Einträge von Google

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Webmaster Level: All



This article is cross-posted on the Google Code Blog.



Today we?re launching the most requested feature for Page Speed, Page Speed for Chrome. Now Google Chrome users can get Page Speed performance suggestions to make their sites faster, right inside the Chrome browser. We would like to thank all our users for your great feedback and support since we launched. We?re humbled that 1.4 M unique users are using the Page Speed extension and finding it useful to help with their web performance diagnosis.



Google Chrome support has always been high on our priority list but we wanted to get it right. It was critical that the same engine that powers the Page Speed Add-On for Firefox be used here as well. So we first built the Page Speed SDK, which we then integrated into the Chrome extension.



Page Speed for Chrome retains the same core features as the Firefox add-on. In addition, there are two major improvements appearing in this version first. We?ve improved scoring and suggestion ordering to help web developers focus on higher-potential optimizations first. Plus, because making the web faster is a global initiative, Page Speed now supports displaying localized rule results in 40 languages! These improvements are part of the Page Speed SDK, so they will also appear in the next release of our Firefox add-on as well.



If your site serves different content based on the browser?s user agent, you now have a good method for page performance analysis as seen by different browsers, with Page Speed coverage for Firefox and Chrome through the extensions, and Internet Explorer via webpagetest.org, which integrates the Page Speed SDK.



We?d love to hear from you, as always. Please try Page Speed for Chrome, and give us feedback on our mailing list about additional functionality you?d like to see. Stay tuned for updates to Page Speed for Chrome that take advantage of exciting new technologies such as Native Client.



By Matthew Steele and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team

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Webmaster level: All



Today, we?re happy to introduce Recipe View, a new way of finding recipes when searching on Google. Recipe View enables you to filter your regular web search results to show only recipes and to restrict results based on ingredients, cook time, or calorie preferences:



Read more about Recipe View on the Official Google Blog and be sure to check out our video of Google Chef Scott Giambastiani demonstrating how he uses Recipe View to find great recipes for Googlers:







Recipe View is based on data from recipe rich snippets markup. As a webmaster, to make sure your recipe content can show in Recipe View (currently rolling out in the US and Japan) as well as in regular search results with rich snippets (available globally), be sure to add structured data markup to your recipe pages. Rich snippets are also available for reviews, people, products, and events, and we?ll continue to expand this list of categories over time. You can always see the full list of supported types by referring to our rich snippets documentation and by watching for further updates here on the Webmaster Central Blog.



This marks an exciting milestone for us -- it?s the first time we?ve introduced search filters based on rich snippets markup from webmasters. Over time, we?ll continue exploring new ways to enhance the search experience using this data.



Posted by Toshiaki Fujiki, Google Search team

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Webmaster level: Intermediate

We?ve noticed a rise in the number of questions from webmasters about how best to structure a website for mobile phones and how websites can best interact with Googlebot-Mobile. In this post we?ll explain the current situation and give you specific recommendations you can implement now.

Some Background

Let?s start with a simple question: what do we mean by ?mobile phone? when talking about mobile-friendly websites?

A good way to answer this question is to think about the capabilities of the mobile phone?s web browser, especially in relation to the capabilities of modern desktop browsers. To simplify matters, we can break mobile phones into a few classifications:

1. Traditional mobile phones: Phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.
2. Smartphones: Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes a diversity of devices, such Windows Phone 7, Blackberry devices, iPhones, and Android phones, and also tablets and eBook readers.

   We can further break down this category by support for HTML5:

   • Devices with browsers that do not support HTML5
   • Devices with browsers that support HTML5

Once upon a time, mobile phones connected to the Internet using browsers with limited rendering capabilities; but this is clearly a changing situation with the fast rise of smartphones which have browsers that rival the full desktop experience. As such, it?s important to note that the distinction we are making here is based on the current situation as we see it and might change in the future.

Googlebot and Mobile Content

Google has two crawlers relevant to this topic: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The questions we?re seeing more of can be summed up as follows:

Given the diversity of capabilities of mobile web browsers, what kind of content should I serve to Googlebot-Mobile?

