Articles in The 'google-webmaster-central' Tag

When In Doubt, Ask Google!

by Darren Franks

Back in December, I discussed Google’s blog for Webmasters, “Have you Checked out Google Webmaster Central Lately?”. As I said at that time, the Webmaster Central blog is a great SEO resource as you are getting answers from Google directly to common SEO problems, as opposed to sifting through the glut of information (some of it bad) about SEO on the Internet.

Today, I’d like to turn your attention to the Google webmaster support forum, http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters:

As you can see from the screenshot of the page above, the discussions are categorized, making it simple to navigate to the particular area that you want to look at. To me, and to other SEOs, webmasters and developers, the Google Webmaster Help Forum is an invaluable place to get answers, straight from Google employees, about issues that are so perplexing, that you can’t find or trust answers anywhere else. A great SEO mantra is, “if you are on the fence about any issue and the answers aren’t anywhere else, ask Google!”

From an SEO perspective, the most useful categories are, “Crawling, indexing & ranking”, “Webmaster Tools” and “Sitemaps”:
When you look at the list of questions in any category, say the The Crawling, indexing & ranking category, you will see questions posed from any number of people in the SEO field. When you first see the list, some of the forum topics will show the word “Answered” underneath the link to the topic:

When you see a topic/question tagged with that word, the question has received an answer that Google feels is the most accurate. The “Best Answers” can be from well respected forum posters, dubbed “Bionic Posters” and Google feels that these posters contribute the most prolific and accurate answers to many questions on the forum. There are also questions, topics and answers posted by Google employees:

As you can see, a poster’s status will be underneath their user handle next to the post, making it easy to ascertain the validity of any kind of answers you observe. Posters will either receive a designation of “Level 1” for the beginners up to “Top Contributor”. Top Contributor status is based on how much you participate (questions & replies), actual helpfulness (best answers) and how frequently you receive a manual thumbs up from Google’ employees.

In February, there was a major algorithmic change at Google affecting over 10% of websites that were deemed to have content that wasn’t of good quality. Many websites feared that they had dropped positions and PageRank for that very reason, so Google went and created a forum topic that if you feel your website was unfairly penalized, you were able to reach out to them:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=76830633df82fd8e&hl=en&start=160. While Google said that they were collecting this information to see how they could improve the algorithm and not make “manual exceptions”, it was still a useful way to alert Google to any concerns pertaining to the ranking status of your site.

Posting to the forum is easy as all you need to do is sign in to Webmaster Central with a Google account and create a user name. Have you signed up yet?

Have you Checked out Google Webmaster Central Lately?

by Darren Franks

Any good webmaster that has a predilection for a well optimized site should always be perusing Google Webmaster Central (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) for the latest Google features. These updates on their blog are really useful for keeping up on the current innovations from the worlds most popular search engine.

Some recent blog posts of note include:

1. Search queries with top pages: This post announces the addition of the ability for site owners to use Webmaster Tools to analyze impression, click, and position data for their top pages.
2. More queries show additional results from a domain: Instead of the usual 2 results for a type of search query, Google will now serve around 4, meaning that some sites will have much more of a presence for exact name matches for their company name or brand.
3. Control crawling and indexing of your site: Google has created a new subdomain, http://code.google.com/, which explains, in a lot of detail, about how to correctly set up a site’s robots.txt file and robots meta tags.

It can sometimes be a daunting task to sift through all of the information on the Internet about how Google wants you to design your site when it comes to indexing and ranking. Webmaster Central is a useful resource if you are on the fence about designing your site for SEO.

Google Webmaster Central

by Michelle Stone

While most of us are primarily familiar with Google as a search engine, there are several products and services offered by the company that can help webmasters gain visibility into their websites. While Google Analytics is one of the better known of this suite of tools (we have an in-house Web Intelligence team as well as a web analytics blog which features articles on it), there is another very useful tool webmasters can use. Conveniently enough, it’s called Google Webmaster Central.

Just like Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Central is offered as freeware. All you need to gain access to these services is a Google account. But, once you are in, what can you do? Well, more than you might realize. Once you verify that you are the website owner (by the addition of a slim-line authentication code in your site metadata or via upload of a validation HTML file), Google Webmaster Central offers a fairly robust selection of services, among which are:

• Diagnostic information, such as the ability to identify “crawl errors”. Google Webmaster Central will show   you the number of each type of crawl error the search engine has found on your website (with links to the individual URLs with errors).
• Top search queries. You are able to view and research the top searches that bring visitors to your site from the Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
• Visibility into what the GoogleBot sees. This is basically a detail of the words used most often in your website. As the search engine’s spiders are essentially “blind” (i.e. they can’t see the images used on your site), the way in which relevance to a particular search term is determined is from reading the words on the site’s pages. Knowing what the GoogleBot sees can help you with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, as well as your web accessibility compliance efforts.
• A listing of external links. This will show you a list of pages on your site with external links to them, along with the number of links to each page. With this listing you can also click through to see the list of external URLs.
• A listing of internal links. This list is presented in an alphabetized format, showing links from your website to other pages within the site (this is also referred to as inter-linking).
• Statistical information for RSS/ATOM feeds. With Google Webmaster Central you can obtain information on the number of subscribers to each feed on your website via the Google Reader and iGoogle. It’s important to note that, if your site offers feeds using a service like FeedBurner, the data in Google Webmaster Central may not match the data from FeedBurner. The reason is that there’s currently no way for site owners to upload a FeedBurner file to the domain or to put an authentication/verification meta tag on the home page. Without this authentication, feeds served up via FeedBurner can’t get added to Google Webmaster Central.
• A listing of site links. This is the list of links and titles that Google has generated for the site and appears in the SERPs.
• Identification of site issues. Your site may have content problems. If there are any issues with missing, duplicate, or short titles or meta descriptions, you can find this information as part of the webmaster toolset.

As Google has the lion’s share of Internet search traffic (with an active reach for 59.41%*), understanding how Google views your site, and diagnosing potential problems, is crucial to increasing your site’s visibility. Learning how Google’s robots crawl and index your website, learning what drives traffic to your site so you can refine your SEO efforts, and actually telling Google about your site by using Google Webmaster Central can help to improve your crawl-ability.

*Figure 1: Nielson Online — Top Online Web Brands in the U.S.

By using the Google Webmaster Central service and its various tools, you can obtain information on how Google, and, by extension Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines, sees your website. Google Webmaster Central is an excellent way to obtain direct, expert support, diagnose any site errors, and improve your site’s search visibility.