Webmaster level: advanced Just over a year ago we introduced a new API for website verification for Google services. In the spirit of keeping things simple and focusing our efforts, we’ve decided to deprecate the old verification API method on March 31…
Webmaster level: allContent on the Internet changes or disappears, and occasionally it’s helpful to have search results for it updated quickly. Today we launched our improved public URL removal tool to make it easier to request updates based on changes…
Since we launched the Structured Data dashboard last year, it has quickly become one of the most popular features in Webmaster Tools. We’ve been working to expand it and make it even easier to debug issues so that you can see how Google understands the marked-up content on your site.
Starting today, you can see items with errors in the Structured Data dashboard. This new feature is a result of a collaboration with webmasters, whom we invited in June to>register as early testers of markup error reporting in Webmaster Tools. We’ve incorporated their feedback to improve the functionality of the Structured Data dashboard.
An “item” here represents one top-level structured data element (nested items are not counted) tagged in the HTML code. They are grouped by data type and ordered by number of errors:
We’ve added a separate scale for the errors on the right side of the graph in the dashboard, so you can compare items and errors over time. This can be useful to spot connections between changes you may have made on your site and markup errors that are appearing (or disappearing!).
Our data pipelines have also been updated for more comprehensive reporting, so you may initially see fewer data points in the chronological graph.
startDate or name property. We also surface missing properties for nested content types (e.g. a review item inside a product item) — in this case, this is the lowprice property.
We hope this new feature helps you manage the structured data markup on your site better. We will continue to add more error types in the coming months. Meanwhile, we look forward to your comments and questions here or in the dedicated Structured Data section of the Webmaster Help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Unsure where to begin improving your smartphone website? Wondering how to prioritize all the advice? We just published a checklist to help provide an efficient approach to mobile website improvement. Several topics in the checklist link to a relevant business case or study, other topics include a video explaining how to make data from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools actionable during the improvement process. Copied below are shortened sections of the full checklist. Please let us know if there’s more you’d like to see, or if you have additional topics for us to include.
Step 1: Stop frustrating your customers
To see all topics in “Stop frustrating your customers,” please see the full Checklist for mobile website improvement.
Step 2: Facilitate task completion
@media query.rel=alternate media and rel=canonical, as well as Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header which helps Google implement Skip Redirect.Vary: User-Agent HTTP header.How to optimize popular mobile workflows using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (slides)
Step Three: Convert customers into fans!
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Searchers on smartphones experience many speed bumps that can slow them down. For example, any time they need to change context from a web page to an app, or vice versa, users are likely to encounter redirects, pop-up dialogs, and extra swipes and taps. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could give your users the choice of viewing your content either on the website or via your app, both straight from Google’s search results?
Today, we’re happy to announce a new capability of Google Search, called app indexing, that uses the expertise of webmasters to help create a seamless user experience across websites and mobile apps.
Just like it crawls and indexes websites, Googlebot can now index content in your Android app. Webmasters will be able to indicate which app content you’d like Google to index in the same way you do for webpages today — through your existing Sitemap file and through Webmaster Tools. If both the webpage and the app contents are successfully indexed, Google will then try to show deep links to your app straight in our search results when we think they’re relevant for the user’s query and if the user has the app installed. When users tap on these deep links, your app will launch and take them directly to the content they need. Here’s an example of a search for home listings in Mountain View:
We’re currently testing app indexing with an initial group of developers. Deep links for these applications will start to appear in Google search results for signed-in users on Android in the US in a few weeks. If you are interested in enabling indexing for your Android app, it’s easy to get started:
For more details on implementation and for information on how to sign up, visit our developer site. As always, if you have any questions, please ask in the mobile section of our webmaster forum.
Posted by Lawrence Chang, Product Manager
Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced We filmed a video providing more details about expanding your site to more languages or country-based language variations. The video covers details about rel=”alternate” hreflang and potential implementation on your multilingual and/or multinational site.
You can watch the entire video or skip to the relevant sections:
Additional resources on hreflang include:
Good luck as you expand your site to more languages!Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Webmaster level: intermediateIn recent years, our free Webmaster Tools product has provided roughly 100,000 backlinks when you click the “Download more sample links” button. Until now, we’ve selected those links primarily by lexicographical order. That…
Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
Using authorship helps searchers discover great information by highlighting content from authors who they might find interesting. If you’re an author, signing up for authorship will help users recognize content that you’ve written. Additionally, searchers can click the byline to see more articles you’ve authored or to follow you on Google+. It’s that simple! Well, except for several advanced questions that we’d like to help answer…
Clicking the author’s byline in search results can reveal more articles and a Google+ profile
Recent authorship questions
1. What kind of pages can be used with authorship?
Good question! You can increase the likelihood that we show authorship for your site by only using authorship markup on pages that meet these criteria:
- The URL/page contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn’t a list of articles or an updating feed. If the author frequently switches on the page, then the annotation is no longer helpful to searchers and is less likely to be featured.
- The URL/page consists primarily of content written by the author.
- Showing a clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the same name as used on their Google+ profile.
2. Can I use a company mascot as an author and have authorship annotation in search results? For my pest control business, I’d like to write as the “Pied Piper.”
