get better and better, supporting more languages.

I hope this FAQ has been helpful, but I’m sure I haven’t covered everything government webmasters want to know. I highly recommend our Webmaster Academy, where you can learn all about making your site search-engine friendly. If you have a specific question, please feel free to add a question in the comments or visit our really helpful Webmaster Central Forum.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Introducing the Structured Data Dashboard

Webmaster level: All

Structured data is becoming an increasingly important part of the web ecosystem. Google makes use of structured data in a number of ways including rich snippets which allow websites to highlight specific types of content in search results. Websites participate by marking up their content using industry-standard formats and schemas.

To provide webmasters with greater visibility into the structured data that Google knows about for their website, we’re introducing today a new feature in Webmaster Tools - the Structured Data Dashboard. The Structured Data Dashboard has three views: site, item type and page-level.

Site-level view
At the top level, the Structured Data Dashboard, which is under Optimization, aggregates this data (by root item type and vocabulary schema).  Root item type means an item that is not an attribute of another on the same page.  For example, the site below has about 2 million Schema.Org annotations for Books (“http://schema.org/Book”)

Itemtype-level view
It also provides per-page details for each item type, as seen below:

Google parses and stores a fixed number of pages for each site and item type. They are stored in decreasing order by the time in which they were crawled. We also keep all their structured data markup. For certain item types we also provide specialized preview columns as seen in this example below (e.g. “Name” is specific to schema.org Product).

The default sort order is such that it would facilitate inspection of the most recently added Structured Data.

Page-level view
Last but not least, we have a details page showing all attributes of every item type on the given page (as well as a link to the Rich Snippet testing tool for the page in question).

Webmasters can use the Structured Data Dashboard to verify that Google is picking up new markup, as well as to detect problems with existing markup, for example monitor potential changes in instance counts during site redesigns.

Posted by Thomas Biggs & Andrei Pascovici, Webmaster Tools Team

New Crawl Error alerts from Webmaster Tools

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re rolling out Crawl Error alerts to help keep you informed of the state of your site.

Since Googlebot regularly visits your site, we know when your site exhibits connectivity issues or suddenly spikes in pages returning HTTP error response codes (e.g. 404 File Not Found, 403 Forbidden, 503 Service Unavailable, etc). If your site is timing out or is exhibiting systemic errors when accessed by Googlebot, other visitors to your site might be having the same problem!

When we see such errors, we may send alerts –- in the form of messages in the Webmaster Tools Message Center –- to let you know what we’ve detected. Hopefully, given this increased communication, you can fix potential issues that may otherwise impact your site’s visitors or your site’s presence in search.

As we discussed in our blog post announcing the new Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors feature, we divide crawl errors into two types: Site Errors and URL Errors.

Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems

Site Errors represent an inability to connect to your site, and represent systemic issues rather than problems with specific pages. Here are some issues that might cause Site Errors:

• Your DNS server is down or misconfigured.
• Your web server itself is firewalled off.
• Your web server is refusing connections from Googlebot.
• Your web server is overloaded, or down.
• Your site’s robots.txt is inaccessible.

These errors are global to a site, and in theory should never occur for a well-operating site (and don’t occur for the large majority of the sites we crawl). If Googlebot detects any appreciable number of these Site Errors, regardless of the size of your site, we’ll try to notify you in the form of a message in the Message Center:

Example of a Site Error alert

The alert provides the number of errors Googlebot encountered crawling your site, the overall crawl error connection rate for your site, a link to the appropriate section of Webmaster Tools to examine the data more closely, and suggestions as to how to fix the problem.

If your site shows a 100% error rate in one of these categories, it likely means that your site is either down or misconfigured in some way. If your site has an error rate less than 100% in any of these categories, it could just indicate a transient condition, but it could also mean that your site is overloaded or improperly configured. You may want to investigate these issues further, or ask about them on our forum.

We may alert you even if the overall error rate is very low — in our experience a well configured site shouldn’t have any errors in these categories.

URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues

Whereas any appreciable number of Site Errors could indicate that your site is misconfigured, overloaded, or simply out of service, URL Errors (pages that return a non-200 HTTP code, or incorrectly return an HTTP 200 code in the case of soft 404 errors) may occur on any well-configured site. Because different sites have different numbers of pages and different numbers of external links, a count of errors that indicates a serious problem for a small site might be entirely normal for a large site.

That’s why for URL Errors we only send alerts when we detect a large spike in the number of errors for any of the five categories of errors (Server error, Soft 404, Access denied, Not found or Not followed). For example, if your site routinely has 100 pages with 404 errors, we won’t alert you if that number fluctuates minimally. However we might notify you when that count reaches a much higher number, say 500 or 1,000. Keep in mind that seeing 404 errors is not always bad, and can be a natural part of a healthy website (see our previous blog post: Do 404s hurt my site?).

A large spike in error count could be because something has changed on your site — perhaps a reconfiguration has changed the permissions for a section of your site, or a new version of a script is crashing regularly, or someone accidentally moved or deleted an entire directory, or a reorganization of your site causes external links to no longer work. It could also just be a transient spike, or could be because of external causes (someone has linked to non-existent pages), so there might not even be a problem; but when we see an unusually large number of errors for your site, we’ll let you know so you can investigate:

Example of a URL Error anomaly alert

The alert describes the category of web errors for which we’ve detected a spike, gives a link to the appropriate section of Webmaster Tools so that you can see what pages we think are problematic, and offers troubleshooting suggestions.

Enable Message forwarding to send alerts to your inbox

We know you’re busy, and that routinely checking Webmaster Tools just to check for new alerts might be something you forget to do. Consider turning on Message forwarding. We’ll send any Webmaster Tools messages to the email address of your choice.

Let us know what you think, and if you have any comments or suggestions on our new alerts please visit our forum.

Written by Brian Malcolm, Webmaster Tools team

Adding associates to manage your YouTube presence

Webmaster level: All

Many organizations have multiple presences on the web. For example, Webmaster Tools lives at www.google.com/webmasters, but it also has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. It's important that visitors to these other properties have confidence that they are actually associated with the Webmaster Tools site. However to date it has been challenging for webmasters to manage which users can take actions on behalf of their site in different services.

Today we're happy to announce a new feature in Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to add "associates" -- trusted users who can act on behalf of your site in other Google products. Unlike site owners and users, associates can't view site data or take any site actions in Webmaster Tools, but they are authorized to perform specific tasks in other products.

For this initial launch, members of YouTube's partner program that have created a YouTube channel for their site can now link the two together. By doing this, your YouTube channel will be displayed as the "official channel" for your website.

Management within Webmaster Tools

To add or change associates:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Configuration, click Associates.
   
3. Click Add a new associate.
4. In the text box, type the email address of the person you want to add.
5. Select the type of association you want.
   
6. Click Add.
   

Management within YouTube

It’s also possible for users to request association from a site’s webmaster.

1. Log in to your YouTube partner account.
2. Click on the user menu and choose Settings > Associated Website.
3. Fill in the page you would like to associate your channel with.
   
4. Click Add. If you’re a verified owner of the site, you’re done. But if someone else in your organization manages the website, the association will be marked Pending. The owner receives a notification with an option to approve or deny the request.
   
5. After approval is granted, navigate back to this page and click Refresh to complete the association.

Through associates, webmasters can easily and safely allow others to associate their website with YouTube channels. We plan to support integration with additional Google products in the future.

If you have more questions, please see the Help with Associates article or visit our webmaster help forum.

Posted by Konstantin Roslyakov, Software Engineer

SEO essentials for startups in under 10 minutes

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Wondering how to be search-friendly but lacking time for SEO research? We’d like to help! Meta keywords tag? Google Search ignores it. Meta description? Good to include.
If you:

• Work on a company website that’s under 50ish pages.
• Hope to rank well for your company name and a handful of related terms (not lots of terms like a news agency or e-commerce site).
• Want to be smart about search engines and attracting searchers, but haven’t kept up with the latest search news.