The answer lies in the User-agent that Googlebot-Mobile supplies when crawling. There are several User-agent strings in use by Googlebot-Mobile, all of which use this format:

[Phone name(s)] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

To decide which content to serve, assess which content your website has that best serves the phone(s) in the User-agent string. A full list of Googlebot-Mobile User-agents can be found here.

Notice that we currently do not crawl with Googlebot-Mobile using a smartphone User-agent string. Thus at the current time, a correctly-configured content serving system will serve Googlebot-Mobile content only for the traditional phones described above, because that?s what the User-agent strings in use today dictate. This may change in the future, and if so, it may mean there would be a new Googlebot-Mobile User-agent string.

For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.

URL Structure for Mobile Content

The next set of questions ask about the URLs mobile content should be served from. Let?s look in detail at some common use cases.

Websites with only Desktop Experience Content

Most websites currently have only one version of their content, namely in HTML that is designed for desktop web browsers. This means all browsers access the content from the same URL.

These websites may not be serving traditional mobile phone users. The quality experienced by their smartphone users depends on the mobile browser they are using and it could be as good as browsing from the desktop.

If you serve only desktop experience content for all User Agents, you should do so for Googlebot-Mobile too; that is, treat Googlebot-Mobile as you treat all other or unknown User Agents. In these cases, Google may modify your webpages for an improved mobile experience.

Websites with Dedicated Mobile Content

Many websites have content specifically optimized for mobile users. The content could be simply reformatted for the typically smaller mobile displays, or it could be in a different format (e.g., served using WAP, etc.).

A very common question we see is: Does it matter if the different types of content are served from the same URL or from different URLs? For example, some websites have www.example.com as the URL desktop browsers are meant to access and have m.example.com or wap.example.com for the different mobile devices. Other websites serve all types of content from just one URL structure like www.example.com.

For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For example, if you redirect mobile users from www.example.com to m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case, use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.

If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.

It is worth repeating that regardless of URL structure, you must correctly detect the User-agent as given by your users and Googlebot-Mobile, and serve both the same content. Don?t forget to keep the default content, the desktop-optimized content, for when an unknown User-agent requests it.

Mobile Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools

Finally, we receive many questions about what URLs to put in Mobile Sitemaps. As explained in our Mobile Sitemaps Help Center articles, you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.

More Questions?

A good place to start is our Mobile Sites Help Center articles and the relevant sections in our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. We also created a thread in our forums for you to ask questions about this post.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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Webmaster level: All

In the past, when you created a website or web app, you were largely limited to a few select ?web safe? fonts such as Times and Arial. If you deviated from these fonts, you were required to use Adobe Flash or to embed text in images, which introduced a whole new set of trade offs. For example, images aren?t semantic, cannot be translated into other languages automatically, and can be much larger in file size than text. In addition, text in images cannot be copied to a user?s clipboard, read with screen-reading software, or easily indexed by search engines.

The good news is, with Google Web Fonts it is now possible to use hundreds of web safe fonts on your web pages. Launched last May, Google Web Fonts allows you to simply choose the font(s) you?d like to use on your webpage, blog, or web app, and embed the snippet of HTML and CSS. In about 30 seconds, you can have beautiful fonts on your pages that will render correctly in the large majority of popular modern web browsers. No longer will you need to use images or Flash to embed the font of your choice.

Unlike Times and Arial, which are references to fonts installed on a user?s local machine, web fonts are served via a browser request (much like an image would be served). That means you can push any web font to a user?s machine. Users will be delighted when they realize these fonts behave just as any other text in Arial would behave.



The adoption of the web font technology has been rapid. Google Web Fonts now serves roughly 50 million daily requests[1], across roughly 800,000 unique websites[2], and is growing at about 30% each month. Here at Google, we?re excited about the potential for web fonts to change the very fabric of the web. Beautiful typography makes the web more pleasant to browse, expressive, and interesting.

Here?s to a beautiful Web!

Written by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Web Fonts

[1] A request is a single call to the Google Font API for one or more fonts.
[2] We count a unique website as unique domains, except that ?www? subdomains are not counted. For example, www.myblog.com and myblog.com would count as one domain. However, sam.myblog.com and sally.myblog.com would count as two domains.

