Sunday, 31 May 2015

Plumbing the web

Posted by Narayanan Shivakumar (Google Distinguished Entrepreneur, Director)

Today is Google Developer Day! We're hosting events for developers in ten cities around the world, as you can read about from Matt Cutts and on our Google Blog. Jonathan Simon and Maile Ohye, whom you have seen on this blog, at conferences, and in our discussion forum, are currently hanging out at the event in San Jose.

I've been at the Beijing event, where I gave a keynote about "Plumbing the Web -- APIs and Infrastructures" for 600 Chinese web developers. I talked about a couple of my favorite topics, Sitemaps and Webmaster Tools, and some of the motivations behind them. Then I talked a bit about consumer APIs and some of our backend infrastructures to support our platform.

Check out the video of my keynote on YouTube or see some of the other videos from the events around the globe.
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6 Quick Tips for International Websites

Note from the editors: After previously looking into various ways to handle internationalization for Google’s web-search, here’s a post from Google Web Studio team members with tips for web developers.

Many websites exist in more than one language, and more and more websites are made available for more than one language. Yet, building a website for more than one language doesn’t simply mean translation, or localization (L10N), and that’s it. It requires a few more things, all of which are related to internationalization (I18N). In this post we share a few tips for international websites.

1. Make pages I18N-ready in the markup, not the style sheets

Language and directionality are inherent to the contents of the document. If possible you should hence always use markup, not style sheets, for internationalization purposes. Use @lang and @dir, at least on the html element:

<html lang="ar" dir="rtl">

Avoid coming up with your own solutions like special classes or IDs.

As for I18N in style sheets, you can’t always rely on CSS: The CSS spec defines that conforming user agents may ignore properties like direction or unicode-bidi. (For XML, the situation changes again. XML doesn’t offer special internationalization markup, so here it’s advisable to use CSS.)

2. Use one style sheet for all locales

Instead of creating separate style sheets for LTR and RTL directionality, or even each language, bundle everything in one style sheet. That makes your internationalization rules much easier to understand and maintain.

So instead of embedding an alternative style sheet like

<link href="default.rtl.css" rel="stylesheet">

just use your existing

<link href="default.css" rel="stylesheet">

When taking this approach you’ll need to complement existing CSS rules by their international counterparts:

3. Use the [dir='rtl'] attribute selector

Since we recommend to stick with the style sheet you have (tip #2), you need a different way of selecting elements you need to style differently for the other directionality. As RTL contents require specific markup (tip #1), this should be easy: For most modern browsers, we can simply use [dir='rtl'].

Here’s an example:

aside {
 float: right;
 margin: 0 0 1em 1em;
}

[dir='rtl'] aside {
 float: left;
 margin: 0 1em 1em 0; 
}

4. Use the :lang() pseudo class

To target documents of a particular language, use the :lang() pseudo class. (Note that we’re talking documents here, not text snippets, as targeting snippets of a particular language makes things a little more complex.)

For example, if you discover that bold formatting doesn’t work very well for Chinese documents (which indeed it does not), use the following:

:lang(zh) strong,
:lang(zh) b {
 font-weight: normal;
 color: #900;
}

5. Mirror left- and right-related values

When working with both LTR and RTL contents it’s important to mirror all the values that change directionality. Among the properties to watch out for is everything related to borders, margins, and paddings, but also position-related properties, float, or text-align.

For example, what’s text-align: left in LTR needs to be text-align: right in RTL.

There are tools to make it easy to “flip” directionality. One of them is CSSJanus, though it has been written for the “separate style sheet” realm, not the “same style sheet” one.

6. Keep an eye on the details

Watch out for the following items:
  • Images designed for left or right, like arrows or backgrounds, light sources in box-shadow and text-shadow values, and JavaScript positioning and animations: These may require being swapped and accommodated for in the opposite directionality.
  • Font sizes and fonts, especially for non-Latin alphabets: Depending on the script and font, the default font size may be too small. Consider tweaking the size and, if necessary, the font.
  • CSS specificity: When using the [dir='rtl'] (or [dir='ltr']) hook (tip #2), you’re using a selector of higher specificity. This can lead to issues. Just have an eye out, and adjust accordingly.