Then perhaps set aside ten minutes for this video (or just the slides) and gain SEO peace of mind.

Everything I’d tell a startup if I had ten minutes as their SEO consultant.

More tips at developers.google.com/startups. Best of luck!

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

For webmasters: Google+ and the +1 button 101

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

Here’s a video that covers the basics of Google+, the +1 button, getting started on Google+, and how social information can make products, like Search, more relevant. This video is for a range of webmasters (from personal bloggers to SEOs of corporations). So, if you’re interested in learning about Google+, we hope that with 20 minutes and this video on YouTube (we have our own Webmaster Support Channel!), you can feel more up to speed with Google’s social opportunities.

Video about the basics of Google+ and how to get started if you're an interested webmaster.

Speaking of Google+, if you join, please say hello! We're often posting and hosting Hangouts.

Maile	Wysz	Susan	Pierre	Gary
Jonathan	JohnMu	Matt	Jenny	Andrey

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites

Webmaster level: All

Every day more and more smartphones get activated and more websites are producing smartphone-optimized content. Since we last talked about how to build mobile-friendly websites, we’ve been working hard on improving Google’s support for smartphone-optimized content. As part of this effort, we launched Googlebot-Mobile for smartphones back in December 2011, which is specifically tasked with identifying such content.

Today we’d like to give you Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites and explain how to do so in a way that gives both your desktop- and smartphone-optimized sites the best chance of performing well in Google’s search results.

Recommendations for smartphone-optimized sites

The full details of our recommendation can be found in our new help site, which we now summarize.

When building a website that targets smartphones, Google supports three different configurations:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.

2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.

3. Sites that have a separate mobile and desktop sites.

Responsive web design

Responsive web design is a technique to build web pages that alter how they look using CSS3 media queries. That is, there is one HTML code for the page regardless of the device accessing it, but its presentation changes using CSS media queries to specify which CSS rules apply for the browser displaying the page. You can learn more about responsive web design from this blog post by Google's webmasters and in our recommendations.

Using responsive web design has multiple advantages, including:

• It keeps your desktop and mobile content on a single URL, which is easier for your users to interact with, share, and link to and for Google’s algorithms to assign the indexing properties to your content.

• Google can discover your content more efficiently as we wouldn't need to crawl a page with the different Googlebot user agents to retrieve and index all the content.

Device-specific HTML

However, we appreciate that for many situations it may not be possible or appropriate to use responsive web design. That’s why we support having websites serve equivalent content using different, device-specific, HTML. The device-specific HTML can be served on the same URL (a configuration called dynamic serving) or different URLs (such as www.example.com and m.example.com).

If your website uses a dynamic serving configuration, we strongly recommend using the Vary HTTP header to communicate to caching servers and our algorithms that the content may change for different user agents requesting the page. We also use this as a crawling signal for Googlebot-Mobile. More details are here.

As for the separate mobile site configuration, since there are many ways to do this, our recommendation introduces annotations that communicate to our algorithms that your desktop and mobile pages are equivalent in purpose; that is, the new annotations describe the relationship between the desktop and mobile content as alternatives of each other and should be treated as a single entity with each alternative targeting a specific class of device.

These annotations will help us discover your smartphone-optimized content and help our algorithms understand the structure of your content, giving it the best chance of performing well in our search results.

Conclusion

This blog post is only a brief summary of our recommendation for building smartphone-optimized websites. Please read the full recommendation and see which supported implementation is most suitable for your site and users. And, as always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Easier domain verification

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re announcing a new initiative that makes it easier for users to verify domains for Google services like Webmaster Tools and Google Apps.

First, some background on this initiative. To use certain Google services with your website or domain, you currently have to verify that you own the site or domain, since these services can share sensitive data (like search queries) or operate Internet-facing services (like hosted email) on your behalf.

One of our supported verification methods is domain verification. Currently this method requires a user to manually create a DNS TXT record to prove their ownership. For many users, this can be challenging and difficult to do.