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Webmaster level: All

If you use Google Analytics to track site data, you can now link your Webmaster Tools verified site to an Analytics profile when they use the same Google Account.

Not only will your Analytics profiles be accessible within Webmaster Tools, but you'll also be able to more easily access a few Google Analytics features:

• View your Google Analytics Referring Pages report directly from the Links to your site page in Webmaster Tools. This report helps you understand the overall trends in traffic volume from referrals, as well as the sites driving those trends.


• Access the Google Analytics Dashboard directly from the Analytics link in the top left bar when you?re on a site-related page.

To link a verified site in Webmaster Tools to a Google Analytics profile:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage next to the site you want, then click Google Analytics profile.



2. Select the profile you want to associate with the site, then click Save.

Note: If your site has multiple owners, each owner will need to link their own account to a Google Analytics profile.

Written by Zhanlu Wang, Webmaster Tools Team

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Webmaster level: All

Last year we relaunched an exciting feature in Webmaster Tools: Search Queries, an analysis tool that visualizes your site?s presence in our search results. It has two main parts: an interactive graph, and a table containing detailed data related to queries for which your site appears in our search results.

Two of the most important pieces of information in the table are ?impressions? and ?clicks.? ?Impressions? shows the number of times your pages were shown in the search results for a certain query, and ?clicks? is how many times users actually clicked on a result from your site.

Based on webmaster feedback, today we?re announcing a slight change in how these numbers are represented in Webmaster Tools, to simplify their interpretation. Instead of showing numbers rounded to two or three digits, the numbers will now be shown with one or two significant digits. For example, instead of Webmaster Tools showing you 246,000 impressions, it will now show 250,000 impressions, which is a nicer representation for a better, less confusing experience. We have not altered the way we calculate the numbers internally, but only changed how we round them in Webmaster Tools. Generally, a difference of less than 10% between the numbers you see now and those you saw prior to this change should not be considered significant.

We hope that this update makes Search Queries easier to understand. If you want to learn more about this feature you can visit our Help Center. If you have feedback or suggestions for Search Queries, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Pierre Far and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst team

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Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

We on the Webmaster Central team aren?t SEOs, but that doesn?t stop me from pretending to be one! In our latest video, I?ll talk about utilizing some features in Webmaster Tools as though I were the SEO for www.googlestore.com.

Just as a grandparent raves about their grandchild, I could have gone on for hours about (my baby!) Webmaster Tools. Thankfully I stopped myself -- but if you have tips to share or questions to ask, please comment below.

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Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

As you?re working to increase your traffic with Webmaster Tools, did you know that you?re also able to monetize this traffic with Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is a program that enables webmasters like you to display relevant ads on your websites and earn revenue. It?s free to use and gives you access to Google?s vast network of advertisers. After a quick and easy set up, AdSense is designed to help you start showing ads on your site that fit in with your audience, while allowing you to earn money from the unique content you?ve created.

A key factor in understanding the opportunities you have with AdSense is understanding the traffic you have coming to your site. Webmaster Tools and other Google tools, such as Google Analytics, provide you with the insight to identify who your visitors are and where they?re coming from. You?re working to bring more people to your site and optimize your most successful pages to boost overall traffic. You can use this information with Google AdSense to display ads that are targeted to your traffic and better suited to match the content on your most successful pages. For example, you can use Webmaster Tools to identify how often your pages appear within Google search results. Knowing these to potentially be your most visible pages, you can use AdSense to display optimized ads on these pages.

Take a look below to see what different AdSense ads can look like.

Text Ad - Medium Rectangle (300x250)	Video Ad - Medium Rectangle (300x250)

Image Ad - Leaderboad (728x90)

Why use Google AdSense?

• Earn revenue from relevant and engaging advertising that enhances the user experience of your site.
• You?re in control, protecting your brand by customizing the size, location, and type of ads that appear.
• Gain insight with the powerful integration of Google Analytics and AdSense, helping you easily identify trends and factors that influence the earning potential of your website.
• Simple and easy to set up. Just add a few lines of code to your site and you?re ready to start showing ads.
• No risk. No obligation. There?s no minimum term of commitment. And it?s free.

