Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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.

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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

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Webmaster Level: All

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

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



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

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

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



Highlights

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

Go ahead, get started

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

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

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

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

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Webmaster Level: All

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


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

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


and now with microformats markup:


or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's next?

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

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

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

Why do you support multiple encodings?

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

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

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

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

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Webmaster Level: All

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

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

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Webmaster Level: All

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

Here is a quick overview of these new gadgets:

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



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



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


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


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

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

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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

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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

??????! 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

Zdrav

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

We've been tracking the growth of Sitemaps on the web. It's been just 2 years since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft co-announced the Sitemaps directive in robots.txt, and it is already supported in many millions of websites including educational and government websites! At the WWW'09 conference in Madrid, Uri Schonfeld presented his summer internship work studying Sitemaps from a coverage and freshness perspective. If you're interested in how some popular websites are using Sitemaps, and how Sitemaps complement "classic" webcrawling, take a look:


At Google, we care deeply about getting increased coverage and freshness of the content we index. We are excited about open standards that help webmasters open up their content automatically to search engines, so users can find relevant content for their searches.

Written by Narayanan Shivakumar, VP Engineering

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Do you think your site might be penalized because of something that
happened on it? As two leaders of the reconsideration team, we recently made
a video to help you discover how to create a good reconsideration request,
including tips on what we look for on our side. Watch the video and then
let us know if you have questions in the comments!



Posted by Rachel Searles and Brian White, Search Quality Team

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Webmaster Level: All

You may be familiar with sitelinks, the links that show up underneath the first search result and which lead to specific pages deeper within the site. Sitelinks enable users to jump directly to important parts of a site, which is often useful for large, complex websites. Sitelinks have the additional advantage of giving users an overview of a website's content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site. For webmasters, sitelinks are also beneficial because they help to expose parts of your site that users may not know about. For instance, a search for NASA provides links to a gallery of images, a page about Space Shuttle and ISS missions, and so on:


Until now, sitelinks have only ever appeared on the first search result, and so at most one site could have sitelinks per query. We're now launching an expansion of sitelinks: a single row of links can now appear for results that didn't show sitelinks before, even for results that aren't in the first position. This means multiple results on one query can now have sitelinks. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result. Here's an example where the first three results each have one-line sitelinks:


These one-line sitelinks have many of the same benefits as the full two-column sitelinks, but on a smaller scale: they show users some relevant sub-pages in the site and give an idea of what the site is about. Comparing the sitelinks that appear for each result can even illustrate the difference between the sites. Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users.

For webmasters, this new feature means it's possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn't. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users. If, however, you absolutely would prefer not to have a particular sitelink show up, remember that you can always block a page from appearing as a sitelink for 90 days through Webmaster Tools. In fact, as part of our ongoing efforts at improving the Webmaster Tools experience, we're speeding up our response time to blocked pages, so you should see a blocked page get dropped as a sitelink even faster than before. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the sitelink blocking tool, take a look at this previous blog post. Currently you can only block sitelinks on your site's home page, but we're working on expanding this capability so you'll soon be able to remove them from any other page as well.

We hope you find these improvements to sitelinks and Webmaster Tools helpful for both your site and your visitors!

Posted by Doantam Phan, Software Engineer, and Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Sitelinks Team

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Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Since launching Google Chrome last September, we received a number of questions from webmasters and web developers about how to make their sites look great in Google Chrome. The questions were very insightful and illuminating for the Chrome team, and I want to respond with a few helpful tips for making your site look stellar in Google Chrome.

Detecting Google Chrome

Most sites will render the same in both Safari and Google Chrome, because they're both WebKit-based browsers. If your site looks right in Safari, then it should look right in Google Chrome, too.

Since Chrome is relatively new, many sites have confused Google Chrome with another browser. If your site doesn't look quite right in Chrome but works fine in Safari, it's possible your site may just not recognize Chrome's user-agent string.

As platforms and browsers adopt WebKit as their rendering engine, your site can detect and support them automatically with the right JavaScript checks. Commonly, sites use JavaScript to 'sniff' the navigator.userAgent property for "Chrome" or "Safari", but you should use proper object detection if possible. In fact, Gmail has been detecting WebKit properly in Chrome since day one!