You’re free to write articles in the manner you prefer — your users may really like the Pied Piper idea. However, for authorship annotation in search results, Google prefers to feature a human who wrote the content. By doing so, authorship annotation better indicates that a search result is the perspective of a person, and this helps add credibility for searchers.
Again, because currently we want to feature people, link authorship markup to an individual’s profile rather than linking to a company’s Google+ Page.
3. If I use authorship on articles available in different languages, such asexample.com/en/article1.html for English and example.com/fr/article1.html for the French translation,
should I link to two separate author/Google+ profiles written in each language?
In your scenario, both articles:
example.com/en/article1.html
andexample.com/fr/article1.html
should link to the same Google+ profile in the author’s language of choice.
4. Is it possible to add two authors for one article?
In the current search user interface, we only support one author per article, blog post, etc. We’re still experimenting to find the optimal outcome for searchers when more than one author is specified.
5. How can I prevent Google from showing authorship?
The fastest way to prevent authorship annotation is to make the author’s Google+ profile not discoverable in search results. Otherwise, if you still want to keep your profile in search results, then you can remove any profile or contributor links to the website, or remove the markup so that it no longer connects with your profile.
6. What’s the difference between rel=author vs rel=publisher?
rel=publisher helps a business create a shared identity by linking the business’ website (often from the homepage) to the business’ Google+ Page. rel=author helps individuals (authors!) associate their individual articles from a URL or website to their Google+ profile. While rel=author and rel=publisher are both link relationships, they’re actually completely independent of one another.
7. Can I use authorship on my site’s property listings or product pages since one of my employees has customized the description?
Authorship annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real person’s perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using authorship in these cases. However, an article about products that provides helpful commentary, such as, “Camera X vs. Camera Y: Faceoff in the Arizona Desert” could have authorship.
If you have additional questions, don’t forget to check out (and even post your question if you don’t see it covered 🙂 in the Webmaster Forum.
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Webmaster level: Intermediate
Users tell us they use smartphones to search online because it’s quick and convenient, but today’s average mobile page typically takes more than 7 seconds to load. Wouldn’t it be great if mobile pages loaded in under one second? Today we’re announcing new guidelines and an updated PageSpeed Insights tool to help webmasters optimize their mobile pages for best rendering performance.
Research shows that users’ flow is interrupted if pages take longer than one second to load. To deliver the best experience and keep the visitor engaged, our guidelines focus on rendering some content, known as the above-the-fold content, to users in one second (or less!) while the rest of the page continues to load and render in the background. The above-the-fold HTML, CSS, and JS is known as the critical rendering path.
We can achieve sub-second rendering of the above-the-fold content on mobile networks by applying the following best practices:
These are explained in more details in the mobile-specific help pages, and, when you’re ready, you can test your pages and the improvements you make using the PageSpeed Insights
tool.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please post in our discussion group.
Posted by Bryan McQuade, Software Engineer, and Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst
We strive to keep spam out of our users’ search results. This includes both improving our webspam algorithms as well as taking manual action for violations of our quality guidelines. Many webmasters want to see if their sites are affected by a manual webspam action, so today we’re introducing a new feature that should help. The manual action viewer in Webmaster Tools shows information about actions taken by the manual webspam team that directly affect that site’s ranking in Google’s web search results. To try it out, go to Webmaster Tools and click on the “Manual Actions” link under “Search Traffic.”
You’ll probably see a message that says, “No manual webspam actions found.” A recent analysis of our index showed that well under 2% of domains we’ve seen are manually removed for webspam. If you see this message, then your site doesn’t have a manual removal or direct demotion for webspam reasons.
If your site is in the very small fraction that do have a manual spam action, chances are we’ve already notified you in Webmaster Tools. We’ll keep sending those notifications, but now you can also do a live check against our internal webspam systems. Here’s what it would look like if Google had taken manual action on a specific section of a site for “User-generated spam”:
In this hypothetical example, there isn’t a site-wide match, but there is a “partial match.” A partial match means the action applies only to a specific section of a site. In this case, the webmaster has a problem with other people leaving spam on mattcutts.com/forum/. By fixing this common issue, the webmaster can not only help restore his forum’s rankings on Google, but also improve the experience for his users. Clicking the “Learn more” link will offer new resources for troubleshooting.
Once you’ve corrected any violations of Google’s quality guidelines, the next step is to request reconsideration. With this new feature, you’ll find a simpler and more streamlined reconsideration request process. Now, when you visit the reconsideration request page, you’ll be able to check your site for manual actions, and then request reconsideration only if there’s a manual action applied to your site. If you do have a webspam issue to address, you can do so directly from the Manual Actions page by clicking “Request a review.”
The manual action viewer delivers on a popular feature request. We hope it reassures the vast majority of webmasters who have nothing to worry about. For the small number of people who have real webspam issues to address, we hope this new information helps speed up the troubleshooting. If you have questions, come find us in the Webmaster Help Forum or stop by our Office Hours.
Update (12:50pm PT, August 9th): Unfortunately we’ve hit a snag during our feature deployment, so it will be another couple days before the feature is available to everyone. We will post another update once the feature is fully rolled out.
Update (10:30am PT, August 12th): The feature is now fully rolled out.
Posted by Matt Cutts, Distinguished Engineer