If you have any questions or feedback, check the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum, or leave your comments here.

Written by Jens O. Meiert and Tony Ruscoe, Tech Leads, Google Web Studio
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Saturday, 30 May 2015

Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website


Webmaster level: All
(Cross-posted on the Google Translate Blog)

Since we first launched the Website Translator plugin back in September 2009, more than a million websites have added the plugin. While we’ve kept improving our machine translation system since then, we may not reach perfection until someone invents full-blown Artificial Intelligence. In other words, you’ll still sometimes run into translations we didn’t get quite right.

So today, we’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.

To get started:
  1. Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
  2. Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator
To tweak a translation:
  1. Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
  2. Click on ‘Contribute a better translation’
  3. And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation -- or just double-click to edit the translation directly.
For example, if you’re translating your site into Spanish, and you want to translate Cat not to gato but to Cat, you can tweak it as follows:


If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away -- the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries. You can learn more about these new features in the Help Center.

This new experimental feature is currently free of charge. We hope this feature, along with Translator Toolkit and the Translate API, can provide a low cost way to expand your reach globally and help to break down language barriers.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate
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Getting started with structured data

Webmaster level: All

If Google understands your website’s content in a structured way, we can present that content more accurately and more attractively to Google users. For example, our algorithms can enhance your search results with “rich snippets” when we understand that your page is a structured product listing, event, recipe, review, or similar. We can also feature your data in Knowledge Graph panels or in Google Now cards, helping to spread the word about your content.

Today we’re excited to announce two features that make it simpler than ever before to participate in structured data features. The first is an expansion of Data Highlighter to seven new types of structured data. The second is a brand new tool, the Structured Data Markup Helper.

Support for Products, Businesses, Reviews and more in Data Highlighter

Data Highlighter launched in December 2012 as a point-and-click tool for teaching Google the pattern of structured data about events on your website — without even having to edit your site’s HTML. Now, you can also use Data Highlighter to teach us about many other kinds of structured data on your site: products, local businesses, articles, software applications, movies, restaurants, and TV episodes. Update: You can see the full list of schemas supported in Data Highlighter here.

To get started, visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter". You’ll be prompted to enter the URL of a typically structured page on your site (for example, a product or event’s detail page) and “tag” its key fields with your mouse.

Google Structured Data Highlighter

The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages. At the end of the process, you’ll have the chance to verify Google’s understanding of your structured data and, if it’s correct, “publish” it to Google. Then, as your site is recrawled over time, your site will become eligible for enhanced displays of information like prices, reviews, and ratings right in the Google search results.

New Structured Data Markup Helper tool

While Data Highlighter is a great way to quickly teach Google about your site’s structured data without having to edit your HTML, it’s ultimately preferable to embed structured data markup directly into your web pages, so your structured content is available to everyone. To assist web authors with that task, we’re happy to announce a new tool: the Structured Data Markup Helper.

Like in Data Highlighter, you start by submitting a web page (URL or HTML source) and using your mouse to “tag” the key properties of the relevant data type. When you’re done, the Structured Data Markup Helper generates sample HTML code with microdata markup included. This code can be downloaded and used as a guide as you implement structured data on your website.

Structured Data Markup Helper

The Structured Data Markup Helper supports a subset of data types, including all the types supported by Data Highlighter as well as several types used for embedding structured data in Gmail. Consult schema.org for complete schema documentation.

We hope these two tools make it easier for all websites to participate in Google’s growing suite of structured data features! As always, please post in our forums if you have any questions or feedback.

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager
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Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Chrome Extensions for web development

Webmaster Level: All

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.


For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.


Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.


With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.


Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.

These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.

