Message Forwarding

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

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

Posted By Tanya Gupta, Software Engineer

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 1st - 5th

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

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

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

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

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


And now a peek behind the scenes:


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

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

SEO Starter Guide now available in 40 languages

Webmaster Level: Beginner

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

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

Here's a list of the languages available:

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

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

Introducing Page Speed

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

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

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

Posted by Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team

Webmaster Central YouTube update for May 26-29

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

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

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

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

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team