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New: Content analysis and Sitemap details, plus more languagesPosted by Jonathan Simon - December 13, 2007 on 3:48 pm | In Google Web Central, crawling and indexing, sitemaps, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends AnalystWe're always striving to help webmasters build outstanding websites, and in our latest release we have two new features: Content analysis and Sitemap details. We hope these features help you to build a site you could compare to a fine wine -- getting better and better over time. Content analysis To help you improve the quality of your site, our new content analysis feature should be a helpful addition to the crawl error diagnostics already provided in Webmaster Tools. Content analysis contains feedback about issues that may impact the user experience or that may make it difficult for Google to crawl and index pages on your site. By reviewing the areas we've highlighted, you can help eliminate potential issues that could affect your site's ability to be crawled and indexed. This results in better indexing of your site by Google and other search engines. The Content analysis summary page within the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools features three main categories. Click on a particular issue type for more details:
 Selecting "Duplicate title tags" displays a list of repeated page titles along with a count of how many pages contain that title. We currently present up to thirty duplicated page titles on the details page. If the duplicate title issues shown are corrected, we'll update the list to reflect any other pages that share duplicate titles the next time your website is crawled.  Sitemap details page If you've submitted a Sitemap, you'll be happy when you see the additional information in Webmaster Tools revealing how your Sitemap was processed. You can find this information on the newly available Sitemap Details page which (along with information that was previously provided for each of your Sitemaps) shows you the number of the pages from your Sitemap that were indexed. Keep in mind the number of pages indexed from your Sitemap may not be 100% accurate because the indexed number is updated periodically, but it's more accurate than running a "site:example.com" query on Google. The new Sitemap Details page also lists any errors or warnings that were encountered when specific pages from your Sitemap were crawled. So the time you might have previously spent on crafting custom Google queries to determine how many pages from your Sitemap were indexed, can now be spent on improving your site. If your site is already the crème de la crème, you might prefer to spend the extra free time mastering your ice-carving skills or blending the perfect eggnog. Here's a view of the new Sitemap details page:  Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Google about your site's most important pages, especially if you have new or updated content that we may not know about. If you haven't yet submitted a Sitemap or have questions about the process, visit our Webmaster Help Center to learn more. Webmaster Tools now available in Czech & Hungarian We love expanding our product to help more people and in their language of choice. We recently put in effort to expand the number of Webmaster Tools available languages to Czech and Hungarian, in addition to the 20 other languages we already support. We won't be stopping here. Our desire to support even more languages in the future means that if your language of choice isn't currently supported, stay tuned -- there'll be even more supported languages to come. We always love to hear what you think. Please visit our Webmaster Help Group to share comments or ask questions. 
Go Daddy and Google offer easy access to Webmaster ToolsPosted by David Sha, Webmaster Tools Team - November 12, 2007 on 9:32 pm | In Google Web Central, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by David Sha, Webmaster Tools TeamWelcome Go Daddy webmasters to the Google Webmaster Tools family! Today, we're announcing that Go Daddy, the world's largest hostname provider in the web hosting space, is working with us as a pilot partner so that their customers can more easily access Google Webmaster Tools. Go Daddy is a great partner, and we hope to educate more webmasters on how to make their site more search engine-friendly. Go Daddy users will now see our link right in their hosting control center, and can launch Google Webmaster Tools directly from their hosting account. And Go Daddy makes the Google Webmaster Tools account creation process faster by adding the site, verifying the site, and submitting Sitemaps on behalf of hosting customers. Our tools show users how Google views their site, give useful stats like queries and links, diagnose problems, and share information with us in order to improve their site's visibility in search results. As a continuation of these efforts, we look forward to working with other web hosting companies to add Google Webmaster Tools to their products soon. And in case you're wondering, Webmaster Tools will stay 100% the same for current users. If you have questions or suggestions about our partnership with Go Daddy, let us know in our Webmaster community discussion groups. 
Better geographic choices for webmastersPosted by Amanda - October 31, 2007 on 3:09 pm | In Google Web Central, crawling and indexing, search results, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Amanda Camp, Webmaster Tools and Trystan Upstill, International Search Quality TeamStarting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries. We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served. For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:  But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...  This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)  Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly. This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world. We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group. 
Dealing with Sitemap cross-submissionsPosted by Mickey Kataria, Google Zürich - October 25, 2007 on 11:57 am | In Google Web Central, sitemaps, webmaster tools | No Comments Posted by Mickey Kataria, Google ZürichSince the launch of Sitemaps, webmasters have been asking if they could submit their Sitemaps for multiple hosts on a single dedicated host. A fair question -- and now you can! Why would someone want to do this? Let's say that you own www.example.com and mysite.google.com and you have Sitemaps for both hosts, e.g. sitemap-example.xml and sitemap-mysite.xml. Until today, you would have to store each Sitemap on its respective host. If you tried to place sitemap-mysite.xml on www.example.com, you would get an error because, for security reasons, a Sitemap on www.example.com can only contains URLs from www.example.com. So how do we solve this? Well, if you can "prove" that you own or control both of these hosts, then either one can host a Sitemap containing URLs for the other. Just follow the normal verification process in Google Webmaster Tools and any verified site in your account will be able to host Sitemaps for any other verified site in the same account. Here is an example showing both sites verified:  And now, from a single host, you can submit Sitemaps for both sites without any errors. sitemap-example.xml contains URLs from www.example.com and sitemap-mysite.xml contains URLs from mysite.google.com but both now reside on www.example.com: For those of you wondering how this affects the other search engines that support the Sitemap Protocol, rest assured that we're talking to them about how to make cross-submissions work seamlessly across all of them. Until then, this specific solution will work only for users of Google Webmaster Tools. 