Written by Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team
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Sunday, 24 May 2015

Multilingual and multinational site annotations in Sitemaps

Webmaster level: All
In December 2011 we announced annotations for sites that target users in many languages and, optionally, countries. These annotations define a cluster of equivalent pages that target users around the world, and were implemented using rel-alternate-hreflang link elements in the HTML of each page in the cluster.
Based on webmaster feedback and other considerations, today we’re adding support for specifying the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in Sitemaps. Using Sitemaps instead of HTML link elements offers many advantages including smaller page size and easier deployment for some websites.
To see how this works, let's take a simple example: We wish to specify that for the URL http://www.example.com/en, targeting English language users, the equivalent URL targeting German language speakers http://www.example.com/de. Up till now, the only way to add such annotation is to use a link element, either as an HTTP header or as HTML elements on both URLs like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/en" >
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://www.example.com/de" >
As of today, you can alternately use the following equivalent markup in Sitemaps:
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/en</loc>
  <xhtml:link 
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="de"
    href="http://www.example.com/de" />
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="en"
    href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/de</loc>
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="de"
    href="http://www.example.com/de" />
  <xhtml:link
    rel="alternate"
    hreflang="en"
    href="http://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
Briefly, the new Sitemaps tags shown in bold function in the same way as the HTML link tags, with both using the same attributes. The full technical details of how the annotations are implemented in Sitemaps, including how to implement the xhtml namespace for the link tag, are in our new Help Center article.
A more detailed example can be found in our new Help Center article, and if you need more help, please ask in our brand new internationalization help forum.
Written by , Webmaster Trends Analyst
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Saturday, 23 May 2015

Why we attend conferences

Posted by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

I've always loved traveling. Okay, not the flights so much, especially given that I typically travel coach (yes, even for work trips). But getting to learn interesting cultural tidbits, enjoy regional cuisines, and meet new people... it all definitely makes my life richer. Even the little things -- linguistic differences ("How are you going?" in Sydney) and just walking around (pass on the left in the UK!) -- can be fascinating.

So I shouldn't be surprised when my friends tease me about my traveling as a representative of Google's Search Quality team: "Must be really rough!" However, being an active part of conferences actually isn't all glamour and relaxation.

Here's a glimpse of the reality:

  • Sometimes (though thankfully rarely) I get metaphorically used as a human punching bag.
  • There's no pause button on my corp and personal e-mail accounts. Days at conferences = LOTS of email to catch up on!
  • And on a related note, what's with the no-wifi nonsense?! I have Verizon broadband [sic] for my laptop now, but still... ack!
  • Attending conferences requires an enormous amount of extra time overall. I stubbornly seem to create presentations fresh for each conference, I collaborate with other Googler speakers on their presentations (and vice versa), and I end up with a ton of additional (valuable but time-intense) work from info I glean at the conferences. Based on this and the e-mail reason noted above, I've noticed that each day of conference = five days of combined prep + analysis + implementation.

But here's why I still really like going to conferences:

  • I learn a bunch from other speakers. When folks from other search engines or various experts speak, I often think -- hey, that's useful information, or that's a particularly thoughtful way of explaining stuff. I'm still pretty new to the conference-speaking circuit, so every bit I soak up helps!
  • SEO and webmaster folks are typically rather fun people. :-)
  • Though I don't always make time for this, it's certainly neat getting to spend some time exploring various cities. Okay, so San Jose doesn't count (it's right next to Google), but I can't wait to check out Toronto (and, likely via a few personal days beforehand, Montreal).
  • I learn a great deal from webmasters I chat with. I'm able to go back to my colleagues here and say - hey, this is how our algorithm changes or our guidelines are being perceived, these are challenges we didn't anticipate from our tools, and so on. And it's not just about search; I've gotten thoughtful earfuls about Gmail, Calendar, and practically everything else about Google, and I do my best to relay this feedback to my colleagues in other departments.
  • Lastly, seeing someone in person provides a very helpful new perspective on what they're meaning to communicate online. It's easy to misread text on a page, especially when there's no immediate opportunity to follow up with questions. But in person, issues get cleared up on both sides, and that's good for everyone.

