New webmaster tutorial videos

Webmaster level: All



Over the past couple of years, we’ve released over 375 videos on our YouTube channel, with the majority of them answering direct questions from webmasters. Today, we’re starting to release a freshly baked batch of videos, and you might notice that some of these are a little different. Don’t worry, they still have Matt Cutts in a variety of colored shirts. Instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics. For example, if you were wondering what the limits are for 301 redirects at Google, we now have a single video for that:







Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for this round. You can be the first to hear about the new videos as they’re released by subscribing to our channel or following us on Twitter.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

A new, improved form for reporting webspam

Webmaster level: All

Everyone on the web knows how frustrating it is to perform a search and find websites gaming the search results. These websites can be considered webspam - sites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and try to trick Google into ranking them highly. Here at Google, we work hard to keep these sites out of your search results, but if you still see them, you can notify us by using our webspam report form. We’ve just rolled out a new, improved webspam report form, so it’s now easier than ever to help us maintain the quality of our search results. Let’s take a look at some of our new form’s features:

Option to report various search issues

There are many search results, such as sites with malware and phishing, that are not necessarily webspam but still degrade the search experience. We’ve noticed that our users sometimes report these other issues using our webspam report form, causing a delay between when a user reports the issue and when the appropriate team at Google handles it. The new form’s interstitial page allows you to report these other search issues directly to the correct teams so that they can address your concerns in a timely manner.

Simplified form with informative links

To improve the readability of the form, we’ve made the text more concise, and we’ve integrated helpful links into the form’s instructions. Now, the ability to look up our Webmaster Guidelines, get advice on writing actionable form comments, and block sites from your personalized search results is just one click away.

Thank you page with personalization options

Some of our most valuable information comes from our users, and we appreciate the webspam reports you submit to us. The thank you page explains what happens once we’ve received your webspam report. If you want to report more webspam, there’s a link back to the form page and instructions on how to report webspam more efficiently with the Chrome Webspam Report Extension. We also provide information on how you can immediately block the site you’ve reported from your personalized search results, for example, by managing blocked sites in your Google Account.

At Google, we strive to provide the highest quality, most relevant search results, so we take your webspam reports very seriously. We hope our new form makes the experience of reporting webspam as painless as possible (and if it doesn’t, feel free to let us know in the comments).

Posted by Jen Lee and Alissa Roberts, Search Quality Team

Submit URLs to Google with Fetch as Googlebot

Webmaster Level: All



The Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools now provides a way to submit new and updated URLs to Google for indexing. After you fetch a URL as Googlebot, if the fetch is successful, you’ll now see the option to submit that URL to our index. When you submit a URL in this way Googlebot will crawl the URL, usually within a day. We’ll then consider it for inclusion in our index. Note that we don’t guarantee that every URL submitted in this way will be indexed; we’ll still use our regular processes—the same ones we use on URLs discovered in any other way—to evaluate whether a URL belongs in our index.



This new functionality may help you in several situations: if you’ve just launched a new site, or added some key new pages, you can ask Googlebot to find and crawl them immediately rather than waiting for us to discover them naturally. You can also submit URLs that are already indexed in order to refresh them, say if you’ve updated some key content for the event you’re hosting this weekend and want to make sure we see it in time. It could also help if you’ve accidentally published information that you didn’t mean to, and want to update our cached version after you’ve removed the information from your site.



How to submit a URL

First, use Diagnostics > Fetch As Googlebot to fetch the URL you want to submit to Google. If the URL is successfully fetched you’ll see a new “Submit to index” link appear next to the fetched URL.

Once you click “Submit to index” you’ll see a dialog box that allows you to choose whether you want to submit only the one URL, or that URL and all its linked pages.

When submitting individual URLs, we have a maximum limit of 50 submissions per week; when submitting URLs with all linked pages, the limit is 10 submissions per month. You can see how many submissions you have left on the Fetch as Googlebot page. Any URL submitted should point to content that would be suitable for Google Web Search, so if you're trying to submit images or videos you should use Sitemaps instead.



Submit URLs to Google without verifying

In conjunction with this update to Fetch as Googlebot, we've also updated the public "Add your URL to Google" form. It's now the Crawl URL form. It has the same quota limits for submitting pages to the index as the Fetch as Googlebot feature but doesn't require verifying ownership of the site in question, so you can submit any URLs that you want crawled and indexed.



