Webmaster Level: All When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we’re now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them. A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this: We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don’t want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox. If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below. Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

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New Message Center notifications for detecting an increase in Crawl Errors

Good news from the horse’s mouth. We don’t mean to call Matt Cutts a horse, but, well, if you know him, you know what we mean. Matt heads the webspam team here at Google and also speaks on behalf of Google answering questions about ranking and results on Google’s search engine. When people have questions about things Google-search-related, Matt is the one who answers. He posts regular video blogs to the Google Webmaster Help channel answering your questions. So we were very pleased when he recently answered the question, “ Will using Google Analytics have a negative effect on my ranking? ” In short, the answer is no, especially now that we’ve launched the asynch tracking code . Take a look at the short video: Thanks Matt! Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team

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Will Using Google Analytics Have A Negative Effect On My Ranking?

Webmaster Level: All We’ve been hearing this question for many years from webmasters. That’s why we built features such as the Safe Browsing API , the malware review form , and our Malware details Labs feature . As of today, once we notice your site is infected, we’ll do our best to send an e-mail to the address you have associated with your account in Webmaster Tools. We believe malware is such an important issue for site owners that being quickly informed is beneficial to you and your website’s visitors. In addition, we’ve promoted our Malware details feature out of Labs and placed it under Diagnostics. The malware data is now updated four times faster than before, we’ve updated our algorithms for identifying injected content, and we’re now able to identify exploits which we were unable to catch earlier. We hope this allows you to stay up-to-date with any malware issues we detect on your site, and to fix them quickly. As always, please let us know if you have any feedback or questions about how to fix malware-related issues in our Webmaster Help Forum . Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team

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When and why was my site flagged for malware? Learn in near real-time!

Webmaster Level: All As 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, schools and universities, even multinational corporations. Spam attacks against forums and user content sections of sites, though not as shocking, are even more widespread. You may have read in an earlier post that we’ve begun notifying webmasters about new software versions via Webmaster Tools to help protect their sites. Continuing with our effort to provide more useful information to webmasters, we’re happy to announce that we’ll soon be sending even more notifications to the Message Center . Starting this month, we will notify more webmasters of more potential issues we’ve detected on their websites, including: Spammy or abused user-generated content Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam Suspected hacking These notifications are meant to alert webmasters of potential issues and provide next steps on how to get their sites fixed and back into Google’s search results. If it pertains to a hacking or abuse issue, the notification will point to example URLs exhibiting this type of behavior. These notifications will run in parallel with our existing malware notifications. A notice of suspected hacking, for example, will look like this: We’ve been notifying webmasters of suspected hacking for years, but a recent upgrade to our systems will allow us to notify many more site owners that have been hacked. We hope webmasters will find these notifications useful in making sure their sites are clean and secure, ultimately providing a better user experience for their visitors. In the future, we may extend this effort even further to include other types of vulnerabilities or abuse issues. Just as before, webmasters who have not already signed up for Webmaster Tools may still do so and retrieve previously sent messages within one year of their send date . And if you don’t want to miss out on any important messages, remember to use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below. Posted by Jessica Wong and Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

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Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse

Webmaster Level: All We 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 information that may not be well known. Some things to keep in mind when taking this quiz: The quiz will be available to take from today until Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST . It doesn’t cover all facets of webmaster problems that arise, and—as with any test—it is at best only a fun way to test your webmaster prowess ;). We leave discussion of specific cases to the forum. We’ve set up the quiz using our very own Google Docs . This means you won’t see results right away, but we plan to write a follow-up blog post explaining answers and listing top scorers. Be sure to save your answers or print out your completed quiz before submitting! This way you can check your answers against the correct ones when we publish them. It’s just for fun! Now go take the quiz ! Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

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Test your webmaster know-how!