Thankfully, it's not just me who's presenting to and chatting with webmasters from Google -- I'd be exhausted, and you'd get quite bored of me. As you can see from the list below, our conference-going is genuinely a team effort: Through this month and June, you'll find Google Search Quality and Webmaster Central folks present at these conferences:

Search Engine Strategies - Xiamen, China - May 25, 26-30
  • Jianfei Zhu (Senior Software Engineer): Get a Lesson from Spamming

Search Engine Strategies - Milan, Italy - May 29-30
  • Brian White (Technical Program Manager)
  • Luisella Mazza (Search Quality Analyst)
  • Stefano Bezze (Search Quality Associate)

American Marketing Association Hot Topics Series - New York, NY - May 25
  • Maile Ohye (Senior Developer Support Engineer): Search Engine Marketing

Google Developer Day - San Jose, CA (was originally set for Mountain View) - May 31
  • Jonathan Simon (Webmaster Trends Analyst)
  • Maile Ohye (Senior Developer Support Engineer)

Search Marketing Expo Advanced - Seattle, WA - June 4-5
  • Matt Cutts (Software Engineer): You&A, Personalized Search and Penalty Box
  • Vanessa Fox (Product Manager, Webmaster Central): Duplicate Content

Search Engine Strategies - Toronto, Canada - June 12-13
  • Adam Lasnik: Search Engine Friendly Design and The Worst SEO Myths, Don'ts, and Scams

Searchnomics - Santa Clara, CA - June 27
  • Shashi Thakur (Software Engineer): Search Engine Friendly Design
  • Greg Grothaus (Software Engineer): Search & Dynamic Web Sites and SEO for Web 2.0

* * *

We look forward to seeing many of you in person! But even if you can't or don't want to go to one of the conferences we attend, we welcome your questions, comments, or even just a friendly introduction in our Webmaster Help Group.

Take care, and enjoy your summer, wherever your online or offline travels may take you!
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Friday, 22 May 2015

Introducing Webmaster Academy

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Looking through all of the information in Webmaster Central can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re just getting started with a website. This is why we’re excited to introduce a new set of educational materials in a program called Webmaster Academy. Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for beginner webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site in our index, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.

We’ve organized the content to represent what beginner webmasters should know in a way that’s both structured and modular, meaning you can go through the whole curriculum, or pick and choose your own path. Once you’ve read the articles, you can easily delve deeper into each topic, as we provide links to more in-depth articles. Most lessons are also accompanied by a video from the Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. If you’re looking to understand search and improve your site, Webmaster Academy is for you!

Have feedback? Excellent. Post it in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Julian Prentice, Search Quality Team
Contributors: Oliver Barrett & Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Team
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Sunday, 17 May 2015

Making more pages load instantly

Webmaster level: All


At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:



We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature.

In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article.

Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone.


Posted by - Software Engineer, Instant Pages
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Taking advantage of universal search

Posted by Vanessa Fox

Yesterday, at Searchology, we unveiled exciting changes in our search results. With universal search, we've begun blending results from more than just the web in order to provide the most relevant and useful results possible. In addition to web pages, for instance, the search results may include video, news, images, maps, and books. Over time, we'll continue to enhance this blending so that searchers can get the exact information they need right from the search results.

This is great news for the searcher, but what does it mean for you, the webmaster? It's great news for you as well. Many people do their searches from web search and aren't aware of our many other tools to search for images, news, videos, maps, and books. Since more of those results may now be returned in web search, if you have content that is returned in these others searches, more potential visitors may see your results.

Want to make sure you're taking full advantage of universal search? Here are some tips:

Google News results
If your site includes news content, you can, submit your site for inclusion in Google News. Once your site is included, you can let us know about your latest articles by submitting a News Sitemap. (Note News Sitemaps are currently available for English sites only.)

News Archive results
If you have historical news content (available for free or by subscription), you can submit it for inclusion in News Archive Search.

Image results
If your site includes images, you can opt-in to enhanced Image search in webmaster tools, which will enable us to gather additional metadata about your images using our Image Labeler. This helps us return your images for the most relevant queries. Also ensure that you are fully taking advantage of the images on your site.

Local results
If your site is for a business in a particular geographic location, you can provide information to us using our Local Business Center. By providing this information, you can help us provide the best, locally relevant results to searchers both in web search and on Google Maps.

