Improved Flash indexing

Written by Ron Adler, Janis Stipins, and Maile Ohye

We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.

Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.

In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.

Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.

Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?
We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.

Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).

That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.

Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:

1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

We're already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!



Update in July 2008: Everyone, thanks for your great questions and feedback. Our focus is to improve search quality for all users, and with better Flash indexing we create more meaningful search results. Listed below, we’ve also answered some of the most prevalent questions. Thanks again!

Flash site in search results before improvements


Flash site after improved indexing, querying [nasa deep impact animation]


Helping us access and index your Flash files

@fintan: We verified with Adobe that the textual content from legacy sites, such as those scripted with AS1 and AS2, can be indexed by our new algorithm.

@andrew, jonny m, erichazann, mike, ledge, stu, rex, blog, dis: For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.

@mike: At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We’ve noted this feature request from several webmasters -- look for this in a near future update.

Update on July 29, 1010: Please note that our ability to load external resources is live.

Interaction of HTML pages and Flash

@captain cuisine: The text found in Flash files is treated similarly to text found in other files, such as HTML, PDFs, etc. If the Flash file is embedded in HTML (as many of the Flash files we find are), its content is associated with the parent URL and indexed as single entity.

@jeroen: Serving the same content in Flash and an alternate HTML version could cause us to find duplicate content. This won't cause a penalty -- we don’t lower a site in ranking because of duplicate content. Be aware, though, that search results will most likely only show one version, not both.

@All: We’re trying to serve users the most relevant results possible regardless of the file type. This means that standalone Flash, HTML with embedded Flash, HTML only, PDFs, etc., can all have the potential to be returned in search results.

Indexing large Flash files

@dsfdgsg: We’ve heard requests for deep linking (linking to specific content inside file) not just for Flash results, but also for other large documents and presentations. In the case of Flash, the ability to deep link will require additional functionality in Flash with which we integrate.

@All: The majority of the existing Flash files on the web are fine in regard to filesize. It shouldn’t be too much of a concern.

More details about our Flash indexing algorithm

@brian, marcos, bharath: Regarding ActionScript, we’re able to find new links loaded through ActionScript. We explore Flash like a website visitor does, we do not decompile the SWF file. Unless you're making ActionScript visible to users, Google will not expose ActionScript code.

@dlocks: We respect rel="nofollow" wherever we encounter it in HTML.

What are your SEO recommendations?

Posted by the Webmaster Trends Analysts (John, Jonathan, Susan)

You may have noticed that we recently rewrote our article on What is an SEO? Does Google recommend them? Previously, the article had focused on warning people about common SEO scams to look out for, but didn't mention many of the valuable services that a helpful SEO can provide.

The article now notes some of the benefits of search engine optimization, and provides some guidance to site owners who are considering hiring an SEO. We'd also like to get your perspective: how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO? What advice would you give to an inexperienced webmaster who's considering whether to contract an SEO? We'd like to hear your thoughts and incorporate your feedback if there's important advice that we should add.

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 22nd - 26th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

As part of Google's goal to make the web faster, we uploaded several video tips about optimizing the speed of your website. Check out the tutorials page to view the tutorials and associated videos.

Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag:

• What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS?
• Is over-optimization bad for a website?
• Will having my software listed in low-quality directories harm my website's ranking?
• Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?
• Will I be penalized if all of my Sitemap URLs have the same priority?

And during Adam Lasnik's visit to India, he was interviewed by Webmaster Help Forum guide Jayan Tharayil about issues related to webmasters in India. We have the full three-part interview right here.

We'll get you started on this batch of videos with Matt's tips for targeting your site to a specific region:

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

Traffic drops and site architecture issues

Webmaster Level: Intermediate.

We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I'd like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let's gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we'll take a look at site design and architecture issues.

Understanding drops in traffic

As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our index. Improvements in our ability to understand our users' interests and queries also often lead to differences in how our algorithms select and rank pages. We realize, however, that such changes might be confusing and sometimes foster misconceptions, so we'd like to address a couple of these myths head-on.

Myth number 1: Duplicate content causes drops in traffic!
Webmasters often wonder if the duplicates on their site can have a negative effect on their site's traffic. As mentioned in our guidelines, unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. The second part of my presentation illustrates in greater detail how to deal with duplicate content using canonicalization.

