Google Webmaster Central Blog

Webmaster Level: Intermediate Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have...

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Webmaster Level: AllHTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in...

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Webmaster Level: AllLast October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler. Today, we're...

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Webmaster Level: AllEverything is more fun with a friend! We've just added a feature to Webmaster Tools Site Verification to make it easier to share verified ownership of your websites.In the past, if more than one person needed to be a verified owner of a website, they each had to...

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Webmaster Level: AllHow many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer...

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Webmaster Level: AllAs we crawl the web, we see bad content inserted on to thousands of hacked sites each day. The number of sites attacked is staggering and the problem is only getting worse. Hackers and spammers target and successfully compromise any sites they can - small personal sites,...

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Webmaster Level: AllThanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the ...

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(Cross-posted on the Google Korea Blog)Webmaster Level: AllLegitimate websites may require that their visitors install software. These sites often do so to provide their users with additional functionality beyond what's available in standard web browsers, like viewing a special type of document. Please note, however, that if your site requires...

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Webmaster Level: AllIf you allow users to publish content on your website, from leaving comments to creating user profiles, you’ll likely see spammers attempt to take advantage of these mechanisms to generate traffic to their own sites. Having this spammy content on your site isn't fun for anyone. Users may...

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Webmaster Level: AllLast year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what...

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Webmaster Level: BeginnerWant to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:Step 1: Absorb...

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Webmaster Level: AllAt PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009, I gave a "State of the Index" talk which covers what Google has done for users, web developers, and webmasters in the last year. I recently recreated it on video for those of you who didn't make it to the...

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Webmaster Level: AllWe thought it might be fun and educational to create a quiz for webmasters about issues we commonly see in the Webmaster Help Forum. Together with our awesome Bionic Posters, we've tried to come up with questions and answers that reflect recurring concerns in the forum and some...

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Webmaster Level: All You asked and Matt Cutts answered. It's time to answer the latest round of Grab Bag questions! Here's the first answer, complete with Matt's new hairstyle:We have a lot of videos ready to share, so we're not currently taking new questions for the Grab Bag. If you...

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You have to have some kind of super-powers to keep up with all of the issues posted in our Webmaster Help Forum—that's why we call our Top Contributors the "Bionic Posters." They're able to leap through tall questions in a single bound, providing helpful and solid information all around. We're...

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Webmaster level: IntermediateWe've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a...

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Webmaster level: IntermediateLet's take a quick look at the individual sections in the Google Webmaster Tools' Site Performance feature:Performance overviewThe performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with...

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We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads...

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Webmaster Level: IntermediateToday we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines...

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Webmaster Level: AllCountry-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location....

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Webmaster level: intermediate We love helping publishers make their content available to large groups of readers, and working on ways to make the world's information useful and accessible through our search results. At the same time, we're also aware of the fact that creating high-quality content is not easy and,...

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How to use "Fetch as Googlebot", part 1Webmaster level: IntermediateHas your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results? Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques? Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party "hacks" a website: they penetrate the security of...

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Webmaster Level: Beginner It has probably happened to you: you're reading articles or watching videos on the web, and you come across some unrelated, gibberish comments. You may wonder what this is all about. Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point...

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Webmaster level: AllOne of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was...

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(This post was largely translated from our Japanese version of the Webmaster Central Blog )Recently I introduced several methods to ensure your mobile site is properly indexed by Google. Today I'd like to share information useful for webmasters who manage both desktop and mobile phone versions of a site.One of...

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