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

Webmaster forums' Top Contributors rock

Webmaster level: All

The TC Summit was a blast! As we wrote in our announcement post, we recently invited more than 250 Top Contributors from all over the world to California to thank them for being so awesome and to give them the opportunity to meet some of our forum guides, engineers and product managers in person.

Our colleagues Adrianne and Brenna already published a recap post on the Official Google Blog. As for us, the search folks at Google, there's not much left to say except that we enjoyed the event and meeting Top Contributors in real life, many of them for the first time. We got the feeling you guys had a great time, too. Let’s quote a few of the folks who make a huge difference on a daily basis:

Sasch Mayer on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English):

"For a number of reasons this event does hold a special place for me, and always will. It's not because I was one of comparatively few people to be invited for a Jolly at the ‘Plex, but because this trip offered the world's TCs a unique opportunity to finally meet each other in person."

Herbert Sulzer, a.k.a. Luzie on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English, German and Spanish):

“Hehehe! Fun, fun fun, this was all fun :D Huhhh”

Aygul Zagidullina on Google+ (Web Search TC in English):

“It was a truly fantastic, amazing, and unforgettable experience meeting so many other TCs across product forums and having the chance to talk to and hear from so many Googlers across so many products!”

Of course we did receive lots of constructive feedback, too. Transparency and communication were on top of the list, and we're looking into increasing our outreach efforts via Webmaster Tools, so stay tuned! By the way, if you haven’t done so yet, please remember to use the forwarding option in the Webmaster Tools Message Center to get the messages straight to your email inbox. In the meantime please keep an eye on our Webmaster Central Blog, and of course keep on contributing to discussions in the Google Webmaster Forum.

On behalf of all Google guides who participated in the 2011 Summit we want to thank you. You guys rock! :)

That’s right, TCs & Google Guides came from all over the world to convene in California.

TCs & Google Guides from Webmaster Central and Search forums after one of the sessions.

After a day packed with presentations and breakout sessions...

...we did what we actually came for...

...enjoyed a party, celebrated and had a great time together.

Posted by Esperanza Navas, Yves Taquet, Uli Lutz, & Kaspar Szymanski, Google Search Quality

Reconsideration requests get more transparent

Webmaster level: All

If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had received the request, we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request. This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. Earlier this year, we started experimenting with sending more detailed reconsideration request responses and the feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive!

Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.

If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it. For more help debugging ranking issues, read our article about why a site may not be showing up in Google search results.

We’ve made a lot of progress on making the entire reconsideration request process more transparent. We aren’t able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but now many webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and they’ll know the outcome of the reconsideration review. In an ideal world, Google could be completely transparent about how every part of our rankings work. However, we have to maintain a delicate balance: trying to give as much information to webmasters as we can without letting spammers probe how to do more harm to users. We're happy that Google has set the standard on tools, transparency, and communication with site owners, but we'll keep looking for ways to do even better.

Posted by Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Help us improve Google Search

Webmaster level: Advanced

Yes, we're looking for help improving Google search—but this time we're not asking you to submit more spam reports. Although we still appreciate receiving quality spam reports, today we've got a different opportunity for you to improve Google Search: how about YOU join our team and do the webspam fighting yourself?

Interested? Here's what we're looking for: open-minded academic graduates willing to work in a multinational environment in our Dublin office. Looking at a site's source code should not scare you. You should be excited about search engines and the Internet. It’s also essential that you share our aversion to webspam and the drive to make high-quality content accessible. PlayStation or foosball skills are a plus.

This is an actual work environment photo taken at the Dublin Google office.

If you'd like to know more about the positions available, here's the full list of requirements and responsibilities. Great candidates should be able to email the recruiter directly.

Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality

New webmaster tutorial videos

Webmaster level: All

Over the past couple of years, we’ve released over 375 videos on our YouTube channel, with the majority of them answering direct questions from webmasters. Today, we’re starting to release a freshly baked batch of videos, and you might notice that some of these are a little different. Don’t worry, they still have Matt Cutts in a variety of colored shirts. Instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics. For example, if you were wondering what the limits are for 301 redirects at Google, we now have a single video for that:



Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for this round. You can be the first to hear about the new videos as they’re released by subscribing to our channel or following us on Twitter.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Google's SEO Report Card

Webmaster Level: All

How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card.

Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations. These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines. From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products' pages.

The project looked at the main pages of 100 different Google products, measuring them across a dozen common optimization categories. Future iterations of the project might look at deeper Google product web pages as well as international ones. We released the report card within Google last month and since then a good number of teams have taken action on it or plan to.

We hope you find our SEO Report Card useful and we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments below or in the Webmaster Central Help Forum. And if you'd like to do your own SEO tune up, a good place to start is by reading our free SEO Beginner's Guide.

Written by Brandon Falls, Adi Goradia, and Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse

Webmaster Level: All

As we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread.

You may have read in an earlier post that we've begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we're happy to announce that we'll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center.

Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we've detected on their websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google's search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications.

A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this:

We've been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues.

Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date. And if you don't want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

State of the Index 2009

Webmaster Level: All

At PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009, I gave a "State of the Index" talk which covers what Google has done for users, web developers, and webmasters in the last year. I recently recreated it on video for those of you who didn't make it to the conference. You can watch it below:

And here are the slides if you'd like to follow along:

Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

Answering your December Grab Bag questions

Webmaster Level: All

You asked and Matt Cutts answered. It's time to answer the latest round of Grab Bag questions! Here's the first answer, complete with Matt's new hairstyle:

We have a lot of videos ready to share, so we're not currently taking new questions for the Grab Bag. If you have a question that you would like answered, your best bet as always is to head to our Webmaster Help Forum, where you'll find plenty of knowledgeable webmasters, including some Bionic Posters!

To be kept up-to-date on our latest video releases, you can follow @googlewmc on Twitter, where we'll announce new videos and blog posts as they're published.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

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

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

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

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

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

Canonical Link Element: presentation from SMX West

A little while ago, Google and other search engines announced support for a canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues. I recreated my presentation from SMX West and you can watch it below:



You can access the slides directly or follow along here:

By the way, Ask just announced that they will support the canonical link element. Read all about it in the Ask.com blog entry.

Thanks again to Wysz for turning this into a great video.

In fact, you might not have seen it, but we recently created a webmaster videos channel on YouTube. If you're interested, you can watch the new webmaster channel. If you subscribe to that channel, you'll always find out about new webmaster-related videos from Google.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

Introducing the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel

In his State of the Index presentation, Matt Cutts said that one of the things to look for from Google in 2009 is continued communication with webmasters. On the Webmaster Central team, we've found that using video is a great way to reach people. We've shown step-by-step instructions on how to use features of Webmaster Tools, shared our presentations with folks who were unable to make it to conferences, and even taken you through a day in the life of our very own Maile Ohye as she meets with many Googlers involved in webmaster support.

We plan on releasing more videos like these in the future, so we've opened up our own channel on YouTube to host webmaster-related videos. Our first video is already up, and we'll have more to share with you soon. If you want to be the first to know when we release something new, you can subscribe to us using your YouTube account, or grab this RSS feed if you'd like to keep track in your feed reader. Please let us know how you like the channel, and use the comments in this post to share your ideas for future videos.

And while we'll all do our best to make sure Matt Cutts understands that Rick Rolling is so last year, be careful where you click on April 1st.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Growing the Webmaster Help Groups Team

Written by Kas, Search Quality Team

One of the ways in which we continuously work to improve our service for users everywhere is to localize and adjust our tools for different regions. In November, we had a chance to introduce our international Webmaster Help Group Team and its guides from Dublin. Today I'm very happy to announce that we've launched three more Google monitored groups in Hebrew, Turkish and Hungarian.

Keeping with tradition, the new guides want to introduce themselves, so please meet our new Webmaster Help Group guides :-)


Turkish Webmaster Help Group

Merhaba! I am Bahar and I am very happy about our brand new Turkish Webmaster Help Group. I will be helping out on any topics related to this new group. Having an engineering background, I've worked in different parts of the IT field as a C and C++ developer and now I work for Google in Dublin. It was quite a big change for me to move here, leaving sunny Istanbul behind. But it was very easy to get used to this new life since I have met really friendly people here who are very enthusiastic about the job they have been doing. You're going to meet a couple of them as well when you keep reading further. Please do not hesitate to have a look at the group and drop your posts either to introduce yourselves or to discuss Webmaster related issues with me and hopefully soon many other helpful, open-minded members!
- Bahar