Myth number 2: Affiliate programs cause drops in traffic!
Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it's essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn't in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.

Having reviewed a few of the most common concerns, I'd like to highlight two important sections of the presentation. The first illustrates how malicious attacks -- such as an injection of hidden text and links -- might cause your site to be removed from Google's search results. On a happier note, it also covers how you can use the Google cache and Webmaster Tools to identify this issue. On a related note, if we've found a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines such as the use of hidden text or the presence of malware on your site, you will typically find a note regarding this in your Webmaster Tools Message center.
You may also find your site's traffic decreased if your users are being redirected to another site...for example, due to a hacker-applied server- or page-level redirection triggered by referrals from search engines. A similar scenario -- but with different results -- is the case in which a hacker has instituted a redirection for crawlers only. While this will cause no immediate drop in traffic since users and their visits are not affected, it might lead to a decrease in pages indexed over time.

Site design and architecture issues
Now that we've seen how malicious changes might affect your site and its traffic, let's examine some design and architecture issues. Specifically, you want to ensure that your site is able to be both effectively crawled and indexed, which is the prerequisite to being shown in our search results. What should you consider?

• First off, check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and is not returning an error.
• Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new "Change of address" feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.
• Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.
• Finally, make good use of the rel="canonical" attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain. The example in the presentation shows how using this attribute helps Google understand that a duplicate can be clustered with the canonical and that the original, or canonical, page should be indexed.

In conclusion, remember that fluctuations in search results are normal but there are steps that you can take to avoid malicious attacks or design and architecture issues that might cause your site to disappear or fluctuate unpredictably in search results. Start by learning more about attacks by hackers and spammers, make sure everything is running properly at crawling and indexing level by double-checking the HTML suggestions in Webmaster Tools, and finally, test your robots.txt file in case you are accidentally blocking Googlebot. And don't forget about those "robots.txt unreachable" errors!

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Spam2.0: Fake user accounts and spam profiles

You're a good webmaster or web developer, and you've done everything you can to keep your site from being hacked and keep your forums and comment sections free of spam. You're now the proud owner of a buzzing web2.0 social community, filling the web with user-generated content, and probably getting lots of visitors from Google and other search engines.

Many of your site's visitors will create user profiles, and some will spend hours posting in forums, joining groups, and getting the sparkles exactly right on the rainbow-and-unicorn image for their BFF's birthday. This is all great.

Others, however, will create accounts and fill their profiles with gibberish, blatherskite and palaver. Even worse, they'll add a sneaky link, a bit of redirecting JavaScript code, or a big fake embedded video that takes your users off to the seediest corners of the web.

Welcome to the world of spam profiles. The social web is growing incredibly quickly and spammers look at every kind of user content on the web as an opportunity for traffic. I've spoken with a number of experienced webmasters who were surprised to find out this was even a problem, so I thought I would talk a little bit about spam profiles and what you might do to find and clean them out of your site.

Why is this important?

Imagine the following scenario:

"Hello there, welcome to our new web2.0 social networking site. Boy, have I got a new friend for you. His name is Mr. BuyMaleEnhancementRingtonesNow, and he'd love for you to check out his profile. He's a NaN-year-old from Pharmadelphia, PA and you can check out his exciting home page at http://example.com/obviousflimflam.

Not interested? Then let me introduce you to my dear friend PrettyGirlsWebCam1234, she says she's an old college friend of yours and has exciting photos and videos you might want to see."

You probably don't want your visitors' first impression of your site to include inappropriate images or bogus business offers. You definitely don't want your users hounded by fake invites to the point where they stop visiting altogether. If your site becomes filled with spammy content and links to bad parts of the web, search engines may lose trust in your otherwise fine site.

Why would anyone create spam profiles?

Spammers create fake profiles for a number of nefarious purposes. Sometimes they're just a way to reach users internally on a social networking site. This is somewhat similar to the way email spam works - the point is to send your users messages or friend invites and trick them into following a link, making a purchase, or downloading malware by sending a fake or low-quality proposition.

Spammers are also using spam profiles as yet another avenue to generate webspam on otherwise good domains. They scour the web for opportunities to get their links, redirects, and malware to users. They use your site because it's no cost to them and they hope to piggyback off your good reputation.

The latter case is becoming more and more common. Some fake profiles are obvious, using popular pharmaceuticals as the profile name, for example; but we've noticed an increase in savvier spammers that try to use real names and realistic data to sneak in their bad links. To make sure their newly-minted gibberish profile shows up in searches they will also generate links on hacked sites, comment spam, and yes, other spam profiles. This results in a lot of bad content on your domain, unwanted incoming links from spam sites, and annoyed users.

Which sites are being abused?

You may be thinking to yourself, "But my site isn't a huge social networking juggernaut; surely I don't need to worry." Unfortunately, we see spam profiles on everything from the largest social networking sites to the smallest forums and bulletin boards. Many popular bulletin boards and content management systems (CMS) such as vBulletin, phpBB, Moodle, Joomla, etc. generate member pages for every user that creates an account. In general CMSs are great because they make it easy for you to deploy content and interactive features to your site, but auto-generated pages can be abused if you're not aware.

For all of you out there who do work for huge social networking juggernauts, your site is a target as well. Spammers want access to your large userbase, hoping that users on social sites will be more trusting of incoming friend requests, leading to larger success rates.

What can you do?

This isn't an easy problem to solve - the bad guys are attacking a wide range of sites and seem to be able to adapt their scripts to get around countermeasures. Google is constantly under attack by spammers trying to create fake accounts and generate spam profiles on our sites, and despite all of our efforts some have managed to slip through. Here are some things you can do to make their lives more difficult and keep your site clean and useful:

• Make sure you have standard security features in place, including CAPTCHAs, to make it harder for spammers to create accounts en masse. Watch out for unlikely behavior - thousands of new user accounts created from the same IP address, new users sending out thousands of friend requests, etc. There is no simple solution to this problem, but often some simple checks will catch most of the worst spam.
  
• Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts. We often see large numbers of fake profiles on one innocent site all linking to the same domain, so once you find one, you should make it simple to remove all of them.
  
• Watch out for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and other security holes that allow spammers to inject questionable code onto their profile pages. We've seen techniques such as JavaScript used to redirect users to other sites, iframes that attempt to give users malware, and custom CSS code used to cover over your page with spammy content.
  
• Consider nofollowing the links on untrusted user profile pages. This makes your site less attractive to anyone trying to pass PageRank from your site to their spammy site. Spammers seem to go after the low-hanging fruit, so even just nofollowing new profiles with few signals of trustworthiness will go a long way toward mitigating the problem. On the flip side, you could also consider manually or automatically lifting the nofollow attribute on links created by community members that are likely more trustworthy, such as those who have contributed substantive content over time.
  
• Consider noindexing profile pages for new, not yet trustworthy users. You may even want to make initial profile pages completely private, especially if the bulk of the content on your site is in blogs, forums, or other types of pages.
  
• Add a "report spam" feature to user profiles and friend invitations. Let your users help you solve the problem - they care about your community and are annoyed by spam too.
  
• Monitor your site for spammy pages. One of the best tools for this is Google Alerts - set up a site: query along with commercial or adult keywords that you wouldn't expect to see on your site. This is also a great tool to help detect hacked pages. You can also check 'Keywords' data in Webmaster Tools for strange, volatile vocabulary.
  
• Watch for spikes in traffic from suspicious queries. It's always great to see the line on your pageviews chart head upward, but pay attention to commercial or adult queries that don't fit your site's content. In cases like this where a spammer has abused your site, that traffic will provide little if any benefit while introducing users to your site as "the place that redirected me to that virus."

Have any other tips to share? Please feel free to comment below. If you have any questions, you can always ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Free online seminar: The Google Trifecta

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Staying competitive in the online space can be hard if you don't have the proper tools at your disposal. That's why we offer solutions like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer to help you improve your site's effectiveness and functionality.

You may already use Google Webmaster Tools to help improve your site's visibility in Google's search results, but what can you do to optimize your pages for visitors who have already made it past the search results and into your site? Using Webmaster Tools in conjunction with Analytics and Website Optimizer, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your pages' visibility in Google, where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site, and what content will most effectively get them to take the action you want.

For the first time ever, the Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer teams will join forces to hold a free online seminar. I'll be there to talk about Webmaster Tools and discuss tips for using it with our other products for site owners. So if you enjoy live webmaster-focused events like our recent JuneTune live chat, check out the details below and register!

TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
TIME: 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC)
JOIN US: Register to attend

During this online seminar, team members will:

• Provide brief introductions to their products
• Highlight recent product updates and releases
• Discuss the benefits of using all three products together
• Answer common questions submitted by attendees

Upon registration, we also invite you to submit any specific topics you'd like us to cover. If you can't make that date or time, don't worry. We know that 9 a.m. for us isn't 9 a.m. for everyone! You'll be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL.

Update: A recording of the event is now available on YouTube.

Android app indexing is now open for everyone!

Webmaster level: All

Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.

App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.

Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.

Getting started is easy

We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:

1. Add deep link support to your app
2. Connect your site and your app
3. There is no step 3 (:

As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.

We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You can publish them in one of the following ways:

• Add a rel=alternate <link> element to specify the corresponding app URI.
  You can insert it in the <head> section of each web page, or in your sitemap. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
• Use the App indexing API

There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during app indexing. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:

We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.

Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Get the audio and Q&As from our recent live chat

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Last Thursday, many of you just couldn't get enough of us and joined our second live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune." It was an action-packed session with live presentations, questions and answers and chatting about cats and other important topics. Over the course of an hour and a half, we made four presentations, received over 600 questions and passed around close to 500 chat messages. It was great to see so many Googlers around the world involved: Adam, Bergy, Evan, Jessica, Maile, Matt (Cutts), Matt (Dougherty), Reid and Wysz in Mountain View; Jonathan and Susan in Kirkland; Alvar, Mariya, Pedro and Uli in Dublin; and me in Zürich. We had users from about as many places as Matt (Harding) has danced in: Alaska, Argentina, Arizona, Australia, Brazil, California, Canada, Chile, Colorado, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Florida, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, New Zealand, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vietnam and a bunch from Seattle, Washington - thank you all for joining us!

To help make the most out of this session, we'd like to make the transcripts and presentations available to everyone. We're also working on filling in the blanks and have started to answer many of the unanswered questions online in the Webmaster Help Group. You'll find the full (and just slightly cleaned up) questions and answers there as well.

I presented an overview of factors involved in personalized search at Google:



Maile gave a nice presentation of case sensitivity in web search in general:



The audio part of these presentations is in the audio transcript below. It also includes Jonathan's coverage of reasons why ranking may change, Wysz's presentation of ways to get URLs removed from our index, as well as everything else that happened on the phone! Enjoy :)

Audio transcript (MP3)

We hope to continue to improve on making these events useful to you, so don't forget to send us your feedback. We'll be back!

Tell us what you think!

(Cross-posted on the Google Product Ideas Blog)

The Webmaster Central team does our best to support the webmaster community via Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster Central Blog, the Webmaster YouTube Channel, Help Center, our forum, and a fellow named Matt Cutts.

If you've got ideas and suggestions for Webmaster Central - features you want, things we can do better - tell us. From now until Friday, July 24, 2009, Product Ideas for Webmaster Central will be open for feedback. Every suggestion you add will be seen not only by the Webmaster Central team, but by other users and webmasters. We'll review every submission, and we'll update you regularly with our progress and feedback.

The more feedback the better, so get started now.

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

One year of monitored European Webmaster Help Groups

Written by Kaspar Szymanski and the European Guides Team, Dublin

A year ago Google Guides from the Search Quality Team started monitoring Google Webmaster Help Groups in European languages. It has been an interesting time and a great, rewarding experience for all those involved :o). We have enjoyed building and growing our communities with webmasters across Europe and we hope you have as well. The feedback we have been receiving since the beginning has been encouraging, with many webmasters responding positively to the opportunity to be able to solve their indexing issues in their native language. Still, we are aware that we have a lot of work ahead of us. I would like to thank everyone who has been active in our communities and invite those who have not joined yet to do so. Sign up, participate and help us make a difference.

Taking advantage of this anniversary, I would like the European Google Guides to have a chance to say a few words about their communities.

Polish Webmaster Help Group
Guglarz, the Polish Google Guide
Our group grew very fast, especially in the last few months and we are well on the way to hitting 600 users! But what I appreciate even more then our group's success, is the open, friendly spirit we have been cultivating in the last twelve months :o). I feel like this is a community that is able to help with indexing issues and beyond!

I already pointed out some exceptional community members in the last blog post about communication with webmasters in a dozen languages. Since then, a few more have joined the list of tremendously committed, group-driving contributors. Bigu has been jumping in every time I've been traveling or very busy, which is the reason why I’d like to thank him a lot.

Also I want to acknowledge Maciej Gluszek for escalating language issues we used to struggle with. You guys help to improve the Google experience for everyone.

Lastly, I want to invite all group members to the chit chat section in order to introduce yourself and share some more information about who you are and what you do. I am really curious to find out more about the people I work with! I hope to see you in the group soon :o).

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Группа помощи Google для веб-мастеров
Oxana, Tilek, Vitali, Mariya
Our Russian Webmaster Help group is growing by the day and just reached an important milestone - a whole kilobyte of members: 1024 (-:! Thanks to all our users for the great questions, the wisdom, and the humour which they bring to our community. Special thanks go to Web-Master, Crazy LionHeart, Andrey Morozov and Lmd for their spot-on comments and prolific posts - we really appreciate your dedication in helping others. We're very happy to be part of such a savvy and lively community, we look forward to more interesting questions and discussions in the future, and to reaching one megabyte of members (-:! С днем рождения!

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Google Webmester Súgó Csoport
Tibor, János
Although the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group is one of our youngest, it already counts 300+ members, and has a pretty high number of lively discussions. The atmosphere is really great and loads of issues are resolved thanks largely to our dedicated and wise users. I would especially like to thank snomag for helping greatly in building the group up in the beginning (where have you disappeared to? We miss you! :)

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Google Site Yöneticisi Yardım Grubu
Bahar
The Turkish Webmaster Help Group has grown into a dynamic and effective community of fantastic webmasters in just four months. I want to thank to everyone in the group who has been eager to share his/her knowledge to help others. Special thanks to Erkan (man_blood) who has written a huge amount of posts in the last three months; Merve who has helped the group with her technical skills as well as calm spirit, especially when I was on vacation; Salih (SesVer) who used to help a lot when the group was first launched; and many more who are not mentioned by name here. It has been exciting and a pleasure to be a part of this rapidly growing family! Desteğiniz için teşekkürler :-)

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קבוצת העזרה למנהלי ומנהלות אתרים
Alon, your Google Guide
Our Hebrew group is maturing. To date we have more than 200 users and we are gaining visibility while more users are using the well-informed discussions we produce.

It is a pleasure to see so many webmasters stopping by to ask, learn and help others. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of you who make the group a place for discussion and collaboration. My special thanks go to Shoshanna, AliaG, Tomer and Seosos, for their great contribution.

By browsing through the “tell us about yourself ” thread you can learn more about our community where many members introduce themselves. You're also welcome to watch my short video giving some specific tips for Israeli Webmasters.

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Google diskussionsgruppe for webmasters
GoogleGuide (Jonas)
The Danish group has been slowly gaining more subscribers since its launch last year, and we still hope to attract more people. We've grown almost 100% in the past year, and we hope to keep up the steam! (: This growth wouldn't have been possible without the help of Anders who contributes equal amounts of webmaster goodness in the form of sharing his tips on 301's and moving content to a new domain (which has been the hottest and most debated topic in the group), to issues on getting your site better indexed and crawled. So a big thanks to Anders, and all the others who have made this group useful for everybody.

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Ajuda a Webmasters do Google
Pedro
The Portuguese Webmaster Help Group is now above 1200 members. The success of the group is a reflection on the great community built by every single contributor. Special thanks to Carlos Lavieri, Rodrigo Soares, Leandro Leite e João Carlos (Orquiza) who used to help so much and recently Flávio Raimundo (M&S) and Ruben Zevallos Jr.

Recently I had the chance of giving a few public interviews to Portuguese speaking webmasters and recognizing the group and its success publicly. I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank my interviewers for their great questions; if you speak Portuguese or you are a Google Translator fan you can read them: Entrevista com Pedro Dias (by Paulo Teixeira) and Entrevista a Pedro Dias (by Kazulo Webmarketing). It is a great pleasure to be a part of such an awesome community.

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Googlen Keskusteluryhmä Verkkovastaaville
Anu
The Finnish Webmaster Help Group will be celebrating its first birthday soon. During the first year, we've built a small but dynamic community and covered various topics from general webmaster issues to language-related toughies. A huge thank you to everyone who has taken part in discussions! I'm looking forward to starting our second year as a group, hope to see both familiar faces and newcomers join in our community!

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Groupe Google d'entraide pour les webmasters
Alec, Nathalie

The French Webmaster Help Group was launched one year ago and we've had a tremendous growth thanks to all our fantastic members. Special thanks to Paul-Arnaud and Cyrille who used to help so much and to Thierry who is now our bionic poster :-)

Recently I had the chance to discuss the Webmaster Help Group with a French SEO I met at SES Paris '08. It was so great to connect again on the Internet and help him with his issues.

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Swedish Webmaster Help Group
Hessam, the Swedish Google Guide
The small Swedish webmaster forum, with currently almost 200 users, has almost tripled its size since its launch last July. During the past year we have seen a steady growth in user participation and a number of questions from our Swedish webmasters. I also had the chance to attend Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Stockholm 2007 which was definitely the highlight of the year. There I was able to meet a number of Swedish webmasters to talk about Google, our Webmaster Tools as well as the cold Swedish winter. During the coming year we are determined to further grow the community to better support our users. Lastly, a big thanks goes to everyone who has supported the group, especially Mattias Nordin and Widar Nord who have contributed with their knowledge and time. I am looking forward to hearing more from our regulars and would like to extend an invite to new members.

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Google Diskussionsforum für Webmaster
Uli
With more than 2700 members and almost a thousand posts per month, the German Webmaster Help Group has developed into a vibrant community. You will find many very savvy webmasters there who are always prepared to discuss all webmaster-related issues and offer advice to both beginners and advanced webmasters.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to this forum. Some webmasters like luzie, alpaka, beejees, Garzosch have been a crucial part of our group since this group began, and with the likes of Zombie joining in October, Mikki in January and Sistrix in March after having the pleasure of meeting him at SMX in Munich, we have an ever-growing pool of wisdom :-)

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Foro de Google para Webmasters
Rebecca, Alvar
The Spanish webmaster group now has almost 2500 members. We have some wonderful webmasters that offer great advice and support, people like Ricardo Antonio, Enrique de Mesa, Jesús Cáceres (chupi), Jose Antonio Nobile (nobilesoft), Carles Pastor, and many others who help make this forum work as well as it does. Recently we had one member visit whose site had been hacked with a cloaking technique and the community was able to help point out how to detect the hidden links and clear the hacked content. It’s great to see his website clean again and up and running.

If you want to know who is behind this forum, have a look at the video where we introduce the forum and Webmaster Tools. Additionally, please give any feedback you may have in the thread where we present the video. By the way, it was great meeting some of you guys face to face at the SMX Madrid conference.

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Google Discussiegroep voor Webmaster
Andre, Jos
Our Dutch Webmaster Help Group now has well over 700 members. Some of our regular posters, like Marketsharer, Janus and Joop are doing a great job helping a lot of our less experienced (as well as more experienced!) webmasters with their questions. Recently, some Dutch webmasters have been dealing with the fact that their sites have been hacked. We've added a sticky post to the group to help webmasters clean up their sites after getting hacked, so if you are dealing with this issue, do have a look at the group! At this moment, the group is still steadily growing and we are really looking forward to reaching the 1000 members mark!

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Google Assistenza Webmaster
Lella, Alessandro, Stefano
The Italian webmaster group is about to turn one year old pretty soon and has been a great success. We have a bunch of fabulous witty power posters like Angelo Palma (Angelo), Marco (Customsoft) and others that keep on massively contributing to the success of the group day by day. Over the last year we achieved excellent results both in terms of traffic increase and new users posting frequently. Coordinating the localization of the post on paid links - later translated into 14 languages - was a turning point for the Webmaster Help team. So was Lella's blog post in English, German and Italian about the Search Engine Strategies Conference in London, where she represented Google as a speaker.

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Webmaster Help Group Guides and Domo-Kun, the team mascot

Speaking on behalf of all our Google Guides, we are looking forward to continued collaboration with webmasters all over the world. Surely the upcoming 12 months are going to be exciting for the Google Help Groups as the communities continue to grow. Thanks again to all the great webmasters out there and see you soon in the discussions!

Watch out for your .yu domain!

Are you the owner of a .yu domain? Then you might have heard the news: as of September 30, all .yu domains will stop working, regardless of their renewal date. This means that any content you're hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. For those of you who would still like to have your site online, we've prepared some recommendations to make sure that Google keeps crawling, indexing, and serving your content appropriately.

• Check your backlinks. Since it won't be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a "comma separated value" -- .csv -- file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.

• Check your internal links. If you are planning to simply move your content in bulk from the old to the new site, make sure that the new internal navigation is up to date. For example, if you are renaming pages on your site from "www.example.yu/home.htm" to "www.example.com/home.htm" make sure that your internal navigation reflects such changes to prevent broken links.

• Start moving the site to your new domain. It's a good idea to start moving while you can still maintain control of your old domain, so don't wait! As mentioned in our best practices when moving your site, we recommend starting by moving a single directory or subdomain, and testing the results before completing the move. Remember that you will not be able to keep a 301 redirection on your old domain after September 30, so start your test early.

While you're moving your site, you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Although we may not crawl or index all the pages listed in each Sitemap, we recommend that you submit one because doing so helps Google understand your site better. You can read more on this topic in our answers to the most frequently asked questions on Sitemaps. And remember that for any question or concerns we're waiting for you in the Google Webmaster Help Forum!
Update: as mentioned here, we have introduced a new feature: Change of Address. Check it out if you are moving from one domain to another! By using this feature you will help us update our index faster and hopefully make the transition for your users smoother.

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Let's make the web faster

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google Code Blog)

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.

We are excited to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:

• Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.
  
• In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.
  
• Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.
  
• While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC's decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.

To find out what Googlers think about making the web faster, see the video below. If you have ideas on how to speed up the web, please share them with the rest of the community. Let's all work together to make the web faster!



Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations and Bill Coughran, SVP, Engineering

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 15th - 19th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Maile Ohye gave a webmaster-focused presentation about Product Search.

Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag:

• Do dates in URLs determine freshness?
• What impact does "page bloat" have on Google rankings?
• What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?
• Should I include my logo text using the 'alt' attribute or CSS?
• What's the preferred way to check for links to my site?

To get you started on watching this latest batch of videos, here's Matt's answer about directories and paid links:



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

Get Cooking with the Webmaster Tools API

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Tools Team

As the days grow longer and summer takes full stage, many of us are flocking to patios and parks to engage in the time-honored tradition of grilling food. When it comes to cooking outdoors, the type of grills used span a spectrum from primitive to high tech. For some people a small campfire is all that's required for the perfect outdoor dining experience. For other people the preferred tool for outdoor cooking is a quad grill gas-powered stainless steel cooker with enough features to make an Iron Chef rust with envy.

An interesting off-shoot of outdoor cooking techniques is solar cooking, which combines primitive skills and modern ingenuity. At its most basic, solar cooking involves creating an "oven" that is placed in the sun and passively cooks the food it contains. It is simple to get started with solar cooking because a solar oven is something people can make themselves with inexpensive materials and a bit of effort. The appeal of simplicity, inexpensiveness and the ability to "do it yourself" has created a growing group of people who are making solar ovens themselves.

How all this relates to webmasters is that the webmaster community is also made up of a diverse group of people who use a variety of tools in a myriad of ways. Just like how within the outdoor cooking community there's a contingent of people creating their own solar ovens, the webmaster community has a subgroup of people creating and sharing their own tools. From our discussions with webmasters, we've consistently heard requests to open Webmaster Tools for third-party integration. The Webmaster Tools team has taken this request to heart and I'm happy to announce that we're now releasing an API for Webmaster Tools. The supported features in the first version of the Webmaster Tools API are the following:

• Managing Sites
• Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools
  
  
• Add your sites to Webmaster Tools
  
  
• Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools
  
  
• Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools
  
  
• Working with Sitemaps
• Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps
• Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools
  
  
• Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools
  
  

Although the current API offers a limited subset of all the functionality that Webmaster Tools provides, this is only the beginning. Get started with the Developer's Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API to begin working with the API.



Webmasters... fire up your custom tools and get cooking!

A new layer to Google Trends

Written by R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management - Consumer Search Properties

Two years ago, we launched Google Trends, a tool that lets anyone see what the world is searching for, and compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Last year, we added Hot Trends, which shows what people are searching for right now - the fastest rising search queries on Google, updated every hour. And just last week, we introduced normalized search volume numbers available for export in Google Trends.