Blast from the pastPosted by Sahala Swenson - October 18, 2007 on 4:47 pm | In Google Web Central, search results, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Sahala Swenson, Webmaster Tools TeamAs you know, the queries used to find your website in search results can change over time. Your website content changes, as do the needs of all the busy searchers out there. Whether the queries associated with your site change subtly or dramatically, it's pretty useful to see how they transform over time. Recognizing this, Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools now presents historical data and other enhancements. Let's take a closer look:  Up to 6 months of historical data: Previously we only showed query stats for the last 7 days. Now you can jump between 9 query stats snapshots ranging from now to 6 months ago. Note that the time interval for each of these snapshots is different. For the 7 day, 2 week, and 3 week snapshots, we report the top queries for the previous week. For the 1 to 6 month snapshots, we report statistics for the previous month. And still others of you who log in may notice that you don't have query stats data going back to 6 months ago. We hope to improve that experience in the future. :) Top query percentages: You might have noticed a new column in the top query listings. Previously we just ranked your query results and clicks. While useful, this didn't really tell you to what extent one query was ranked higher than another. Now we show what percentage each query result or click represents out of the top 20 queries. This should help you see how well the result or click volume is distributed in the top 20. Downloads: Since we're now showing historical data on the Top Search Queries screen, we figured it would be rude to not let you download it all and play with the data yourself (spreadsheet masochists, I'm looking at you). We added a “Download data” link that lets you download all the stats in CSV format. Note that this exports all query stats historical data across all snapshots as well as search types and languages, so you can slice and dice to your satisfaction. The “Download all stats (including subfolders)” link, however, will still only show query stats for your site and sub-folders for the last 7 days. Freshness: We've improved data freshness in Webmaster Tools a couple of times in the past, and we've done it again with the new Top Search Queries. Statistics are being now updated constantly. Top query results and clicks may visibly change rank a lot more often now, sometimes daily. So enough talk. Sign in and play around with the new improvements for yourself. As always we welcome feedback (especially in the form of beer), so feel free to drop us a note in the Webmaster Help Group and let us know what you think. 
Introducing Code Search SitemapsPosted by Mickey Kataria, Google Zürich - October 18, 2007 on 2:59 pm | In Google Web Central, sitemaps, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Mickey Kataria, Google ZürichThe Sitemaps team is continuing its trend of extending the Sitemap Protocol for specific products and content types. Our latest work with the Google Code Search team now enables you to create Sitemaps that contain information about public source code you host and would like to include in Code Search. There's more information about this new functionality on the Google Code blog. If you're eager to get going, take a look at our Help Center documentation, create a Code Search Sitemap, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and submit a Sitemap for Code Search!  
Webmasters can now provide feedback on SitelinksPosted by Liza Ma - October 18, 2007 on 1:48 pm | In Google Web Central, search results, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Stacey Kuznetsov, Search QualitySitelinks are extra links that appear below some search results in Google. They serve as shortcuts to help users quickly navigate to the important pages on your site.  Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don't want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don't typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don't want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won't appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster. To view and manage your sitelinks, go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and click the site you want. In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks.  Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned for more updates! 
Data freshnessPosted by Ríona MacNamara - October 8, 2007 on 12:35 pm | In Google Web Central, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools TeamCommon feedback we hear from webmasters is that you want us to improve the freshness of the data in Webmaster Tools. Understood. :) We've increased the update frequency for your verified sites' data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site. If your content doesn't change very often, or if you're not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools. Please continue to post your Suggestions & feature requests in the Webmaster Help Group. It's one of our most important sources of feedback from the webmaster community. We seriously take it seriously. 
Subscriber stats and morePosted by Liza Ma - September 14, 2007 on 5:49 pm | In Google Web Central, products and services, webmaster tools | No Comments Posted by Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools TeamWe're unrolling some exciting new features in Webmaster Tools. First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information.  To improve the navigation and look and feel, we've also made some changes to the interface, including:
Sign in to see these changes for yourself. For questions or feedback, please post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. 
Update on penalty notificationsPosted by Ben D'Angelo - August 29, 2007 on 3:40 pm | In Google Web Central, webmaster guidelines, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Ben D'Angelo, Search Quality TeamFirst, 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 number of spoofed messages being sent from outside Google, primarily to German webmasters. Then, in mid-July, we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners. While Message Center is great for verified site owners, it doesn't allow us to notify webmasters who aren't registered in Google's Webmaster Tools. For this reason, we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won't keep messages waiting if you haven't previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months. We'll keep you posted as things change. 
Register non-English domain names with Webmaster ToolsPosted by Foucher - August 27, 2007 on 4:16 pm | In Google Web Central, webmaster tools | No Comments Written by Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools TeamI'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. 
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