If you must detect the user-agent type, you can use this simple JavaScript to detect WebKit:

var isWebkit =
  navigator.userAgent.indexOf("AppleWebKit") > -1;

Or, if you want to check that the version of WebKit is at least a certain version?say, if you want to use a spiffy new WebKit feature:

var webkitVersion =
  parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.split("AppleWebKit/")[1]) ||
  undefined;
if (webkitVersion && webkitVersion > 500 ) {
  // use spiffy WebKit feature here
}

For reference, here are a few browser releases and the version of WebKit they shipped:



We do not recommend adding "Google" or "Apple" to your navigator.vendor checks to detect WebKit or Google Chrome, because this will not detect other WebKit or Chromium-based browsers!

You can find more information about detecting WebKit at webkit.org.

Other helpful tips

• Google Chrome doesn't support ActiveX plug-ins, but does support NPAPI plug-ins. This means you can show plug-in content like Flash and Java in Google Chrome the same way you do with Firefox and Safari.
• If text on your site looks a bit off, make sure you provide the proper content type and character encoding information in the HTTP response headers, or at the beginning of your pages, preferably near the top of the <head> section.
• Don't put block elements inside inline elements.

Wrong:   <a><div>This will look wrong.</div></a>

Right:     <div><a>This will look right!</a></div>

• If your JavaScript isn't working in Google Chrome, you can debug using Chrome's built-in JavaScript debugger, under the "page" menu -> 'Developer' -> 'Debug JavaScript' menu option.

To help webmasters and web developers find more answers, we created a support center and forum specifically to answer your questions. Of course, if you find something you think is really a bug in Chrome, please report it to us!

Help us improve Google Chrome!

If you'd like to help even more, we're looking for sites that may be interested in allowing Google to use their site as a benchmark for our internal compatibility and performance measurements. If you're interested in having Google Chrome development optimized against a cached version of your site, please contact us about details at chrome-webmasters@google.com.

Please keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep working to improve Google Chrome!

Written by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager, Google Chrome

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Last July, we launched our Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program and it's been a huge hit. Hundreds of providers have signed up, and thousands of users now access Webmaster Tools via their provider's control panel.

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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.

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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

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Webmaster Level: All

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

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



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

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

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



Highlights

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

Go ahead, get started

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

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

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

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

Dieser Artikel wurde von von der Seite Google verfasst und hier aggregiert.

Webmaster Level: All

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


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

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


and now with microformats markup:


or alternatively, use RDFa markup. Either format works:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's next?

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

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

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

Why do you support multiple encodings?

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

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

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

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

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Webmaster Level: All

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

Posted by Matt Ghering, Product Marketing Manager

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Webmaster Level: All

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

Here is a quick overview of these new gadgets:

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



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



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


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


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

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

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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

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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

??????! 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

Zdrav

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We've been tracking the growth of Sitemaps on the web. It's been just 2 years since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft co-announced the Sitemaps directive in robots.txt, and it is already supported in many millions of websites including educational and government websites! At the WWW'09 conference in Madrid, Uri Schonfeld presented his summer internship work studying Sitemaps from a coverage and freshness perspective. If you're interested in how some popular websites are using Sitemaps, and how Sitemaps complement "classic" webcrawling, take a look:


At Google, we care deeply about getting increased coverage and freshness of the content we index. We are excited about open standards that help webmasters open up their content automatically to search engines, so users can find relevant content for their searches.

Written by Narayanan Shivakumar, VP Engineering

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Do you think your site might be penalized because of something that
happened on it? As two leaders of the reconsideration team, we recently made
a video to help you discover how to create a good reconsideration request,
including tips on what we look for on our side. Watch the video and then
let us know if you have questions in the comments!



Posted by Rachel Searles and Brian White, Search Quality Team

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Webmaster Level: All

You may be familiar with sitelinks, the links that show up underneath the first search result and which lead to specific pages deeper within the site. Sitelinks enable users to jump directly to important parts of a site, which is often useful for large, complex websites. Sitelinks have the additional advantage of giving users an overview of a website's content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site. For webmasters, sitelinks are also beneficial because they help to expose parts of your site that users may not know about. For instance, a search for NASA provides links to a gallery of images, a page about Space Shuttle and ISS missions, and so on:


Until now, sitelinks have only ever appeared on the first search result, and so at most one site could have sitelinks per query. We're now launching an expansion of sitelinks: a single row of links can now appear for results that didn't show sitelinks before, even for results that aren't in the first position. This means multiple results on one query can now have sitelinks. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result. Here's an example where the first three results each have one-line sitelinks:


These one-line sitelinks have many of the same benefits as the full two-column sitelinks, but on a smaller scale: they show users some relevant sub-pages in the site and give an idea of what the site is about. Comparing the sitelinks that appear for each result can even illustrate the difference between the sites. Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users.

