Written by David Sha, Webmaster Tools Team
We launched Webmaster Central back in August 2006, with a goal of creating a place for you to learn more about Google’s crawling and indexing of websites, and to offer tools for submitting sitemaps and other content. Given all of your requests and recommendations, we’ve also been busy working [...]
Written by Ben D’Angelo, Search Quality Team
First, a brief recap: In late 2005, we started emailing webmasters to let them know that their site is violating our Webmaster Guidelines and that we have temporarily removed some of their pages from our index. A few months ago we put these emails on hold due to a [...]
Written by Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools Team
I’m happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system’s limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior [...]
Written by Jonathan Simon
As summer inches towards fall and in many places the temperature is still rising, you’re probably thinking the best place to be right now is on the beach, by a pool or inside somewhere that’s air-conditioned. These are all good choices, but next week there’s somewhere else to be that’s both hot [...]
Posted by John Blackburn, Webmaster Tools and Matt Dougherty, Search Quality
We’ve improved Webmaster Central’s robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren’t aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your [...]
Written by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Anti-Malware Team
In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites — suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post “About badware warnings” as well as the stopbadware discussion [...]
Written by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Search Quality Team
Held on June 27th, Searchnomics 2007 gave us (Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur) a chance to meet webmasters and answer some of their questions. As we’re both engineers focused on improving search quality, the feedback was extremely valuable. Here’s our take on the conference and a [...]
Written by Prashanth Koppula, Product Manager, and Matt Cutts, Software Engineer
When Google originally introduced Supplemental Results in 2003, our main web index had billions of web pages. The supplemental index made it possible to index even more web pages and, just like our main web index, make this content available when generating relevant search results [...]
Written by Maile OhyeToday we’re launching our Message Center, a new way for webmasters to receive personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Should we need to contact you, you’ll see a notification in your Webmaster Tools dashboard.
Initially the messages will refer to search quality issues, but over time we’ll use the Message Center [...]
Given helpful suggestions from our discussion group, we’ve improved feedback for sitemaps in Webmaster Tools. Now, minor problems in a sitemap will be reported as “warnings,” and will appear instead of, or in addition to, more serious “errors.” (Previously all problems were listed as errors.) Warnings allow us to provide feedback on [...]
Posted by Selina & Jos, Search Quality Team, Dublin
In the Dutch market, the concept of so-called ’startpages’ is hugely popular. In this article we will give some background information on them, and give those of you who may be startpage webmasters a few tips on how to create unique and informative startpages.
What’s a startpage?
Basically, it’s [...]
Written by Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team
We occasionally get questions on the Webmaster Help Group about how webmasters should work with Adobe Flash. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a few words about the search considerations designers should think about when building a Flash-heavy site.
As many of you already know, Flash is inherently [...]
