Changes in First Click Free

Webmaster level: Intermediate

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

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

Questions and answers about First Click Free

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Best practices for Product Search

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

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

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

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

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 8th - 12th

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

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

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

Matt also went over a great example of whitehat linkbait:



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



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

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

An Update on Sitemaps at Google

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

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

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

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

Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Out with the old, in with the new

Webmaster Level: All

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

You offered some constructive feedback as well:

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

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

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

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team