Google AdSense automatically delivers ads that are targeted to your content and audience. AdSense also allows you to create Custom Channels that help advertisers target certain pages of your website, or even specific sections of these pages. As a Webmaster Tools user you have an advantage in understanding which Google search results guide traffic to your pages. You can use this information to provide more accurate descriptions of your custom channels for advertisers, allowing you to show even more relevant ads to your users. In turn, you can earn more revenue by displaying these more relevant and high quality ads.

Sign up and monetize your website with Google AdSense.
You can also learn more about Google AdSense in the AdSense Help Forum.

Posted by Nathan DeOms, Google AdSense Publisher Engagement Team

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Webmaster level: all



It's been a bit more than five years now that our Webmaster Help Forum has been up and running, helping webmasters around the world. Over the years, over tens of thousands of users have discussed various topics in well over 100,000 threads, helping each other to improve their websites and to solve a variety of issues that web publishers are confronted with. Among those users is a group that we call the "Bionic Posters," users who have proven to be consistently helpful and knowledgeable, selflessly helping others to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems.



It's great to have such an awesome community -- but thanks is best said by those who are helped. Here is some of the feedback that we collected this year:

• "Thank you for the time you have spent helping me. It is genuinely appreciated."


• "Thank you to everyone who helped with my problem! My creaky old 1996 era website is all cleaned up and doing just fine now! Good Guys Rule!"


• "WOW!!!!!!!! Thank you so much for your help! I was reluctant to post because I thought you guys might think my site is too small, too insignificant, etc. Thanks so much! To me, it's a BIG deal!"


• "My traffic has doubled and I am now either top or close to the top in search terms"


• "Thanks. Hopefully my late night paid off then, all the help and information has been great!!!!!!!"


• "Wow Webado Thank You Again.. You Really Know Your stuff! (…) You Are a True professional and Seriously The Only Person That Could Even Figure This out. I even Spoke to Other Top Specialists and YOU were the Only one who told me what to do and what was wrong."


• "You are AMAZING! Thank you so much!"


• "Finally, thanks so much for your concern and prompt reply, Squibble. Can't imagine a person would deligated his efforts to someones you don't even know and met. (…) Thanks for your help!! It means everything to me!"


• "Wow thanks so much! I have just been to the hot springs in Banos Ecuador, the volcano is rumbling and the town has evacuated but I am still here talking Apache, now that is dedication, I will test your helpfulness out 2moro! Thanks so much!!!"


• "THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU! YOU ARE SOOOO AMAZING! MY BLOG IS GONE FROM GOOGLE AND ALL THE OLD POSTS ASSOCIATED WITH THAT TOO! THANK YOU! I LOVE YOU!"


• "It worked! Thank you very much for your help Cristina :)"


• "I could NEVER have seen what's possible without this forum. I am so grateful."


• "Thank you so much for your detailed response to my questions. In 10 years of me having a website, no one has explained these concepts better to me than you did."


• "IT WORKED!!! Thank you so much for saving me the grief and embarrassment of this problem. I truly appreciate both your knowledge and guidance."


• "Thank you so much for such a detailed answer and putting into terms I can easily understand. (…) Where shall I send the batch of brownies?"


• "Thank you so much Squibble you are a hero. I have done what it says and i will check to see if i appear in google! Thanks again!"


• "you guys are amazing! thank you so much redleg! (…) and if you happen to ever be in san carlos give me a shout - you deserve at least a beer and a lunch! "


• "Thank you Squibble, Vanessa, Cristina, and Ishigaki for weighing in on this and helping me. I hope I can pay it forward one day."


• "Great info Guys. I really appreciate it. It was awesome of y'all to help me out. I really appreciate it. Thank you."


• "Your amazing i love you lol xx im sorted now thanks and never in a million years would i have found that out!"


• "THANK YOU! I love Google and appreciate that they have these safety precautions in place for those nasty hackets - especially when we can fix the problem! Thanks so much for your help. Whew."


• "Thank you very much, Robbo! With a little tweaking it worked perfectly!"


• "yay!!! I think it finally went through - THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!"