Note that Googlebot is already pretty good about finding and crawling new content in a timely fashion, so don’t feel obligated to use this tool for every change or update on your site. But if you’ve got a URL whose crawling or indexing you want to speed up, consider submitting it using the Crawl URL form or the updated Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools. Feel free to comment here or visit our Webmaster Help Forum if you have more detailed questions.



Written by Jonathan Simon & Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Preview the latest +1 button changes

Webmaster level: All

Want to test the latest +1 features? Today we’re introducing a new option for webmasters who want to be the first to know about changes to the +1 button. Enroll in the Google+ Platform Preview, available globally, to test updates before they launch to all users on your site. When you’re logged into the account you’ve enrolled with and you visit a page with the +1 button, you’ll see the latest preview release.

If you join now, you’ll be able to test the first set of updates we’ve released to Platform Preview: hover and confirmation bubbles.

If you hover your mouse over a +1 button, you’ll see a bubble letting you know what will happen when you click:



After you click, you’ll receive confirmation that the +1 has been applied:



This will give your site’s users an extra reminder of the account they’re using to +1, as well as the fact that their +1 is public.

If you have any questions, please join us in the Webmaster forum. To receive updates about the +1 button, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. And for advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site.

Posted by Joshua Ganderson, Software Engineer

Page Speed Service - Web Performance, Delivered.

Webmaster level: Advanced



Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.



Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.



In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.



At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.



Posted by Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager

The +1 Button: Now Faster

Webmaster level: All

One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception. Since the button’s launch, we have been hard at work improving its load time. Today, we’re proud to announce two updates that will make both the +1 button and the page loading it, faster.

First, we’ve begun to roll out out a set of changes that will make the button render up to 3x faster on your site. No action is required on your part, so just sit back, relax, and watch as the button loads more quickly than before.

In addition to the improvements made to the button, we’re also introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 experience even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we’re ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn’t lead to an increase in your page load time. For those of you who have already implemented the button, you’ll need to update the code to the new async snippet, and then you should see an overall improvement in your page load time.

To generate the new async snippet, use our +1 Configuration Tool. Below, you’ll find an example of the code, which should be included below the last <g:plusone> tag on your page for best performance.

If you haven’t already implemented the +1 button on your site, we’re excited for your first experience to be a fast one. This is a great opportunity to allow your users to recommend your site to their friends, potentially bringing in more qualified traffic from Google search. To those that already have the button, we hope that you enjoy the improvements in speed. Our team will continue to work hard to enhance the +1 button experience as we know that “fast is better than slow” is as true today as it’s ever been.

If you have any questions, please join us in the Webmaster forum. To receive updates about the +1 button, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site.

Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer

Validation: measuring and tracking code quality

Webmaster level: All

Google’s Webmaster Team is responsible for most of Google’s informational websites like Google’s Jobs site or Privacy Centers. Maintaining tens of thousands of pages and constantly releasing new Google sites requires more than just passion for the job: it requires quality management.

In this post we won’t talk about all the different tests that can be run to analyze a website; instead we’ll just talk about HTML and CSS validation, and tracking quality over time.

Why does validation matter? There are different perspectives on validation—at Google there are different approaches and priorities too—but the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn’t guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.

While paying a lot of attention to validation, we’ve developed a system to use it as a quality metric to measure how we’re doing on our own pages. Here’s what we do: we give each of our pages a score from 0-10 points, where 0 is worst (pages with 10 or more HTML and CSS validation errors) and 10 is best (0 validation errors). We started doing this more than two years ago, first by taking samples, now monitoring all our pages.

Since the beginning we’ve been documenting the validation scores we were calculating so that we could actually see how we’re doing on average and where we’re headed: is our output improving, or is it getting worse?

Here’s what our data say:

Validation score development 2009-2011.

On average there are about three validation issues per page produced by the Webmaster Team (as we combine HTML and CSS validation in the scoring process, information about the origin gets lost), down from about four issues per page two years ago.

This information is valuable for us as it tells us how close we are to our goal of always shipping perfectly valid code, and it also tells us whether we’re on track or not. As you can see, with the exception of the 2nd quarter of 2009 and the 1st quarter of 2010, we are generally observing a positive trend.

What has to be kept in mind are issues with the integrity of the data, i.e. the sample size as well as “false positives” in the validators. We’re working with the W3C in several ways, including reporting and helping to fix issues in the validators; however, as software can never be perfect, sometimes pages get dinged for non-issues: see for example the border-radius issue that has recently been fixed. We know that this is negatively affecting the validation scores we’re determining, but we have no data yet to indicate how much.