For webmasters, this new feature means it's possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn't. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users. If, however, you absolutely would prefer not to have a particular sitelink show up, remember that you can always block a page from appearing as a sitelink for 90 days through Webmaster Tools. In fact, as part of our ongoing efforts at improving the Webmaster Tools experience, we're speeding up our response time to blocked pages, so you should see a blocked page get dropped as a sitelink even faster than before. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the sitelink blocking tool, take a look at this previous blog post. Currently you can only block sitelinks on your site's home page, but we're working on expanding this capability so you'll soon be able to remove them from any other page as well.

We hope you find these improvements to sitelinks and Webmaster Tools helpful for both your site and your visitors!

Posted by Doantam Phan, Software Engineer, and Raj Krishnan, Product Manager, Sitelinks Team

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Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Since launching Google Chrome last September, we received a number of questions from webmasters and web developers about how to make their sites look great in Google Chrome. The questions were very insightful and illuminating for the Chrome team, and I want to respond with a few helpful tips for making your site look stellar in Google Chrome.

Detecting Google Chrome

Most sites will render the same in both Safari and Google Chrome, because they're both WebKit-based browsers. If your site looks right in Safari, then it should look right in Google Chrome, too.

Since Chrome is relatively new, many sites have confused Google Chrome with another browser. If your site doesn't look quite right in Chrome but works fine in Safari, it's possible your site may just not recognize Chrome's user-agent string.

As platforms and browsers adopt WebKit as their rendering engine, your site can detect and support them automatically with the right JavaScript checks. Commonly, sites use JavaScript to 'sniff' the navigator.userAgent property for "Chrome" or "Safari", but you should use proper object detection if possible. In fact, Gmail has been detecting WebKit properly in Chrome since day one!

If you must detect the user-agent type, you can use this simple JavaScript to detect WebKit:

var isWebkit =
  navigator.userAgent.indexOf("AppleWebKit") > -1;

Or, if you want to check that the version of WebKit is at least a certain version?say, if you want to use a spiffy new WebKit feature:

var webkitVersion =
  parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.split("AppleWebKit/")[1]) ||
  undefined;
if (webkitVersion && webkitVersion > 500 ) {
  // use spiffy WebKit feature here
}

For reference, here are a few browser releases and the version of WebKit they shipped:



We do not recommend adding "Google" or "Apple" to your navigator.vendor checks to detect WebKit or Google Chrome, because this will not detect other WebKit or Chromium-based browsers!

You can find more information about detecting WebKit at webkit.org.

Other helpful tips

• Google Chrome doesn't support ActiveX plug-ins, but does support NPAPI plug-ins. This means you can show plug-in content like Flash and Java in Google Chrome the same way you do with Firefox and Safari.
• If text on your site looks a bit off, make sure you provide the proper content type and character encoding information in the HTTP response headers, or at the beginning of your pages, preferably near the top of the <head> section.
• Don't put block elements inside inline elements.

Wrong:   <a><div>This will look wrong.</div></a>

Right:     <div><a>This will look right!</a></div>

• If your JavaScript isn't working in Google Chrome, you can debug using Chrome's built-in JavaScript debugger, under the "page" menu -> 'Developer' -> 'Debug JavaScript' menu option.

To help webmasters and web developers find more answers, we created a support center and forum specifically to answer your questions. Of course, if you find something you think is really a bug in Chrome, please report it to us!

Help us improve Google Chrome!

If you'd like to help even more, we're looking for sites that may be interested in allowing Google to use their site as a benchmark for our internal compatibility and performance measurements. If you're interested in having Google Chrome development optimized against a cached version of your site, please contact us about details at chrome-webmasters@google.com.

Please keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep working to improve Google Chrome!

Written by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager, Google Chrome

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Last July, we launched our Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program and it's been a huge hit. Hundreds of providers have signed up, and thousands of users now access Webmaster Tools via their provider's control panel.

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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

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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.

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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

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Webmaster Level: All

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

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



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

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager