Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Update on penalty notifications

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Written by Ben D'Angelo, Search Quality Teamemailing webmastersWebmaster Guidelinesput these emails on holdlaunched Message CenterWebmaster Tools

Register non-English domain names with Webmaster Tools

Monday, August 27, 2007

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 to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.

Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:

Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.

Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:

If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.

We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.

Join us at cool SES San Jose - it'll be hot!

Friday, August 17, 2007

Written by Jonathan SimonAs 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 and cool: the Search Engines Strategies conference in San Jose. In addition to the many tantalizing conference sessions covering diverse topics related to search, there will be refreshments, food, and of course, air-conditioning.

Additionally, on Tuesday evening at our Mountain View ‘plex we're hosting the “Google Dance” -- where conference attendees can eat, drink, play, dance, and talk about search. During the Google Dance be sure to attend the “Meet the Engineers” event where you’ll be able to meet and have a conversation with 25 or more engineers including Webmaster Central’s own Amanda Camp. Also, if you get a spare minute from merry-making, head over to the Webmaster Tools booth, where you’ll find Maile Ohye offering lots of good advice.If you’re a night owl, you’ll probably also be interested in the unofficial late-night SES after-parties that you only know about if you talk to the right person. To stem the potential barrage of “where’s the party” questions, I'd like to make it clear that I unfortunately am not the right person. But if you happen to be someone who’s organizing a late night party, please consider inviting me. ;)"Enough about the parties -- what about the conference?," you ask. As you would expect, Google will be well-represented at the conference. Here is a sampling of the Search-related sessions at which Googlers will be speaking:Universal & Blended Search
Monday, August 20
11:00am-12:30pm
David Baile
Personalization, User Data & Search
Monday, August 20
2:00 - 3:30pm
Sep Kamvar
Searcher Behavior Research Update
Monday, August 20
4:00 - 5:30pm
Oliver Deighton
Are Paid Links Evil?
Tuesday, August 21
4:45 - 6:00pm
Matt Cutts
Keynote Conversation
Wednesday, August 22
9:00 - 9:45am
Marissa Mayer
Search APIs
Wednesday, August 22
10:30am - 12:00pm
Jon Diorio
SEO Through Blogs & Feeds
Wednesday, August 22
10:30am - 12:00pm
Rick Klau
Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues
Wednesday, August 22
1:30 - 2:45pm
Greg Grothaus
CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines
Wednesday, August 22
3:15 - 4:30pm
Amanda Camp
Search Engine Q&A On Links
Wednesday, August 22
4:45 - 6:00pm
Shashi Thakur
Meet the Crawlers
Thursday, August 23
10:45am - 12:00pm
Evan Roseman
We will also have a large presence in the conference expo hall where members of the Webmaster Central Team like Susan Moskwa and I will be present at the Webmaster Tools booth to answer questions, listen to your thoughts and generally be there to chat about all things webmaster related. Bergy and Wysz, two more of us who tackle tough questions in the Webmaster Help Groups, will be offering assistance at the Google booth (live and in person, not via discussion thread).If you're reading this and thinking, "I should go and grab the last frozen juice bar in the freezer," I suggest that you save that frozen juice bar for when you return from the conference and find that your brain's overheating from employing all the strategies you've learned and networking with all the people you've met.
Joking aside, we are psyched about the conference and hope to see you there. Save a cold beverage for me!

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

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 Sitemap's URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.

www.example.com
disalow images

user-agent: *
Disallow:

sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

http://www.example.com
/archives

See for yourself at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools.
Official Google Blog www.example.com www.example.com/2007promotion.html<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT"
CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 EST">Robots Exclusion Protocol www.example.com/2007promotion.pdfX-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 31 Dec
2007 23:59:59 ESTWebmaster Help Group

Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

Monday, August 13, 2007

Written by Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Anti-Malware Teammalware/badware"About badware warnings"stopbadware discussion groupWebmaster Toolsmalware-labeled search results

View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.

Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.

New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.

New: Check the status of your review.

If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).

Stopbadware's malware prevention tipsdocumentationdiscussion groupWebmaster Tools

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Written by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Search Quality TeamSearchnomics 2007Here's our take on the conference and a recap of some of what we talked about there.Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, ".co.uk " domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

I have many different sites. Can I cross-link between them?Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it.Any special guidance for DHTML/AJAX/Flash documents?It's important to make sure that content and navigation can be rendered/negotiated using only HTML. So long as the content and navigation are the same for search crawlers and end users, you're more than welcome to use advanced technologies such as Flash and/or Javascript to improve the user experience using a richer presentation. In "Best uses of Flash," we wrote in more detail about this, and are working on a post about AJAX technology.

Webmaster Central Blog

Update on penalty notifications

Register non-English domain names with Webmaster Tools

Join us at cool SES San Jose - it'll be hot!

New robots.txt feature and REP Meta Tags

Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

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