If you have a question that you would like to ask, a problem that you need help with, we'd love to see you in the forums! We just ask that you please take the time to read through our frequently asked questions, and search the forum before posting. Chances are high that a question like yours has already been answered. Tell us a little bit about yourself and then join us to learn more and help others!



Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Today Google introduced Instant Previews, a new search feature that helps people find information faster by showing a visual preview of each result. Traditionally, elements of the search results like the title, URL, and snippet—the text description in each result—help people determine which results are best for them. Instant Previews achieves the same goal with a visual representation of each page and where the relevant content is, instead of a text description. For our webmaster community, this presents an opportunity to reveal the design of your site and why your page is relevant for a particular query. We'd like to offer some thoughts on how to take advantage of the feature.

First of all, it's important to understand what the new feature does. When someone clicks on the magnifying glass on any result, a zoomed-out snapshot of the underlying page appears to the right of the results. Orange highlights indicate where highly relevant content on the page is, and text call outs show search terms in context.

Here?s the Instant Preview for the Google Webmaster Forum.

These elements let people know what to expect if they click on that result, and why it's relevant for their query. Our testing shows that the feature really does help with picking the right result—using Instant Previews makes searchers 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Many of you have put a lot of thought and effort into the structure of your sites, the layout of your pages, and the information you provide to visitors. Instant Previews gives people a glimpse into that design and indicates why your pages are relevant to their query. Here are some details about how to make good use of the feature.

• Keep your pages clearly laid out and structured, with a minimum of distractions or extraneous content. This is always good advice, since it improves the experience for visitors, and the simplicity and clarity of your site will be apparent via Instant Previews.


• Try to avoid interstitial pages, ad pop-ups, or other elements that interfere with your content. In some cases, these distracting elements may be picked up in the preview of your page, making the screenshots less attractive.


• Many pages have their previews generated as part of our regular crawl process. Occasionally, we will generate screenshots on the fly when a user needs it, and in these situations we will retrieve information from web pages using a new "Google Web Preview" user-agent.


• Instant Previews does not change our search algorithm or ranking in any way. It's the same results, in the same order. There is also no change to how clicks are tracked. If a user clicks on the title of a result and visits your site, it will count as a normal click, regardless of whether the result was previewed. Previewing a result, however, doesn't count as a click by itself.


• Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.


• Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a "puzzle piece" icon or a black square. We're working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

We hope you're as excited about this next step in the search results as we are. We're looking forward to many more improvements to Instant Previews in the future.

Posted by Jeremy Silber, Software Engineer

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Webmaster Level: All

At Google, we continually strive to improve our algorithms to keep search results relevant and clean. You have been supporting us on this mission by sending spam reports for websites that violate our Webmaster Guidelines, using the spam report form in Google Webmaster Tools. While you might not see changes right away, we take your reports seriously and use them to fine-tune our algorithms -- the feedback is much appreciated and helps us to protect the integrity of our search results. We also take manual action on many of these spam reports. A recent blog post covers more information on how to identify webspam.

For those of you who regularly report spam, or would like to do so, we?ve now published a Chrome extension for reporting spam that makes the process more convenient and simple. The extension adds ?Report spam? links to search results and your Web History, taking you directly to the spam report form and autocompleting some form fields for you. With this extension, Google?s spam report form is always just one click away.

The Google Webspam Report Chrome extension provides further tools to help you quickly fill out a spam report:

• a browser button to report the currently viewed page
• an option to retrieve recent Google searches from your Chrome history
• an option to retrieve recently visited URLs from your Chrome history

As before, you need to be logged into your Google Account to report spam. You can find a more detailed walkthrough of the use cases and features in this presentation and on the Chrome Extensions Gallery page, where you can also provide feedback and suggestions. We hope that you find this extension useful and that you continue to help us fight spam.

The extension is available in 16 languages. If your Chrome browser is set to a language supported by the extension, it will automatically use the localized version, otherwise defaulting to English.

Note: We care about your privacy. The Google Webspam Report Chrome extension allows you to access your personal Chrome history for the purpose of reporting spam, but does not send data retrieved from it to our servers. The source code of the extension has been published under an open source license.