Video results
If you have video content, you can host it on Google Video, YouTube, or a number of other video hosting providers. If the video is a relevant result for the query, searchers can play the video directly from the search results page (for Google Video and YouTube) or can view a thumbnail of the video then click over to the player for other hosting providers. You can easily upload videos to Google Video or to YouTube.

Our goal with universal search is to provide most relevant and useful results, so for those of you who want to connect to visitors via search, our best advice remains the same: create valuable, unique content that is exactly what searchers are looking for.
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Friday, 15 May 2015

Using schema.org markup for organization logos

Webmaster level: all

Today, we’re launching support for the schema.org markup for organization logos, a way to connect your site with an iconic image. We want you to be able to specify which image we use as your logo in Google search results.

Using schema.org Organization markup, you can indicate to our algorithms the location of your preferred logo. For example, a business whose homepage is www.example.com can add the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
  <a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a>
  <img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" />
</div>

Update 21 October 2014: You can also use any other supported syntax such as this JSON-LD code:

<script type="application/ld+json">
      {
      "@context": "http://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Organization",
      "url": "http://www.example.com/",
      "logo": "http://www.example.com/logo.png"
      }
    </script>
This example indicates to Google that this image is designated as the organization’s logo image for the homepage also included in the markup, and, where possible, may be used in Google search results. Markup like this is a strong signal to our algorithms to show this image in preference over others, for example when we show Knowledge Graph on the right hand side based on users’ queries.

As always, please ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Posted by RJ Ryan, Google Engineer
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Monday, 11 May 2015

Musings on Down Under

Posted by Aaron D'Souza, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Earlier this year, a bunch of Googlers (Maile, Peeyush, Dan, Adam and I) bunged ourselves across the equator and headed to Sydney, so we could show our users and webmasters that just because you're "down under" doesn't mean you're under our radar. We had a great time getting to know folks at our Sydney office, and an even greater time meeting and chatting with all the people attending Search Summit and Search Engine Room. What makes those 12-hour flights worthwhile is getting the chance to inform and be informed about the issues important to the webmaster community.

One of the questions we heard quite frequently: Should we as webmasters/SEOs/SEMs/users be worried about personalized search?

Our answer: a resounding NO! Personalized search takes each user's search behavior, and subtly tunes the search results to better match their interests over time. For a user, this means that even if you're a lone entomologist in a sea of sports fans, you'll always get the results most relevant to you for the query "cricket". For the webmaster, it allows niche markets that collide on the same search terms to disambiguate themselves based on individual user preferences, and this really presents a tremendous opportunity for visibility. Also, to put things in perspective, search engines have been moving towards some degree of personalization for years; for example, providing country/language specific results is already a form of personalization, just at a coarser granularity. Making it more fine-grained is the logical next step, and helps level the playing field for smaller niche websites which now have a chance to rank well for users that want their content the most.

Another question that popped up a lot: I'm moving my site from domain X to Y. How do I make sure all my hard-earned reputation carries over?

Here are the important bits to think about:
  • For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (How? Typically through .htaccess, but check with your hosting provider).
  • You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines' crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URLs.
  • http://www.google.com/webmasters is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want.
  • Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we recrawl your site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your site's pages.
  • Don't forget to update your Sitemap. (You are using Sitemaps, aren't you?)
  • If possible, don't substantially change the content of your pages at the same time you make the move. Otherwise, it will be difficult to tell if ranking changes are due to the change of content or incorrectly implemented redirects.
Before we sign off, we wanted to shout-out to a couple of the folks at the Sydney office: Lars (one of the original Google Maps guys) gets accolades from all of us jetlagged migrants for donating his awesome Italian espresso machine to the office. And Deepak, thanks for all your tips on what to see and do around Sydney.
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Analytics - Another tool for webmasters

Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards.

But we wanted to highlight some of the webmaster-specific metrics within Google Analytics for our regular readers, since it offers a lot of easily-accessible information that will enrich the work you're doing.

For instance, do you know how many visitors to your site are using IE versus Firefox? And even further, how many of those IE or Firefox users are converting on a goal you have set up? Google Analytics can tell you information like this so you can prepare and tailor your website for your audience. Then, when you are designing, you can prioritize your testing to make sure that the site works on the most popular browsers and operating systems first.



