Nobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you’re ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools ), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They’re very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today. You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website , which is the start of using the rich information about your organic ranking and organic traffic available in Webmaster Tools. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button. This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript , so if you haven’t migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It’ll save you a little time — who doesn’t like that? Just as with all of Google Webmaster Tools’ other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet. Don’t forget that once you’ve verified ownership, you can add other verified owners in Webmaster Tools (not Google Analytics) quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There’s no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved! Webmaster Central has also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there’s no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — the new interface will walk you through it. The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. Please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions. And much thanks to the Webmaster Central team for launching this feature. If you’re not already, make sure to read their informative blog . It’s a must for any site owner. Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team, and Sean Harding, Webmaster Central Team

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New Verification Integration With Asynch

Webmaster Level: All Nobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics , you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you’re ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools ), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They’re very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today. You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button. This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript , so if you haven’t migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It’ll save you a little time — who doesn’t like that? Just as with all of our other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet. Don’t forget that once you’ve verified ownership, you can add other verified owners quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There’s no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved! We’ve also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there’s no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — we’ll walk you through it. The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions. Written by Sean Harding, Software Engineer

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Verification time savers —  Analytics included!

Webmaster Level: All You can now check your Video Sitemap for even more errors right in Webmaster Tools ! It’s a new Labs feature to signal issues in your Video Sitemap such as: URLs disallowed by robots.txt Thumbnail size errors (160×120px is ideal. Anything smaller than 90×50 will be rejected.) Video Sitemaps help us to better crawl and extract information about your videos, so we can appropriately feature them in search results. Totally new to Video Sitemaps? Check out the Video Sitemaps center for more information. Otherwise, take a look at this new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools. Written by Jackie Lai, Video Search Team

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To err is human, Video Sitemap feedback is divine!

This is part of a series of stories from people who have shared how Google has helped them in their lives. Check back the rest of this week for more, and if you have a Google story, tell us about it . -Ed. I work on projects to help people communicate between languages—whether to read in foreign languages, write in different scripts or chat with people in other countries. Helping people understand information and each other, regardless of language, is an incredibly rewarding experience. This is why it’s always exciting to hear real testimonials from people who have used our language tools—especially in unexpected ways. Ryan, from Ottawa, shared this moving story of how he used Google Transliteration to learn his future fiancée’s native language: Received: 1/14/2010 From: Ryan In October 2009, I proposed to my wonderful girlfriend, Irina, and am happy to report we are getting married this Summer. Although we met and fell in love in North America, I am from the United States, while she is originally from Bangladesh. As our relationship developed, I naturally felt compelled to learn my fiancee’s native language, to better understand her life and to learn to communicate to her non-English-speaking family members. Recalling my junior high Spanish courses, I put together a list of English words I figured I should learn in Bangla and passed the list to Irina. After she had translated them for me, I clumsily began constructing awkward sentences and surprising her with them. To help push my education along further, I transferred my word list into a Google spreadsheet via Google Documents. Whenever Irina would use a Bangla word I hadn’t heard before, I would ask her what it meant, and then immediately put the word into my Google Document, which I titled “Bangla Dictionary.”; My dictionary grew and grew. Today it contains over 350 words and phrases. As much as I enjoyed this process, in less than a year I had reached a “peak” and learned as much Bangla as I would ever learn using this method. I realized that if I were ever to learn how to speak Bangla, I would need to become LITERATE in Bangla. That was when I discovered Google Transliteration. Irina had already shown me how to express Bangla words in English characters. By using your Transliteration feature I could spell a word the only way I knew how, and see immediately what it looked like in Bangla! With the help of a few online Bengali alphabet sites, I could now start learning the characters in the contexts of words and sentences I understood. I am happy to report that I am finally learning to read and write in Bangla. Thanks to your applications, I have learned a second language, become closer to my fiancee, and have opened the door toward building strong ties in my new Bangladeshi family. We’re always happy to hear how people are using our tools to achieve their goals and, in this case, build relationships with future in-laws across the globe. We wish all the best to Ryan and Irina and here’s to many more years of communicating in Bangla! Posted by Anjali Joshi, Director, Product Management

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Your Google stories: finding the right words

