Greek Web Masters

We’ve just released updates to several features in Webmaster Tools to provide you with more detail and more control of how your site appears in search results.

Search queries: Time does not stand still and neither should your site. With that in mind we’ve added a “Change” column next to the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and position columns, making it easier to identify trends for each of these important metrics. The change column is tied to the date range you specify, which should help when you’re trying to pinpoint when a particular change occurred.

Each query listed in Search queries now links to a query details page which includes a graph of impressions and clicks for that specific query, providing a quick visual of its performance in the search results over time. Below the graph is a table listing of the pages returned in search results for that query, along with impressions, clicks and CTR. Each column in the table is sortable, offering a quick way to re-sort the data based on what’s most interesting to you. If you’d rather use your own favorite tool to slice and dice the data you can use the “Download this table” link to export all the information from the main Search queries page or from each individual query details page.

Better Parameter Handling: We’ve moved this feature under its own tab in the Settings section of Webmaster Tools, and introduced a new action to manage parameters. When we introduced Parameter Handling last year, we allowed you to specify URL parameters and whether they should be ignored or not. When you choose to ignore a parameter, you are telling us that this parameter has no impact on the displayed content. For example, consider a session id parameter, like “sid” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=1234

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=5678

Assuming that these three URLs display exactly the same product page for tasty Swedish fish candy, Google only needs to crawl and index one of them. You can simply select action “Ignore” for parameter “sid” in Webmaster Tools and Google will just crawl and index one of these URLs, avoiding duplicates.

In addition to the old functionality, you now have the ability to choose a specific value among the known values for a given URL parameter. This is important when a parameter is relevant to the content, but different values of this parameter lead to similar pages. For example, consider a sorting parameter, like “sort-by” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2

These four URLs show products in the candy category. There are enough items in this category to fill two pages, and the products shown can be sorted by price, in ascending or descending order. Selecting action “Ignore” for parameter “sort-by” would be incorrect and could potentially limit our indexing of the site. This is because, after ignoring “sort-by”, we would consider the first two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with ascending sort order. We would also consider the last two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with descending sort order. In this scenario, we would be indexing the candy category inconsistently, with some candy products appearing in both of the pages selected for the index, while other candy products not appearing in either of them. The right solution comes from the new action “Use specific value” now available in Webmaster Tools. To avoid duplicates but still keep our indexing consistent, you can simply select action “Use specific value” for parameter “sort-by” and choose one of the valid values, say “asc-price”. After this, our indexing would be fully consistent, as we would focus only on the pages with products sorted by ascending price.

Messages: Some sites receive lots of messages in the Webmaster Tools Message Center. With this update we’ve added the ability to “star” specific messages that you deem important. There’s now a separate “Starred” view where you can see all the messages that you’ve starred, making tracking and finding the most important messages for your site a breeze.

We hope these updates make Webmaster Tools even more useful for your site. Please post a comment if you have feedback on any of these updates; or if you have questions, post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.”

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.With Google Instant, we also measure impressions in these new cases:
2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.
3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

To give an example, let’s say your site has lots of impressions for [hotels] and [hotels in santa cruz]. Now, because Instant is quickly fetching results as the user types, the user could see your site in the search results for [hotels] after typing only the partial query [hote]. If a user types the partial query [hote] and then clicks on any result on the page for [hotels], that counts as an impression for your site. That impression will appear in Webmaster Tools for the query [hotels]. The term ‘hotels’ would also be included in the HTTP referrer when the user clicks through to visit your website.

It’s likely that your site will still see impressions for queries like [hotels in santa cruz], but because Instant is helping the user find results faster, your site may see an increase in impressions for shorter terms as well.

Let us know if we can help you better understand how these changes impact Webmaster Tools, measured Search queries and impressions, CTR, or anything else. We’d love to hear from you in our blog comments or Webmaster Help Forum.

Now there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites, or for just one site at a time.

Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve noticed related to your site which may indicate serious problems. For instance, alerts may warn you about an increase in crawl errors, an increase in 404 errors, or about possible outages. With their newfound prominence comes a new name: what used to be “SiteNotice messages” will now simply be known as “alerts.”