Are your visitors using Java-enabled browsers? What version of Flash are the majority of your visitors using? What connection speed do they have? If you find that lots of visitors are using a dial-up service, you're going to want to put in some more effort to streamline the load time of images on your site, for example.

Plus, Google Analytics will make your company's marketing division very happy. It reports on the most effective search keywords, the most popular referring sources and the geographic location of visitors, as well as the performance of banner ads, PPC keyword campaigns, and email newsletters. If you haven't tried Google Analytics, watch the Flash tour of the product or set up a free account now and see statistics on your visitors and the traffic to your site within three hours.

Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
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Sunday, 10 May 2015

About those fake penalty notification emails

(This post was translated from our German webmaster blog, originally written by Stefanie.)

We are aware that a number of German webmasters have received fake penalty notification emails that allegedly came from Google Search Quality. These spam emails have created some confusion about their authenticity, since we send very similar email notifications, which you can read more about here. Therefore, we clearly want to state that these emails are not related to any of Google's efforts concerning webmaster notification.

Updated: Because these emails are easy to mistake for authentic ones from Google, we've temporarily discontinued sending them as we work on ways to provide more secure communication mechanisms. We hope this will reduce confusion.

In the original post, we had listed the ways to tell if the email you received was not from Google. However, as we've temporarily stopped sending emails about guidelines violations, you can safely assume that any email you receive isn't from us. Note that the emails we sent did not include attachments. In addition, some of the emails mentioned 301 redirects as being the violation in question. Rest assured that 301 redirects are not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Note that we do provide information about some violations in webmaster tools. If your site previously violated the guidelines and you've made changes to fix it, you can let us know by filing a reinclusion request.

This post has been updated to indicate that we've temporarily stopped sending emails to webmasters about guidelines violations to reduce confusion.
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Saturday, 9 May 2015

MT657x (MT6515 / MT6575 / MT6577) flashing tutorial


Now that the new MediaTek SoC has been released, it is time to publish the instructions on how to flash your MT65x5 (MT6515 and MT6575) based device. Please note that the images shown on this tutorial are just examples and that you must flash your device with the correct ROM files.

Make sure that you read everything carefully and know what you are doing. Don't blame me for any damage that may occur on your device.



Update: By the time that this tutorial was written only MT65x5 was available. Current MT6577 based device can also be flashed using the exact same method, so this has just been updated with references to that most recent SoC.


What's needed:
  • Computer running Windows XP (or higher)
  • USB data cable
  • MediaTek USB VCOM drivers 
  • SP Flash Tool (v3.1206.01 or higher for MT6575 / v3.1222.00 or higher for MT6577)
Note: SP Flash Tool is backward compatible, which means you can (and should) use the most up to date version.

And now the tutorial...
  • First of all, make sure that you have MediaTek DA USB VCOM drivers installed.

Flashing the whole ROM
  • First of all open SP Flash Tool, then click Scatter-loading button to load the correct scatter file (MT6575_Android_scatter_emmc.txt or MT6577_Android_scatter_emmc.txt, depending on which device you have)  for your device and ignore any message that may appear.
  • Turn off your device, remove the battery and replace it after some seconds (and don't turn on the device).
  • Press F9 (or hit Download button) and connect your device into the computer via USB data cable. The process will start and a red progress bar will appear.

  •  After the red progress bar is complete, there will appear a purple progress bar.
  • Right after the purple progress bar is complete, a message will appear underneath it: “Please insert USB cable in x seconds” and then the download will start right away (you will see the yellow progress bar filling up).
  • When the yellow bar is complete, you'll get a popup with a green circle and Download OK message, which means that the process has been successfully terminated.
  • You can now safely disconnect your device and turn it on. The process ends here.

Flashing only part of the ROM
  • In case you want to flash just one part of the ROM, that is also possible. In the shown example, only recovery image will be flashed. Deselect all parts except the one(s) you want to flash and then press F9 (or hit Download button).
  • The tool will immediately show a warning because not all parts are selected, but you should continue anyway. Safely press Yes to continue.
  • The download of the chosen partition image will start and after the yellow bar is complete, the popup with the green circle should appear.