Today, we add a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.

Let's take a look at one example, the release of Radiohead's In Rainbows album. As part of our annual Zeitgeist, we post the fastest rising search terms, and this past year, radiohead took the crown as the fastest rising search term in the last quarter of 2007.

Using Google Trends, we can see the search volume for radiohead compared to in rainbows over the last 12 months.

radiohead vs. in rainbows

With Hot Trends, we can see that on October 10th (the release date of In Rainbows), people were most interested in downloading In Rainbows and reviews of the new release.

Now, using Trends for Websites, this story can be viewed from another perspective: we can see how the number of unique visitors that visit radiohead.com and inrainbows.com has changed over the last 12 months, the countries where the sites are most popular, the top related sites and search terms.

radiohead.com vs. inrainbows.com

We can see that in October 2007, radiohead.com (the blue line) saw a huge surge in popularity. The release of In Rainbows clearly drove many people to visit the band's website. The album's website, inrainbows.com (the red line), saw an even more dramatic jump; probably because that is where you could actually download the new album. And, it looks like site traffic to radiohead.com has increased overall, even as inrainbows.com traffic declined.

Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information. For more information, be sure to check out our Website Owners FAQs.

To start using Trends for Websites, head over to Google Trends.

Flash indexing with external resource loading

Webmaster Level: All

We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users' queries. For example, this result currently comes up in response to the query [2002 VW Transporter 888]:

Prior to this launch, this result did not appear, because all of the relevant content is contained in an XML file loaded by a SWF file.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn't particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

If you don't want your SWF file or any of its external resources crawled by search engines, please use an appropriate robots.txt directive.

Written by Janis Stipins, Software Engineer

Reconsideration requests: Now with notifications

If you've submitted a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools, you've probably wondered what happens once Google receives it. We've always done our best to act upon these requests as quickly as possible, but until now we haven't notified webmasters once we've processed their requests.

As of last week, after your request has been processed, we'll confirm this by sending a message to your Message Center in Webmaster Tools. (Prefer to be notified by email? You can do that too.) Sometime after you receive a reconsideration request confirmation message, check your site's performance in search results. If it's doing well, it means that Google has reviewed your site and believes that it adheres to our Webmaster Guidelines. If your site still isn't performing well in search, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines and also checking out these possible reasons why your site might not be doing as well as you expect.

Posted by Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Best practices for Product Search

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:

• Attributes to include in your feed
• FAQs
• Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
• Do product listings expire after 30 days?
• How often should I submit my feed?

More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Join us for another live chat - June 19, 2008

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

When it comes to talking with webmasters, we just can't get enough.

This past March we had the pleasure of connecting with hundreds of you online in our first-ever Webmaster Help Group online live chat, which included a presentation on Images in Google Search by Maile, lots of feedback from you on webmaster issues, a site clinic, and dozens of questions answered by folks from our Google Webmaster Central team.

Given the success of this previous chat, we've decided to do it again.  We're hosting another free live chat (dubbed JuneTune), and we'd love to have you attend!

Here's what you'll need:

• About an hour of free time.
• A phone, or ability to make a phone call online (e.g., with Skype or Gizmo5, etc.)
• An internet-connected computer, and these additional specifications.
• A URL for the chat, which you can only get when you register for the event  (you can likely do this in under 60 seconds)

What will our JuneTune chat include?  

• INTRO:  A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides
• PRESO:  A presentation on Personalization in Google Search by our own John Mueller.
• FAQs:  We're calling this "Three for Three," and we'll have three different Googlers tackling three different issues we've seen come up in the Group recently.  What will they be?  You'll just have to attend the chat to find out!
• And lots of Q&A!  You'll have a chance to type questions during the entire session, and we'll pick as many as we can to answer in writing and in speaking during the chat.

When and how can you join in?

• Mark the date on your calendar now: Thursday, June 19, for about one hour starting at 2:00pm PDT / 5:00pm EDT / 21:00 UTC / 23:00 CET 
• Register right now for this event. Please note that you'll need to click on the "register" link on the lefthand side.
• Using the link e-mailed to you by WebEx (the service hosting the event), log in 5-10 minutes prior to 2pm PDT.

We hope you can stop by, and look forward to chatting with you!  In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to post a note in this Groups thread.