We’re excited to hear from users that are able to attribute some incredible growth to Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and many of the other tools we offer. Today, we’re taking a quick look at Twiddy & Company , which uses Google Analytics on a daily basis to optimize their website. They are one of our best examples of using marketing tools from Google to generate skyrocket growth. If you run a business, we think you’ll enjoy this story and be inspired - it’s like a blueprint for using Google Analytics for a successful SMB that relies on their website. Make sure you read to the metaphor they use around bounce rate - we love it! Also, Twiddy & Company was also recently featured in a CNN Small Business Article , where they shared their success in using Kampyle , which uses the Google Analytics API to analyze web analytics and user feedback. Meet Doug Twiddy Doug Twiddy started selling real estate in 1978 in the sleepy village of Duck, North Carolina. After selling a few oceanfront lots, the owners built a few homes and asked the question “can you rent out my home when I’m not using it?” Today, Twiddy & Company manages 860 vacation rental homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. These homes range from a 23 bedroom oceanfront on 20 acres to a 3 bedroom soundfront. We sat and talked with Doug at length, and here’s what’s important to him, in his own words. Favorite Reports “Before Google Analytics, we only knew half of the working equation. Now that e-commerce tracking is installed, we can see the complete formula and it illuminates the true end result. Before we were following indicative numbers, now we can follow the most fundamental and necessary ingredient in all of business. Top Content is also especially useful at highlighting the exact exposure an individual home receives. This feature has created an all out addiction for home owners. Now their first question in relation to their performance is how many visitors their individual home has received. Bounce rate is also a must-have for us. It’s the online equivalent of the human senses. We know a higher bounce rate means that something on that page doesn’t smell, look, or taste good.” How Analytics has changed their approach in analyzing the website “Google Analytics is our compass in terms of allocating our resources. It allows an evolution of marketing. The more successful ideas draw more time and capital. Even the non productive ideas yield educational lessons. In many instances, we learn more from a quick failure than a slow success.” How they tested changes on the website “We’ve recently started testing with Google Website Optimizer. How did we ever survive without this? Our old testing setup was an elementary A/B test but Google Website Optimizer engaged the hyper drive. David Booth at Webshare helped us get started and the results quickly produced the laughter of humility. The variables are now part of our secret sauce. Not only did it make it easier, it made it more successful in an exponential fashion.” How Google Analytics has changed their company “Google Analytics gives Twiddy the tools to outperform the market; the metrics for successful marketing. One of the unforeseen benefits includes the hospitality of the phone calls. By examining what the visitors are looking for online, Twiddy is able to produce more relevant content online that decreases the redundancy of questions for the reservationists. The reservationists now can focus on the more personal side of the vacation experience and guests can fulfill their desire to research the choices and arrive at a very intelligent decision. Google Analytics has had a very tangible impact on the success of the company. It’s become ingrained into the daily routine and crucial to the marketing strategy. General Patton had the 3rd Army, Twiddy & Company has Google Analytics.” We congratulate Twiddy & Company on their success. If you find yourself in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, be sure to stop by their offices and say hello. Posted by Ashish Vij, Google Analytics Team

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Use Case: Twiddy & Company

Webmaster Level: All Today we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable “soft” or “crypto” 404s. A “soft 404″ occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn’t exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site’s crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content. The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content. Additionally, soft 404s can potentially be confusing for your site’s visitors as described in our past blog post, Farewell to Soft 404s .     You can find the new soft 404s reporting feature under the Crawl errors section in Webmaster Tools . Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users: Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL: Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404) Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help. We hope that you’re now better enabled to find and correct soft 404s on your site. If you have feedback or questions about the new “soft 404s” reporting feature or any other Webmaster Tools feature, please share your thoughts with us in the Webmaster Help Forum . Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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Crawl Errors now reports soft 404s