Although we track more than just validation for quality control purposes, validation plays an important role in measuring the health of Google’s informational websites.

How do you use validation in your development process?

Posted by Jens O. Meiert, Google Webmaster Team

+1 around the world

Webmaster Level: all



A few months ago we released the +1 button on English search results on google.com. More recently, we’ve made the +1 button available to sites across the web, making it easy for the people who love your content to recommend it on Google search.



Today, +1’s will start appearing on Google search pages globally. We'll be starting off with sites like google.co.uk, google.de, google.jp and google.fr, then expanding quickly to most other Google search sites soon after.



We’ve partnered with a few more sites where you’ll see +1 buttons over the coming days.

If you’re a publisher based outside of the US, and you’ve been waiting to put +1 buttons on your site, now’s a good time to get started. Visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central where the +1 button is already available in 44 languages.



Adding the +1 button could help your site to stand out by putting personal recommendations right at the moment of decision, on Google search. So if you have users who are fans of your content, encourage them to add their voice with +1!



Posted by Kari Wilson, Product Marketing Manager

Pilot Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries data in Google Analytics

Webmaster Level: All



Webmasters have long been asking for better integration between Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. Today we’re happy to announce a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search Queries data from Webmaster Tools.



In addition to including Search Queries data found in Webmaster Tools, these Search Engine Optimization reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports, you should sign up for the pilot and you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator. Each additional user who would like to view them also needs to individually sign up for the pilot.



Posted by Christina Chen & Torrey Hoffman, Webmaster Tools Team

Troubleshooting Instant Previews in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster level: All

In November, we launched Instant Previews to help users better understand if a particular result was relevant for a their search query. Since launch, our Instant Previews team has been keeping an eye on common complaints and problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews.

When we see issues with preview images, they are frequently due to:

• Blocked resources due to a robots.txt entry
• Cloaking: Erroneous content being served to the Googlebot user-agent
• Poor alternative content when Flash is unavailable

To help webmasters diagnose these problems, we have a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs section of Webmaster Tools (in English only for now).

Here, you can input the URL of any page on your site. We will then fetch the page from your site and try to render it both as it would display in Chrome and through our Instant Preview renderer. Please keep in mind that both of these renders are done using a recent build of Webkit which does not include plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, so it's important to consider the value of providing alternative content for these situations. Alternative content can be helpful to search engines, and visitors to your site without the plugin would benefit as well.

Below the renders, you’ll also see automated feedback on problems our system can detect such as missing or roboted resources. And, in the future, we plan to add more informative and timely feedback to help improve your Instant Previews!

Please direct your questions and feedback to the Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Michael Darweesh, Software Engineer

Flash support in Instant Previews

Webmaster level: All

With Instant Previews, users can see a snapshot of a search result before clicking on it. We’ve made a number of improvements to the feature since its introduction last November, and if you own a site, one of the most relevant changes for you is that Instant Previews now supports Flash.

An Instant Preview with rich content rendered

In most cases, when the preview for a page is generated through our regular crawl, we will now render a snapshot of any Flash components on the page. This will replace the "puzzle piece" icon that previously appeared to indicate Flash components, and should improve the accuracy of the previews.

However, for pages that are fetched on demand by the "Google Web Preview" user-agent, we will generate a preview without Flash in order to minimize latency. In these cases the preview will appear as if the page were visited by someone using a browser without Flash enabled, and "Install Flash" messages may appear in the preview, depending on how your website handles users without Flash.

To improve your previews for these on-demand renders, here are some guidelines for using Flash on your site:

• Make sure that your site has a reasonable, seamless experience for visitors without Flash. This may involve creating HTML-only equivalents for your Flash-based content that will automatically be shown to visitors who can't view Flash. Providing a good experience for this case will improve your preview and make your visitors happier.


• If Flash components are rendering but appear as loading screens instead of actual content, try reducing the loading time for the component. This makes it more likely we'll render it properly.


• If you have Flash videos on your site, consider submitting a Video Sitemap which helps us to generate thumbnails for your videos in Instant Previews.


• If most of the page is rendering properly but you still see puzzle pieces appearing for some smaller components, these may be fixed in future crawls of your page.

If you have additional questions, please feel free to post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

As always, we'll keep you updated as we continue to make improvements to Instant Previews.

Posted by Raj Krishnan, Product Manager