So now, in collaboration with Go Daddy and eNom, we’re introducing a simple, automated solution for domain verification that guides you through the process in a few easy steps.

If your domain name records are managed by eNom or Go Daddy, in the Google site verification interface you will see a new, easier verification method as shown below.

   

Selecting this method launches a pop-up window that asks you to log in to the provider using your existing account with them.

  

The first time you log in, you’ll be asked to authorize the provider to access the Google site verification service on your behalf.

 

Next you’ll be asked to confirm that you wish to verify the domain.

   

And that’s it! After a few seconds, your domain should be automatically verified and a confirmation message displayed.

 

Now eNom and Go Daddy customers can more quickly and easily verify their domains to use with Google services like Webmaster Tools and Google Apps.

We’re also happy to share that Bluehost customers will be able to enjoy the same capability in the near future. And we look forward to working with more partners to bring easier domain verification to even more users. (Interested parties can contact us via this form.)

If you have any questions or feedback, as always please let us know via our webmaster help forum.

Posted by Anthony Chavez, Product Manager

Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website

Webmaster level: All
(Cross-posted on the Google Translate Blog)

Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.

So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.

To get started:

1. Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
2. Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator

To tweak a translation:

1. Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
2. Click on ‘Contribute a better translation’
3. And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.

For example, if you’re translating your site into Spanish, and you want to translate Cat not to gato but to Cat, you can tweak it as follows:

If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.

This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

Multilingual and multinational site annotations in Sitemaps

Webmaster level: All

In December 2011 we announced annotations for sites that target users in many languages and, optionally, countries. These annotations define a cluster of equivalent pages that target users around the world, and were implemented using rel-alternate-hreflang link elements in the HTML of each page in the cluster.

Based on webmaster feedback and other considerations, today we’re adding support for specifying the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in Sitemaps. Using Sitemaps instead of HTML link elements offers many advantages including smaller page size and easier deployment for some websites.

To see how this works, let's take a simple example: We wish to specify that for the URL http://www.example.com/en, targeting English language users, the equivalent URL targeting German language speakers http://www.example.com/de. Up till now, the only way to add such annotation is to use a link element, either as an HTTP header or as HTML elements on both URLs like this:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en" >
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.example.com/de" >

As of today, you can alternately use the following equivalent markup in Sitemaps:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/en</loc>
  <xhtml:link 
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="de"
    href="http://www.example.com/de" />
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="en"
    href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/de</loc>
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="de"
    href="http://www.example.com/de" />
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="en"
    href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>

Briefly, the new Sitemaps tags shown in bold function in the same way as the HTML link tags, with both using the same attributes. The full technical details of how the annotations are implemented in Sitemaps, including how to implement the xhtml namespace for the link tag, are in our new Help Center article.

A more detailed example can be found in our new Help Center article, and if you need more help, please ask in our brand new internationalization help forum.

Written by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Introducing Webmaster Academy

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Looking through all of the information in Webmaster Central can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re just getting started with a website. This is why we’re excited to introduce a new set of educational materials in a program called Webmaster Academy. Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for beginner webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site in our index, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.

We’ve organized the content to represent what beginner webmasters should know in a way that’s both structured and modular, meaning you can go through the whole curriculum, or pick and choose your own path. Once you’ve read the articles, you can easily delve deeper into each topic, as we provide links to more in-depth articles. Most lessons are also accompanied by a video from the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. If you’re looking to understand search and improve your site, Webmaster Academy is for you!

Have feedback? Excellent. Post it in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Julian Prentice, Search Quality Team
Contributors: Oliver Barrett & Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Team

Making more pages load instantly

Webmaster level: All


At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:

We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature.

In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article.

Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone.


Posted by Ziga Mahkovec - Software Engineer, Instant Pages

Sorting and Filtering Results in Custom Search

Webmaster level: All
(Cross-posted on the Custom Search Blog)

Using Custom Search Engine (CSE), you can create rich search experiences that make it easier for visitors to find the information they’re looking for on your site. Today we’re announcing two improvements to sorting and filtering of search results in CSE.