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog ) It’s no secret that any successful 21st century political campaign must have a robust online strategy to succeed. But elected officials and candidates need more than just a website and a YouTube channel to engage voters: from President Obama’s YouTube interview to Senator Scott Brown’s campaign team’s use of Google Docs to Congressman Scott Murphy’s “ Google blast” ad strategy , we’re seeing politicians use more and more of our products and platforms to interact with voters, share information and keep their campaigns organized. We want to do our part to make sure candidates and campaigns have the tools to stay close to voters, who now expect to hear and see much more from their elected officials than ever before. So today, we’re launching YouTube’s You Choose 2010 Campaign Toolkit and a new and improved Google Campaign Toolkit . Both help candidates make their organizations more effective and deliver their messages more directly. On YouTube, campaigns will have access to features like a Politician channel (which allows campaigns to brand their channel and upload longer videos), Google Moderator , our free analytics tool YouTube Insight, and information about running paid advertising campaigns—using formats like in-stream ads and Promoted Videos —to reach viewers with political ads, just like on TV. And our Google toolkit demonstrates how Google Apps can keep staff and volunteers connected, how search ads can grow your email list and provides other helpful tools. We hope campaigns in both national and local contests will use these toolkits to engage and inform voters on important issues in 2010. As access to information online is increasingly important in elections, we’re pleased to continue developing useful tools for voters and candidates. Posted by Ginny Hunt, head of public sector programs

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Inform, engage and mobilize voters with YouTube and Google Campaign Toolkits

by Manoj Jasra Last week I caught up with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google (on the Webmaster Tools team). Maile will be keynoting SES Toronto in a couple of weeks with a presentation titled: Inside Google Webmaster Central. I was able to get a sneak peak on some of the topics from that upcoming session in my chat with Maile - read more about it below: [Manoj]: Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of the latest features, such as DNS record update and clicks/avg. position? [Maile Ohye]: Sure, Manoj, thanks for asking. The schedule for our DNS verification we helped webmasters more easily verify ownership of subdomains in Webmaster Tools. Rather than individually verify www.example.com, blog.example.com, and shopping.example.com, you can add one line to you DNS record and all associated sites/subdomains are verified at once. We expect this feature to be most helpful to webmasters of larger sites. In our improved Search queries , you can view data from not just web search, but also from other properties like images, mobile, and smartphone queries. And you can tailor the information to originate from various countries, like the United Kingdom or Japan. Features like Search queries’ replay the conversation about a topic. I think this may be the only searchable, replay-able, public archive of tweets. [Manoj]: What feature of Webmaster tools is your favorite? [Maile Ohye]: Picking a favorite feature is pretty difficult for me. It’s like picking my favorite niece (I love them all!). One feature I definitely feel goes under-recognized, though, is HTML suggestions. HTML suggestions tells you what pages have duplicate

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Insight Into Webmaster Tools - A Chat with Google’s Maile Ohye

by Stoney deGeyter In Part 3 of the Google Webmaster Tools series we started looking at the Your Site on the Web stats. We covered top search queries. In this post we’ll finish working our way through this section of Webmaster Tools. Top search queries Links to your site Keywords Internal links Subscriber stats Links to Your Site You’ve never been able to get decent or accurate backlink counts (the number of other sites linking to your site) by running a link command search on Google. Such a search generally only shows a fraction of the links to any given page Google Webmaster Tool’s link reports are far more accurate. Not only do you get a total number of incoming links to your site, Google will also give you the number of incoming links on a page by page basis. Google doesn’t tell you if these are links that are counted in their algorithm or not. You can assume that not every link is a valuable link, but unless you are engaged in spammy link practices the vast majority of them should be factored into the algorithm for your site’s ranking. To get more data you can click on the link number for each page. This will produce a list of all the URLs that link to that specific page and the last date Google found each link. You can use this information for a number of reasons, including to see where the majority of your links come from, whether spammy sites are linking to you and if links are pointing to incorrect URLs. This can also tell you if you have important pages that are not getting enough links so you know where to direct your link building efforts, or how quickly Google finds the links on a link building campaign you are running. If you click over to the “Anchor Text” tab at the top of the page you’ll get a list of the actual words used in the links pointing to your site. It’s unfortunate that this doesn’t break down to the page level, but the overall data is still helpful. When you expand each listing you’ll see the variations of that particular phrase. It pretty much just shows you differences in the punctuation and capitalization used in the linked words. Google caps this page at 200 results for the link text. I think it can be assumed that they show the top 200 most linked phrases, though this isn’t clear. [Top] Keywords This is Google’s version of a keyword cloud for your entire site. The most frequently used word (excluding common words such as “the,” “and,” etc.) is shown with a full graph. The bar graphs for rest of the keywords go down proportionately to how often each word is used compared to the most frequently used word at the top. The words at or near the top should represent your most important single-word keyword. If you see an important keyword to far down then you’ll want to remedy that be working it into your content so it appears more frequently. If you click any of the keywords Google provides you with additional data on each phrase including total number of occurrences on your site and the “Top URLs”. Not sure what constitutes a “top URL” here. A nice additional feature would be to get a keyword cloud “significance bar” on a page by page basis, not just the site as a whole. [Top] Internal Links This page is similar to the “links to my site” page but instead of showing links from other sites to each page, it shows you how many internal links you have to each page. On the left, as before, you have the URL of the page with the number of internal links to that page on the right. You have additional functionality here that allows you to filter the links by sub-domain, if you have them. Clicking the number of links for any given page gives you the list of all the pages linking to that page along with the last date that particular link was found. This is great data for analyzing the internal link architecture of your site. Look for important pages that have few incoming links. By their very nature, product pages will have fewer incoming links than top-level and category-level pages. Your most important pages should have the most links to them and then the numbers should go down as page importance goes down. If you find valuable or important pages with few internal links, this is your que to add some additional internal links to those important pages. [Top] Subscriber Stats This section gives you a quick glance at your RSS feeds and how many people are subscribed to them with Google. You have the option to submit any of these feeds as a sitemap. [Top] Learn more about these sections of Google Webmaster Tools Part I: Setting Up a Site Part II: Site configuration Part III: Your site on the web Part IV: Your site on the web (continued) Part V: Diagnostics Part VI: Labs