Hebrew Webmaster Help Group

I’m Alon and I’ll be looking after the Hebrew Webmaster Help Group. Originally coming from the wonderful Israeli city of Holon, now I spend my days and nights in the green island called Ireland. So let me tell you a bit about myself by ranking keywords and their importance in my life: family, social activism, work, web, friends, Tel-Aviv, coffee and rollerblading, to mention a few. Prior to joining Google I graduated in economics and worked as a freelancer in the IT field. I love the online sphere, and for a couple of years now I've been volunteering for an organization facilitating international webmaster communication. I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in our Hebrew Webmaster Help Group.
- Alon

Hungarian Webmaster Help Group

Sziasztok, my name is Tibor, and I am very excited about the launch of the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group. I grew up in the heart of Hungary, in the prosperous and pleasant city of Székesfehérvár, right between Lake Balaton and Budapest. I have an engineering and management background, seasoned with marketing and design experience, and have worked in various assignments, including dozens of web related projects (the first in '94). Today I am a happy owner of a small blog, but have some ambitious plans to start some bigger projects too, to get first hand experience of the constantly growing arsenal of Google's Webmaster Tools! I work primarily on search, dealing with Turkish and Lithuanian languages besides Hungarian. I also oversee trends in a dozen other languages scattered across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Just like my colleague János, I also enjoy old-school times with StarCraft, and my "weaknesses" also include Guitar Hero and the Nintendo Wii. As Webmaster Tools is now available in Hungarian, I look forward to hearing from you in the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group and to engage myself in vibrant discussions :-)
- Tibor

Hungarian Webmaster Help Group

Sziasztok! My name is János and I'm in charge of the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group, too. I studied linguistics and worked in the IT industry before I ended up with Google in Ireland. Currently my primary work focus is search in several languages. In the past I've been lucky to support a wide range of different markets including Russian, Turkish, Polish and many more. Well, I like learning languages, as you might guess. I'm running my own website where I develop content, sometimes I need to troubleshoot it as well - no crawling/indexing issues yet though - I'm a happy Webmaster Tools user ;-) When I don't work, I'm usually at home surfing the Internet or leading my zealous Protoss forces against other races in the StarCraft universe. Please drop by the Hungarian Help Group and introduce yourself, too! My guide colleague Tibor and I are eagerly waiting to help you with webmaster issues.
- János

Looking back on 2007

Written by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools Team

2007 has been a great year of change and growth for the Webmaster Central team. Without the webmaster community helping us drive our vision to create better tools we wouldn't have accomplished much. All of us with the Webmaster Central team would like to say a big thank you to everyone! Before we look ahead to 2008 and begin to incorporate your feedback from the blog posts and discussion groups, we would like to take a minute to reflect upon some of our bigger feats of the last twelve months.

Our blog has been very active since its launch in August 2006, and we hope you've found it helpful. For those who are new readers, you can find useful information about our Webmaster Tools updates here, as well as articles on how to make your sites more search engine-friendly and user-friendly. Outside of the US, we have readers from the UK, France, Canada, India and Germany, just to name a few—it just goes to show what a big and widespread community you are! In fact, we also have a dedicated group of readers for our Webmaster Central German and China blogs. For those keeping track, 47.28% of you are using Firefox to read our blog and 45.06% are using Internet Explorer, and our most popular post this past December answered your questions on meta tags and web search. Here's a snapshot of what our top search queries look like for December:

January

• Made preparations for our big debut (see February)

February

• Moved Webmaster Tools officially out of beta
• Traveled the globe and met with webmasters like you at conferences in Australia and London
• Launched the external and internal links feature in Webmaster Tools to make it easier for you to learn about your links

March

• Extended anchor text information to show the entire phrase sites use to link to you (not just individual words)
• Posted some helpful articles about robots.txt
• Kicked off a new blog for German webmasters

April

• Met with more of you at SES New York
• Added URL removal to Webmaster Tools

May

• Shared some useful tips on how webmasters can make use of Google's newly unveiled universal search
• Met with webmasters like you at conferences in China, Italy, New York and San Jose

June

• Revamped the Help Center to make it easier for everyone to find the content they need
• Reached out to webmasters at conferences in Seattle, Santa Clara and Toronto
  