First, CSE now supports UI-based results sorting, which you can enable in the Basics tab of the CSE control panel. Once you’ve updated the CSE element code on your site, a “sort by” picker will become visible at the top of the results section.

By default CSE supports sorting by date and relevance. In the control panel, you can specify additional “sort by” keys that are based on the structure of your site’s content, giving users more options to find the results that are most relevant to them. For example, if you’ve marked up pages for product rich snippets, you could enable sorting based on price as shown below:

Second, we’re introducing compact queries for filtering by attribute. Currently you can issue a query like
[more:pagemap:product-description:search more:pagemap:product-description:engine]
which will only show pages with a ‘product-description’ attribute that contains both ‘search’ and ‘engine’.

With a compact query, you can issue the same request as:
[more:p:product-description:search*engine]

We hope these new features help you create richer and more useful search experiences for your visitors. As always, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know via our Help Forum.

Posted by Roger Wang, Software Engineer

Navigation, Dashboard and Home page

Webmaster level: All

After announcing Webmaster Tools spring cleaning earlier this quarter, it’s time to do the job. There are a few changes coming along: an updated navigation, revamped dashboard, and a compact view for the home page site-list.

Here's the new sample Webmaster Tools Dashboard for www.example.com

We’ve regrouped the features in Webmaster Tools to create an improved navigation structure (shown on the left-hand side of the above image). We distinguished the following groups: Configuration, Health, Traffic and Optimization. Each group represents a related set of functionality:

• Configuration: Things you configure and generally don’t change very often.
• Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK.
• Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who’s linking to you; where you can explore the data about your site.
• Optimization: Where you can find ideas to enhance your site, which enables us to better understand and represent your site in Search and other services.

If you have a moment, please take time to familiarize yourself with the new Webmaster Tools navigation. Some features were slightly renamed, such as HTML Suggestions became HTML Improvements, however the functionality remains the same.

Hoping you’ll find the new navigation useful, we also think you’ll like the new Dashboard. At the top of the Dashboard you can see recent, important, prioritized messages regarding your site. Just below that, you’ll find another section which provides a brief summary of the current status of your site. There are three widgets displayed: Crawl Errors, Search Queries and Sitemaps, each representing a different navigation group: Health, Traffic and Optimization (respectively). We know your time is valuable. With the new Dashboard, we've surfaced more messages and charts to let you see how your site is doing at a glance. Take a quick look before diving into the details.

Finally, those of you who manage a large number of sites can choose to view your site-list in a 'Compact' layout, without the large site-preview thumbnails. Don't worry, if you want the more expanded layout you can always switch back.

Compact layout of the Home page

If you have questions or comments about these changes please post them in our Help Forum.

Written by Kamila Primke, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools

Coding guidelines for HTML and CSS

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

Even more Top Search Queries data

Webmaster level: All We recently updated the Top Search Queries data to take into account the average top position, we enabled programmatic download and we made sure you could still get all the queries that drive traffic to your site. Well, now it’s time to give you more search queries data!

First, and most important, you can now see up to 90 days of historical data. If you click on the date picker in the top right of Search queries, you can go back three months instead of the previous 35 days.

And after you click:

In order to see 90 days, the option to view with changes will be disabled. If you want to see the changes with respect to the previous time period, the limit remains 30 days. Changes are disabled by default but you can switch them on and off with the button between the graph and the table. Top search queries data is normally available within 2 or 3 days.

Another big improvement in Webmaster Tools is that you can now see basic search query data as soon as you verify ownership of a site. No more waiting to see your information.

Finally, we're now collecting data for the top 2000 queries for which your site gets clicks. You may see less than 2000 if we didn’t record any clicks for a particular query in a given day, or if your query data is spread out among many countries or languages. For example, a search for [flowers] on Google Canada is counted separately from a search for [flowers] on google.com. Nevertheless, with this change 98% of sites will have complete coverage. Let us know what you think. We hope the new data will be useful.

Written by Javier Tordable, Tech Lead, Webmaster Tools