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SEO With Google Webmaster Tools - Part 4: Your Site on the Web (Continued)

(Cross-posted on the Google Enterprise Blog ) With school almost out for summer, things are hitting a frenzied end-of-year pace in classrooms; and life is similarly fast-paced for the Google’s Apps for Education team as we work with the schools adopting Google Apps in increasing numbers. Today we’ve reached another milestone — 8 million students, faculty and staff around the world have gone Google. To put this in perspective, the U.S. has about 16 million college students total. This new milestone has been keeping us especially busy since it comes less than 60 days after we announced 7 million active users. It’s pretty cool to see adoption growing even as the school year wraps up, because it means more freshmen get to come to campus and dive into using Google Apps for email and collaboration next fall. Some of the new schools in this bunch are Morehouse, University of Rhode Island, University of Nevada Las Vegas, the Metropolitan State College of Denver and North Carolina State University. These colleges and universities join thousands of others that have gone Google, some of which you can see on this map . According to the Campus Computing survey , more than 80 percent of schools in the U.S. have moved to cloud computing or are considering it, and of those almost 60 percent choose Google Apps, so these new schools have plenty of company. With this kind of growth, we expect a lot of quick change. Some schools choose Apps for students ( UC Davis ), and some migrate their faculty and staff , either with or after student deployments (like Boise State University ). Some schools deploy for alumni (like Notre Dame ) and some pilot Apps rollouts with their graduate schools (like Howard University ). We always support pilots as they help schools check out how their productivity, or even server costs, can change with group collaboration and web-based tools and often lead to broader deployments down the line. Universities (like Googlers!) are experts at trying a lot of things and sticking with what works for them. As Apps for Edu heads toward its fourth birthday we expect we’ll see schools continue to develop personalized plans for piloting, deployment and of course, use. One cool example is from Temple University, which designated April Google Apps month and built a Google site to help students and faculty learn more about the tools and get their feedback. Often schools will find that something that works for them, and continue to build from there. For example, after Vanderbilt University successfully deployed Google Apps for their students, they decided they wanted to improve search on their site, too — so they also rolled out Google Site Search. To hear more from Vanderbilt about how and why they did this, tune in to our webinar on Wednesday, May 12 (you can register here ). Google Apps and search tools helped Vandy save $750,000 annually, and the student population is all about collaborating in the cloud: the student government takes meeting notes on Docs and also shares a campus-wide activity calendar. That’s Commodore efficiency at its best. Even though our summer break won’t necessarily consist of exotic travel, summer school, or pool-side relaxation, we’ll keep busy working with schools as they deploy Google Apps. So, if you’ve done something neat at your school to “go Google”, we’d love to hear about it . Posted by Miriam Schneider, Apps Edu Team

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Schools are (almost) out for summer…and in for Apps