July

• Unveiled the Message Center, a key component in helping us keep in touch with you!
• Improved Sitemap feedback to help you identify important issues in your Sitemaps
• Launched a Webmaster Central blog in China
  
  

August

• Enabled non-English domain names in Webmaster Tools
• Chatted with you at SES San Jose
• Updated Webmaster Tool's feature to help you analyze your robots.txt files
  
  

September

• Updated Webmaster Tools:

• Introduced Subscriber stats
• Revamped the UI
• Added support for 2 new languages: Romanian & Turkish
  

October

• Went all out for Halloween in true Google fashion
• Launched new features in Webmaster Tools—and a lot of them:

• Sitemap updates: cross-submissions and Code Search Sitemaps
  
• Top search queries—for the last 6 months!
• Sitelinks feature to help you identify the ones you have and help you get rid of the ones you don't like
  
• Set your geographic target to help your users find you more easily in country-specific searches
  

• Improved data freshness to keep you better informed about your site's performance

November

• Highlighted terrific webmasters in the discussion group and introduced Googlers ready to answer your questions in 11 non-English languages.
  
• Made it easier for Go Daddy users to access our tools
  

• Produced some helpful videos featuring our very own Matt Cutts on the anatomy of a search result and how to use ALT attributes intelligently
  

December

• Another Webmaster Tools update loaded with new features:
  
• Improved Sitemap summary pages to help you identify issues in your Sitemaps
  
• Content analysis
  
• Video Sitemaps
• Added support for 2 new languages: Czech and Hungarian

• Attended PubCon in Las Vegas and SES Chicago
  

It was a busy year, but we had a lot of fun. I hope you'll stick with us as we embark on more great adventures in 2008. Remember, you can always reach out to us through our discussion group or at various search conferences throughout the year and around the globe!

A dozen ways to discuss "webmaster help"

Written by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team

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

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


French Webmaster Help Group

Salut, I come from the French city Bordeaux where I spent most of my time, before I moved to Paris and then Dublin where I work now in Google Search Quality. When not in front of my computer, I like to go to the cinema, play chess and organize dinners
with my friends.
- Guide Google

Italian Webmaster Help Group

Ciao, my name is Stefano and I’m responsible for the Italian Webmaster Help Group. I work on search quality issues in Italian. I’m from Italy and have been living in Ireland for more than 2 years. I do love the multicultural environment you can find in Dublin and all the people from everywhere you get to know here, but sometimes it’s difficult to be so far away from my favorite football team, so now and then I really have to fly back home to get a bit of Serie A.
- Guida Google

German Webmaster Help Group

Grüss Gott! My name is Uli, and I post in the German Webmaster Help Group. I am originally from Germany but live in Ireland now. Unfortunately, I don't have my own website to show off. The German Help Group has grown into a big, vibrant community of very helpful and savvy webmasters, so if you speak German, go and check it out!
- Google Webmeister Guide

Spanish Webmaster Help Group

Hola! My name is Alvar and I'll be monitoring the Spanish Webmaster Help Group. Please join us if you speak a word or two in Spanish :-) More on the personal side, I don't own a portal or something like that but rather a tiny blog with nearly no visibility on the Internet, and I'm happy with that. I studied telecommunication engineering and my hobbies include soccer, foosball, table tennis, basically almost any other sport, traveling, photography, cinema, and technology, so I admit sitting in front of a computer can be counted as a hobby :-) Another important fact about me is that I'm from Barcelona, a city everyone should visit at least once in their life. What are you waiting for?
- Guía de Google para webmasters

Hola, I'm Rebecca. I studied to be a librarian but somehow along the way ended up being drawn into the digital side of information. So while I still snuggle up to books at night, computers take up most of my day. As for things I like to do (but wouldn't go so far as to call them hobbies…) I'm still pretty new to Dublin so I rather enjoy walking around until I'm lost and then trying to figure out how to get back home, and then when I get back home I like to play with my cat, best known for her fantastic Gollum impersonation when she gets riled up.
- Guía de Google

Dutch Webmaster Help Group

Hallo, I'm Andre. I'm very fond of Dutch music. But since living in Dublin for almost 2 years now, my taste for music has fused with the Irish sound. I like listening to live music in pubs, hanging out with the locals, have a pint or two and talking about upcoming gigs, artists, and all other topics that pass the day.
- André