Webmaster level: Intermediate We’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 new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we’re announcing our support of the cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element . Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication: Choose your preferred domain When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves. Reduce in-site duplication Before starting on cross-site duplicate content questions, make sure to handle duplication within your site first. Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects . These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file . Don’t forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools . Use the cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element There are situations where it’s not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel=”canonical” link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel=”canonical” link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible. Still have questions? Q: Do the pages have to be identical? A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine. Q: For technical reasons I can’t include a 1:1 mapping for the URLs on my sites. Can I just point the rel=”canonical” at the homepage of my preferred site? A: No; this could result in problems. A mapping from old URL to new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to use rel=”canonical”. Q: I’m offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel=”canonical”? A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel=”canonical”, if both parties agree. Q: My server can’t do a 301 (permanent) redirect. Can I use rel=”canonical” to move my site? A: If it’s at all possible, you should work with your webhost or web server to do a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that we treat rel=”canonical” as a hint, and other search engines may handle it differently. But if a 301 redirect is impossible for some reason, then a rel=”canonical” may work for you. For more information, see our guidelines on moving your site . Q: Should I use a noindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel=”canonical” link element? A: No, since those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing - one would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Additionally, it’s important that these pages are not disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, otherwise search engine crawlers will not be able to discover the rel=”canonical” link element. We hope this makes it easier for you to handle duplicate content in a user-friendly way. Are there still places where you feel that duplicate content is causing your sites problems? Let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum ! Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

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Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication

Want to know what’s new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel ? Here’s what we’ve uploaded in the past week: Matt Cutts answered a few new questions from the Grab Bag: What if a search for my business triggers “Did you mean?” Why do big brands rank so well? Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO? Matt also went over a great example of whitehat linkbait : And if you’ve ever thought about hiding text , here’s one technique that didn’t fool Google : Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum . Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

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Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 8th - 12th

Want to know what’s new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel ? Here’s what we’ve uploaded in the past week: Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag: Are shortened URLs treated differently than other redirects? How can I make sure Google reaches my deeper pages? What impact does server location have on rankings? Will a “coming soon” page negatively impact my site? How many pages can Google index from a single site? In response to questions we’ve been getting about the videos themselves, we created a behind the scenes look at our setup. And just to throw in some more variety, Matt took a break from SEO questions for a few minutes to show off a fun use of a barcode scanner with Google Book Search. You can read more about it on the Inside Google Book Search blog. For your instant viewing pleasure, here’s the answer to the question about URL shortners: And now a peek behind the scenes: Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum . Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

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Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 1st - 5th

At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user’s experience and helps them become more productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we’ve used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page Speed . Page Speed is a tool we’ve been using internally to improve the performance of our web pages — it’s a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug . When you run Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve their speed. For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn’t actually used to display the page, which can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display. Page Speed’s suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted best practices that we and other websites implement. To help you understand the suggestions and rules, we have created detailed documentation to describe the rationale behind each of the rules. We look forward to your feedback on the Webmaster Help Forum. Posted by Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team

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Introducing Page Speed

Webmaster Level: All Many thanks to the more than 1,600 people who filled out our survey in February . You gave us your feedback on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google Webmaster Tools , the Webmaster Help Forum , and our Webmaster Central videos on YouTube . You told us what you like and want to see more of: Webmaster Central gives users insight into Google: “[I like] being able to access, communicate, and see how my sites relate to Google.” Webmaster Central provides high quality information: “What I have enjoyed most of all, is reading Google’s guidelines for webmasters, which is on-point with what I have been telling customers about SEO.” Webmaster Central collects several useful tools in one place: “It’s an innovative central hub for all the tools supported and provided by the industry leader Google, for free.” We also learned about what you don’t like and where we could be doing better. Our top finding is that beginner webmasters (about 20% of the survey respondents) are less satisfied than intermediate or advanced webmasters with Webmaster Central. Open-ended comments suggested that new webmasters want basic, less technical information from us. A common feedback that we received: “Many users like myself are not of the hi-tech, IT-savvy variety and prefer simplicity, whether we create a website for information or to generate revenue.” Based on your responses, we’ve planned some new resources like a series of how-to videos especially for new webmasters (coming soon to YouTube ). We take your feedback seriously and will continue improving Webmaster Central and our other webmaster sites. Again, thanks for your participation in the survey. We want Webmaster Central to continue being a useful resource for you. Written by Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher

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