Posted by Manuel Holtz, Support Engineer, Search Quality team

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Webmaster level: All

Everyone who uses the web knows how frustrating it is to land on a page that sounds promising in the search results but ends up being useless when you visit it. We work hard to make sure Google?s algorithms catch as much as possible, but sometimes spammy sites still make it into search results. We appreciate the numerous spam reports sent in by users like you who find these issues; the reports help us improve our search results and make sure that great content is treated accordingly. Good spam reports are important to us. Here?s how to maximize the impact of any spam reports you submit:

Why report spam to Google?

Google?s search quality team uses spam reports as a basis for further improving the quality of the results that we show you, to provide a level playing field for webmasters, and to help with our scalable spam fighting efforts. With the release of new tools like our Chrome extension to report spam, we?ve seen people filing more spam reports and we have to allocate appropriate resources to the spam reports that are mostly likely to be useful.

Spam reports are prioritized by looking at how much visibility a potentially spammy site has in our search results, in order to help us focus on high-impact sites in a timely manner. For instance, we?re likely to prioritize the investigation of a site that regularly ranks on the first or second page over that of a site that only gets a few search impressions per month. A spam report for a page that is almost never seen by users is less likely to be reviewed compared to higher-impact pages or sites. We generally use spam reports to help improve our algorithms so that we can not only recognize and handle this particular site, but also cover any similar sites. In a few cases, we may additionally choose to immediately remove or otherwise take action on a site.

Which sites should I report?

We love seeing reports about spammy sites that our algorithms have missed. That said, it?s a poor use of your time to report sites that are not spammy. Sites submitted through the spam report form are reviewed for spam content only. Sites that you think should be tackled for other reasons should be submitted to us through the appropriate channels: for example, for those that contain content which you have removed, use our URL removal tools; for sites with malware, use the malware report form; for paid links that you find on sites, use the paid links reporting form. If you want to report spammy links for a page, make sure that you read how to report linkspam. If you have a complaint because someone is copying your content, we have a different copyright process--see our official documentation pages for more info. There?s generally no need to report sites with technical problems or parked domains because these are typically handled automatically.

The same applies to redirecting legitimate sites from one top level domain to another, e.g. example.de redirecting to example.com/de. As long as the content presented is not spammy, the technique of redirecting one domain to another does not automatically violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines.


The best way to submit a compelling spam report is to take a good look at the website in question and compare it against the Google Webmaster Guidelines. For instance, these would be good reasons to report a site through the spam report form:

• the cached version contains significantly different (often keyword-rich) content from the live version
• you?re redirected to a completely different domain with off-topic, commercial content
• the site is filled with auto-generated or keyword-stuffed content that seems to make no sense

These are just a few examples of techniques that might be potentially spammy, and which we would appreciate seeing in the form of a spam report. When in doubt, please feel free to discuss your concerns on the Help Forum with other users and Google guides.

What should I include in a spam report?

Some spam reports are easier to understand than others; having a clear and easy-to-understand report makes it much easier for us to analyze the issue and take appropriate actions. Here are some things to keep in mind when submitting the spam report:

• Submit the URLs of the pages where you see spam (not just the domain name). This makes it easy for us to verify the problem on those specific pages.
• Try to specify the issue as clearly as possible using the checkboxes. Don?t just check every single box--such reports are less likely to be reviewed.
• If only a part of the page uses spammy techniques, for example if it uses cloaking or has hidden text on an otherwise good page, provide a short explanation on how to look for the spam you?re seeing. If you?re reporting a site for spammy backlinks rather than on-page content, mention that.

By following these guidelines, your spam reports will be reproducible and clear, making them easier to analyze on our side.

What happens next?

After reviewing the feedback from these reports (we want to confirm that the reported sites are actually spammy, not just sites that someone didn?t like), it may take a bit of time before we update our algorithms and a change is visible in the search results. Keep in mind that sometimes our algorithms may already be treating those techniques appropriately; for instance, perhaps we?re already ignoring all the hidden text or the exchanged links that you have reported. Submitting the same spam report multiple times is not necessary. Rest assured that we actively review spam reports and take appropriate actions, even if the changes are not immediately visible to you.

With your help, we hope that we can improve the quality of and fairness in our search results for everyone! Thank you for continuing to submit spam reports and feel free to post here or in our Help Forum should you have any questions.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist & John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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Webmaster Level: All

Last year, as part of Google?s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It?s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier -- ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.