Messages containing alerts will be marked with an icon to make them quickly distinguishable from other messages. Each site’s Dashboard will display a notification whenever the site has unread alerts. The Dashboard notification will lead to the new site Message Center with a filter enabled to show only alerts for the current site.

You can also enable the alerts filter yourself. On the home page, enabling the alerts filter across all your sites is a great way to see alerts you may have missed and may help you find problems common across multiple sites. Even with these changes we recommend you use the email forwarding feature to receive these important alerts without having to visit Webmaster Tools.

We hope these new features make it easier to manage your messages. If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

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.

• URLs disallowed by robots.txt
• Thumbnail size errors (160x120px 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.

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:
   1. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
   2. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
   3. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
4. 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.

• Is the URL that’s appearing in search results the exact same URL that you submitted for removal? It’s fairly common for the same, or similar, content to appear on multiple URLs on a site. You may have successfully removed one URL, but still see others containing that same content.
  Solution: Request removal of the other URL(s) in question. See this article for help.
• Keep in mind that URLs are case sensitive, so requesting removal of http://www.example.com/embarrassingstuff.html is not the same as requesting removal of http://www.example.com/EmbarrassingStuff.html
  Solution: Request removal of the exact URL(s) that appear in search results, including the same capitalization. See this article for help.
• When a request is marked “Removed,” that can mean different things depending on what type of request you submitted. If you requested removal of an entire URL, then “Removed” should mean that that entire URL no longer appears in our search results. If you requested removal of the cached copy of a URL, “Removed” means that the cached copy has been removed and will no longer appear in search results; but the URL itself may still appear.
  Solution: Double-check what type of removal you requested by looking at the “Removal Type” column. If you requested a cache removal but you want the entire URL gone, make sure the URL meets the requirements for complete removal and then file a new request for complete removal of the URL.

When not to use the URL removal tool

• To clean up cruft, like old pages that 404.
  The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and just have some outdated URLs in the index, Google’s crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There’s no need to request an urgent removal through this tool.
• To remove crawl errors from your Webmaster Tools account.
  The removal tool removes URLs from Google’s search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. There’s currently no way for you to manually remove URLs from this report; they will drop out naturally over time as we stop crawling URLs that repeatedly 404.
• To “start from scratch” with your site.
  If you’re worried that your site may have a penalty, or you want to “start from scratch” after purchasing a domain from someone else, we don’t recommend trying to use the URL removal tool to remove your entire site and then “start over.” Search engines gather a lot of information from other sites (such as who links to you, or what words they use to describe your site) and use this to help understand your site. Even if we could remove everything we currently know about your site, a lot of it would come back exactly the same once we’d recrawled all the other sites that help us understand your site and put it in context. If you’re worried that your domain has some bad history, we recommend filing a reconsideration request letting us know what you’re worried about and what has changed (such as that you’ve acquired the domain from someone else, or that you’ve changed certain aspects of your site).
• To take your site “offline” after hacking.
  If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, you can use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created, e.g., http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don’t recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you’ll eventually want indexed; instead, simply clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site so that we can reindex the new, cleaned-up content as soon as possible. This article contains more details on how to deal with hacking.
• To get the right “version” of your site indexed.
  When a request to remove https://www.example.com/tattoo.html is accepted, http://www.example.com/tattoo.html is also removed. The same is true of the www and non-www versions of your URL or site. This is because the same content is often available at each of these URLs and we realize that most webmasters and searchers don’t want these duplicates appearing in search results. In short, the URL removal tool should not be used as a canonicalization tool. It won’t keep your favorite version, it’ll remove all versions (http/https and www/non-www) of a URL.

We hope this series has answered your questions about removing content from Google’s search results, and helped you troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Join us in our Help Forum if you still have questions.

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.

We’ve got a series of blog posts lined up for you explaining how to successfully remove various types of content, and common mistakes to avoid. In this first post, I’m going to cover a few basic scenarios: removing a single URL, removing an entire directory or site, and reincluding removed content. I also strongly recommend our previous post on managing what information is available about you online.