Swedish Webmaster Help Group

Hejsan! My name is Hessam and I'm responsible for the Swedish Webmaster Help Group. I've been with Google for the last 2 years, working on search quality issues in Sweden. I'm originally from Sweden but moved to Dublin two years ago. My main interest is traveling and living in Dublin makes it easy to visit to all corners of Europe without blowing the budget. Thanks to cheap airlines, it takes merely a few hours from my door to the beer gardens of Munich, wine bars of Paris, ski slopes of Italy or beaches of Spain, depending on the mood. Looking forward to talking to you all!
- Google Webbansvarig Guide

Finnish Webmaster Help Group

Hei, I'm Anu and I work in the Search Quality team. I'm originally from Finland but these days I hold my umbrella high in Dublin. When I'm not online, you can catch me cycling (be it one or two wheels), playing virtual tennis or at the airport. I've been bitten by the travel bug, and try to see as many places near and far as possible. Besides all things webmaster related, I also have an interest in foreign languages, books and films. I look forward to meeting you in the Finnish Webmaster Help Group!
- Googlen Web-ylläpidon Ryhmän Opas

Polish Webmaster Help Group

Cześć, I'm Guglarz (it stands for Googler in Polish), the Googler on the Polish Webmaster Help Group. I was lucky to grow up in the city of Kraków, Poland's most beautiful city and the place where Google recently opened a research center. I've been with Google for two years now and I still love this job as much as I did the very first day. It's my favorite hobby activity in fact. If I don't work, I like to keep myself busy with general aviation, running or bowling, a sport I recently found out I was talented in. ;-)

I discovered my passion for the Internet early in school and after graduating in information science studies I was looking for a challenging position in the industry, although after the year 2000 crash there was little hope for that. It took me a couple of jobs in the established industries and some traveling around the globe before I found my dream job here at Google.

Ever since I started helping on the Polish Webmaster Help Group, it has been growing rapidly, both in terms of user numbers as much as in terms of the activity. It's really exciting to see how Polish webmasters help each other and make the web a more interesting place. Three group members, Cezary Lech, Umik and krzys in particular made an effort to vitalize the community in its early days. I'd like to say dziękuję (thank you in Polish) and please keep up the great spirit - thumbs up!
- Guglarz

Portuguese Webmaster Help Group

Olá, my name is Pedro. I'm Portuguese and I'm part of the Search Quality team. I've been working at Google since March 2006 mostly focused on the Portuguese language markets. I grew up in Tavira, a small town in the Algarve region – South of Portugal – and I always had a nerdy side, playing with computers since my very early days when memory meant 128KB. Most of my interests fall on my origins, I enjoy sailing and scuba diving, music is also on my top list. I'm based in the European Headquarters – Dublin office, and I'll be looking to strengthening contact with Portuguese webmasters (non Portuguese are also welcome).
- Ajuda a Webmasters do Google

Russian Webmaster Help Group

Привет! My name is Oxana and I come from Moldova, a teeny tiny country in Eastern Europe. My background is in mathematics and computer sciences and I have worked as a web developer for more than 7 years now. Of course I have a web site, but it features only an, unfortunately, eternal "under construction" message and a hope for a better future. :) I love to read and to travel, and at the moment I am a helpless wannabe photographer. Also, I'm a passionate WoW player and soon I'll become the best Warlock Orc on this side of Kalimdor! When I'm a grown-up person I work at Google on the Search Quality team and I primarily support the Russian market.
- Оксана

Danish Webmaster Help Group

Hej, my name is Jonas, and I am from Copenhagen, the wonderful capital of beautiful Denmark. I've been a webmaster of a blog since 2001, where I still drop a few lines every now and then. I am a jack of many trades, with a background in human geography and communication, design, and media. I've done some authoring for the web, but mostly administrative backends in PHP/MySQL, so they are not that interesting. I've been active on Usenet for awhile as well, and spent many hours there, getting smarter with the help of others.

I've been with Google for a couple of years now, working exclusively with search quality and I am now helping out in the Danish Webmaster Help Group. Looking forward to seeing you there (:
- GoogleGuide