So today, we?re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We?re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We?ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) -- in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.



Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:

• Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself,
• Recompressing an image when its HTML context changes to serve only the bytes required (typically tedious to optimize manually), and
• Extending the cache lifetime of the logo and images of your website to a year, while still allowing you to update these at any time.

We?re working with Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for many of its 8.5 million customers. Warren Adelman, President and COO of Go Daddy, says:

"Go Daddy is continually looking for ways to provide our customers the best user experience possible. That's the reason we partnered with Google on the 'Make the Web Faster' initiative. Go Daddy engineers are seeing a dramatic decrease in load times of customers' websites using mod_pagespeed and other technologies provided. We hope to provide the technology to our customers soon - not only for their benefit, but for their website visitors as well.?

We?re also working with Cotendo to integrate the core engine of mod_pagespeed as part of their Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.

mod_pagespeed integrates as a module for the Apache HTTP Server, and we?ve released it as open-source for Apache for many Linux distributions. Download mod_pagespeed for your platform and let us know what you think on the project?s mailing list. We hope to work with the hosting, developer and webmaster community to improve mod_pagespeed and make the web faster.

Richard Rabbat, Product Manager, ?Make the Web Faster? initiative

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Webmaster Level: All

In time for the holiday season, we now support rich snippets for shopping (e-commerce) sites! As many of you know, rich snippets are search results that have been enhanced using structured data from your web pages. Our new format shows price, availability, and product reviews on pages offering a product for sale. Here?s a result for [office lava lamp]:


As a webmaster, there are two ways that you can provide the information needed for product rich snippets to show up for your site, both described on the Product rich snippets help page:

Option 1: Provide a Merchant Center feed.

Many sites already provide Merchant Center feeds for use in Google Product Search, which means that most of the work needed for rich snippets is already done. For Google to make use of Merchant Center feeds for rich snippets, you should also use the rel=?canonical? link element on your product pages. By adding rel=?canonical? to your pages, Google can match the URLs in your feed to the pages found by our crawler.

Update on November 4, 2010: In order to have your product review information in your rich snippets, you can submit your product ratings directly in your feed, or you can work with one of our reviews partners to submit this information. If you work with a partner, your reviews information will appear in rich snippets, and shoppers on Google Product Search will be able to see your full-length reviews on relevant product pages, branded with your logo.

Option 2: Add markup to your site.

If prices for your products tend to change only infrequently, then adding markup is an alternative method to provide product data for rich snippets. We?ve updated our product markup format to allow a variety of different types of shopping sites to participate. In addition to the Google format, we support two other standards: the hProduct microformat and GoodRelations. You can use the rich snippets testing tool to test your markup and make sure it?s being parsed correctly.

This feature is currently available to merchants located in the US, but we will be rolling it out in more markets soon. Additionally, there are a number of rich snippets formats that can be used world-wide in various languages?make your snippets compelling and useful! Should you have any questions about the use of rich snippets, check out our FAQs and feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Q&A

Which should I provide -- a Merchant Center feed or markup?

For most merchants, providing a Merchant Center feed is the best bet. That way your product prices and availability are updated quickly, and the data can be shown in rich snippets as well as in other applications like Google Shopping and Product Ads. If prices and availability change only infrequently, and you don?t want to set up a feed, then adding markup is also a valid option.

If I add markup to my site, will Google show product rich snippets for my pages?

We can?t guarantee that providing a feed or adding markup will result in rich snippets being shown. Note also that it may take a few weeks after providing data for rich snippets to be shown. If you mark up your pages, we encourage you to make sure that the data is parsed correctly by Google by using the rich snippets testing tool. The testing tool updates are rolling out over the next few days, so in this interim period the testing tool may not show previews for some types of markup.

I?ve already done reviews markup for my product offer pages. Should I add product/offer markup as well?

Yes, absolutely. Rich snippets are shown if the information provided accurately represents the main focus of the page. Therefore, for product pages you should add markup using the relevant offer/product fields which can include nested reviews.

Written by Nitin Shetti and Mircea Ciurumelea, Search Quality team