Removing a single URL

In general, in order for your removal requests to be successful, the owner of the URL(s) in question—whether that’s you, or someone else—must have indicated that it’s okay to remove that content. For an individual URL, this can be indicated in any of three ways:

• block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
• block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag
• indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 status code

Before submitting a removal request, you can check whether the URL is correctly blocked:

• robots.txt: You can check whether the URL is correctly disallowed using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.
• noindex meta tag: You can use Fetch as Googlebot to make sure the meta tag appears somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. If you want to check a page you can’t verify in Webmaster Tools, you can open the URL in a browser, go to View > Page source, and make sure you see the meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags.
• 404 / 410 status code: You can use Fetch as Googlebot, or tools like Live HTTP Headers or web-sniffer.net to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code. Sometimes “deleted” pages may say “404″ or “Not found” on the page, but actually return a 200 status code in the page header; so it’s good to use a proper header-checking tool to double-check.

If unwanted content has been removed from a page but the page hasn’t been blocked in any of the above ways, you will not be able to completely remove that URL from our search results. This is most common when you don’t own the site that’s hosting that content. We cover what to do in this situation in a subsequent post. in .

If a URL meets one of the abovPart II of our removals seriese criteria, you can remove it by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, entering the URL that you want to remove, and selecting the “Webmaster has already blocked the page” option. Note that you should enter the URL where the content was hosted, not the URL of the Google search where it’s appearing. For example, enter
http://www.example.com/embarrassing-stuff.html
not
http://www.google.com/search?q=embarrassing+stuff

This article has more details about making sure you’re entering the proper URL. Remember that if you don’t tell us the exact URL that’s troubling you, we won’t be able to remove the content you had in mind.

Removing an entire directory or site

In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site’s robots.txt file. For example, in order to remove the http://www.example.com/secret/ directory, your robots.txt file would need to include:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /secret/
It isn’t enough for the root of the directory to return a 404 status code, because it’s possible for a directory to return a 404 but still serve out files underneath it. Using robots.txt to block a directory (or an entire site) ensures that all the URLs under that directory (or site) are blocked as well. You can test whether a directory has been blocked correctly using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.

Only verified owners of a site can request removal of an entire site or directory in Webmaster Tools. To request removal of a directory or site, click on the site in question, then go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL. If you enter the root of your site as the URL you want to remove, you’ll be asked to confirm that you want to remove the entire site. If you enter a subdirectory, select the “Remove directory” option from the drop-down menu.

Reincluding content

You can cancel removal requests for any site you own at any time, including those submitted by other people. In order to do so, you must be a verified owner of this site in Webmaster Tools. Once you’ve verified ownership, you can go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL > Removed URLs (or > Made by others) and click “Cancel” next to any requests you wish to cancel.

Still have questions? Stay tuned for the rest of our series on removing content from Google’s search results. If you can’t wait, much has already been written about URL removals, and troubleshooting individual cases, in our Help Forum. If you still have questions after reading others’ experiences, feel free to ask. Note that, in most cases, it’s hard to give relevant advice about a particular removal without knowing the site or URL in question. We recommend sharing your URL by using a URL shortening service so that the URL you’re concerned about doesn’t get indexed as part of your post; some shortening services will even let you disable the shortcut later on, once your question has been resolved.

• Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
• Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.

Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.

After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, “How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?” With the feature that we’re introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.

We’re really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

• If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you’re on an exercise bike, training for Ironman.
• Or, if you’re more a video watcher, try listening to my “Search Friendly Development” session while you’re cleaning your house. Keep in mind that some parts of the presentation are a little more technical.

• For good measure, and because at some point you’ll hear references to them, check out our webmaster guidelines for yourself.

Step 2: Explore details that pique your interest

Step 3: Verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools

Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic

Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here’s a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):

As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name “Canada” after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you’re looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.

As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.

We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don’t show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won’t show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we’d end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag.

We hope you’ll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.