  • Please note that, even though it isn't mandatory to select it on the list of images to flash, preloader file must be present in the same folder as the other partition(s) that you want to flash, or else device will not be able to enter into download mode.


Attention: Please follow the instructions carefully. I will not take any responsibility on whatever may happen with your device.

Very important warning: Always make sure that you trust the sources of the ROM you download and know that it is meant for your device. After flashing a wrong preloader, your device will be completely dead (can't be powered on, it will not charge and won't be detected anymore by the computer) and there is no way to recover it.

Last note: All needed tools and drivers can be downloaded from my MT65xx Tools 4shared folder. The password to login is bm-smartphone-reviews.blogspot.com. Have fun!
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Friday, 8 May 2015

ThL V9 (Dual SIM with 3G support)

Introduction

If you have been following the latest news, then you should be already aware that MediaTek has released the new MT6575 chipset. The first engineering samples started to emerge by the end of the first quarter of this year and right now, the market is already filled up with quite a few interesting options.

I have decided to take ThL V9, not only for its appealing design, but also because the manufacturer is known for releasing phones with great quality and providing updates very often.

Specifications

Chipset

Name:MediaTek MT6575
CPU:1 GHz ARM Cortex™-A9
GPU:PowerVR™ SGX 531
Instruction set:ARMv7

Software environment

Embedded:OS: Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread)

Body

Dimensions
(width x height x depth):		130 x 65.5 x 12.1 millimetres
Weigth:139 grams (battery included)
Color:Black (also available in white or grey)

Battery

Capacity: 1550 mAh

Memory

RAM:capacity:512 MB
ROM-capacity:4 GB
Expansion slot:microSD memory card, supporting up to 32 GB

Network support

Primary phone:GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900, UMTS850, UMTS2100
Secondary phone:GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900
Data links:GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA

Display

Type:Sharp ASV-LCD capacitive touchscreen
Size:4.3 inches, qHD resolution (540 x 960 pixels)

Camera

Main (rear):5 megapixels with autofocus and dual LED flash
Secondary (front):0.3 megapixels

Interfaces

Bluetooth (802.15):Bluetooth 3.0 + Enhanced Data Rate
Wireless LAN / Wi-Fi (802.11):  IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n
USB:USB 2.0 Client, Hi-Speed (480 Mbit/s)
USB Series Micro-B (Micro-USB) connector

Satellite navigation

Built-in GPS module:MT6620 chipset
GPS antenna:Internal
Complementary GPS services:  A-GPS (Assisted GPS), MediaTek EPO (Extended Prediction Orbit)

Additional features

Sensors:Gravity, Proximity, Light and Magnetic field sensors
Analog Radio:FM radio (87.5-108 MHz) with RDS radio receiver

Design and construction

This is actually one of the best well built Chinese smartphones that I've ever reviewed and a perfect clone of HTC Amaze 4G. Now that I was used to a 4" screen smartphone, of course I find it a bit larger (and a little bit heavier), but that's easily forgotten as soon as you start playing with it.


Rather than sink down into its bezel, its display actually rises slightly above it, giving the impression that it's coming out at you.



The 3,5 mm headset jack and dedicated power button are located on the top edge. The extra-large volume rocker is placed on the right edge.


The micro-USB port is located on the left edge. I usually prefer to have it at the top or bottom so that I can use the phone -while in charge- without having the cable get in the way.


On the right side of the device there are also shutter press and video record buttons for the camera.



On the back side, we find the 5 megapixels autofocus camera above a dual LED flash.



Getting the back of the phone off is easy, just having to slide the cover up.




The two SIM slots and the microSD slot can only be accessed after removing the battery.


Display quality

This phone features an ASV-LCD from Sharp and its definition is simply amazing.



The colours are vivid and really vibrant on this display. It has excellent viewing angles and is easily readable in direct sunlight.

Functionality

There are not that many changes related to the user interface, given that the stock ROM is still based on Android 2.3. Anyway, for those that haven't had any contact with a MT65x3 phone before, here are some screenshots and details of the most important features.

The notification panel provides a fast access for brightness and display timeout setting, enabling or disabling auto rotation, Wi-Fi, BT, GPS and data connection, as well as alternating between sound profiles.

The dialer interface has changed a little bit, although the features are exactly the same. It supports smart dialing feature (can be seen on the second picture) which works perfectly and very fast!


The dial button can immediately start the call when a SIM is set as default for voice calls or open a pop up which let's you choose from which SIM the call should be established.


In call history screen, the list of missed / received / made calls can be checked with the indication of the name of the SIM. In addition, you can filter calls by SIM.

Many options can be set under the dual SIM management menu. The user can edit the name of each SIM and also set the associated background color that will appear in call log as well as in the notification bar (behind the network strength bars).

In the same menu, the user has the possibility to set a default SIM card to establish all outgoing calls (both voice and video) or set it to always ask, thus enabling the pop up that I have referred above (with the options of which SIM card should initiate the call). The same thing can be set for messaging and data connection purposes.



The phone is equipped with proximity, light, gravity and magnetic field (compass) sensors.



It also natively supports portable Wi-Fi hotspot feature, letting the user share data connection over a wireless network.


And just like it happened on previous MediaTek platforms, the feature to schedule power on / off is present. This is a feature that can only be found on very few smartphones.



The phone comes pre-installed with all Google applications, supporting e-mail, contact and calendar syncing. Google Play Store (formerly known as Android Market) works without any problem, providing access for free and paid applications / games.


Adobe Flash support was something that the owners of phones based on the previous MediaTek platform were missing (although there was a modified version for ARMv6 devices that worked more or less well). That is not a problem any more on the new platform, given that MT6575 already features an ARMv7 compliant processor.


Another weakness of the MT65x3 phones was the lack of NEON instruction set support, which didn't allowed Skype video calls (the user was limited to voice calls only). The processor used on the new MT6575 platform now supports it, so the users can enjoy Skype's video-calling feature. Personally, I have already tested it and I must say that it works flawlessly.

In terms of network reception, the phone performs greatly, having successfully passed all the tests that I've performed. Sound quality is clear enough and microphone quality is good.

Finally, but not less important, it must be mentioned that SIM2 will be reachable even if there is an active data connection established on SIM1. The data connection will be immediately dropped when a new call is incoming from SIM2 and the download will be automatically resumed after the call is over. 

MT6575 chipset and benchmarks

MT6575 chipset features a single core 1 GHz ARM Cortex™-A9 processor and a PowerVR™ SGX531 graphical processor. The difference in terms of speed are easily noticed and the benchmarks prove it. Here you have the results of both ThL V9 and my good "old" G11i Pro (MT6575 versus MT6573).

 ThL V9 benchmark scores

G11i Pro benchmark scores
(stock CPU frequency - 650 MHz)

G11i Pro benchmark scores
(overclocked CPU - 800 MHz)

The differences when compared to MT6573 (the device used for the benchmarks was G11i Pro) are pretty obvious: the benchmark score of ThL V9 is almost twice of G11i Pro (when overclocked to 800 MHz). For a more fair comparison, a friend of mine gently provided the score of his ZTE U960 (which is based on MSM8255 chipset):

ZTE U960 benchmark scores

I was pleasantly surprised to see that MediaTek MT6575 outperforms Qualcomm MSM8255, taking into account that both processors work at the same frequency -1 GHz. What a great job, MediaTek!

Final thoughts

I'm really amazed with the performance of this phone. I only wished that I could have tested this phone already running Android 4.0 (there are rumours that a future update will be released given that other competitors are also working on it). Anyway, if you were looking for a fast and stable Dual SIM featuring 3G support, here's your chance.

Just let me finish this review with an advertisement... in order to avoid questions regarding where to buy it from, you can always visit my partner shop (etotalk.com). ThL V9 is available for 229 USD.

Highs:
  • High quality product
  • Good battery life taking into consideration the big screen
  • ARMv7 compliant processor (enabling native support for Adobe Flash and other applications)
Lows:
  • Should have been released out-of-the-box with Android 4.0
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