Viva, Webmasters in Vegas

Thanks for visiting us at WebmasterWorld PubCon in Las Vegas couple weeks ago. Whether it was at the panel sessions, the exhibitor hall, or the Safe Bets event, we had a blast meeting you and sharing with you the many Google products that are available to webmasters to enhance and drive traffic to your site. For those who weren't able to join us, here are answers to some of the top questions that we heard:

Q: How do I increase the visibility of my site in search results?
A: There are many factors that can impact visibility of your site in search results. We outlined just a few tips that can make a big difference to increasing your site's visibility in Google search results. First, you should ensure your site has quality content that is unique. Second, have quality sites link to your site. Third, submit a Sitemap to let us know about all the URLs on your site. Fourth, sign up for a webmaster tools account to get information how about Google sees your site, such as crawl errors, indexing details, and top queries to your site. Lastly, you can visit Webmaster Central and Webmaster Help Center for more webmaster related questions and resources.

Q How much do I have to pay to create a Google Custom Search Engine?
A: Nothing -- it's free. In addition to being able to create your own custom search engine on your site, you can make money on your site using AdSense for Search.

Q: Why is it better to create gadgets rather than create feeds?
A: First, gadgets are much more flexible. As a publisher, you control the format of your content. Second, gadgets are by nature more interactive. They can be built with flash, HTML or AJAX, and are generally much more interesting than feeds. Finally, your users can customize a gadget to their liking, making your content a lot more targeted.

Q: What is this new ad placement feature for AdSense and how come I don't see it in my account?
A: Ad placements are publisher-defined groups of ad units that advertisers will see when searching for places where they can target their ads. If you don't yet see it in your AdSense account, it's because we've been slowly rolling out this feature to everyone. This exciting feature will be available to all publishers in the next few weeks, so be sure to keep an eye out.

Q: What's the easiest way to put a searchable Google Map on my web page?
A: Use the Map Search Wizard to design a Google Map for your page. The wizard will write all of the code for you; all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your web page, and your users will see your location on a map.

For more information about Google products for webmasters, you can check them out here:

• Webmaster tools
• Gadgets
• Custom Search Engine
• Code
• AdSense
• AdWords
• Analytics

We also wanted to share some photos from PubCon. If you look closely enough, you may be able to see yourself.


Thanks for stopping by, on behalf of the 25 Googlers in attendance!

Controlling crawling and indexing now documented on code.google.com

Webmaster level: All

Do you know how Google's crawler, Googlebot, handles conflicting directives in your robots.txt file? Do you know how to prevent a PDF file from being indexed? Do you know Googlebot’s favorite song? The answers to these questions (except for the last one :)), along with lots of other information about controlling the crawling and indexing of your site, are now available on code.google.com:

Controlling crawling and indexing



Now site owners have a comprehensive resource where they can learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directives. Please share your comments, and if you have questions you can post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

MediaTek launches MT6592 octa-core mobile platform

Hooray! MediaTek finally unveiled the new MT6592 platform, an octa-core mobile platform. Built on the advanced 28nm HPM high-performance process, it packs low-power Cortex™-A7 CPU cores, and courtesy of the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing use model on top of ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, all eight cores can operate simultaneously -- at up to between 1.7 GHz and 2 GHz, depending on the version. 

Concerning to multimedia subsystem, it integrates an ARM Mali™-450 MP graphics processor clocked at 700 MHz, an advanced video playback system supporting Ultra-HD 4Kx2K H.264 video playback and support for new video codecs such as H.265 and VP9, a 16-megapixel camera and a Full HD display.

MT6592 incorporates MediaTek's advanced multi-mode cellular modem and a full connectivity capability for dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Miracast screen-sharing as well as Bluetooth, GPS and a FM tuner. The next big step for MediaTek is the entrance into LTE market, so let's see if there are any upcoming news regarding this matter.

The first devices to feature the new platform are expected to arrive as soon as end of year, so let's get ready for it!

Introducing Sitemaps for Google News

Good news for webmasters of English-language news sites: If your site is currently included in Google News, you can now create News Sitemaps that tell us exactly which articles to crawl for inclusion in Google News. In addition, you can access crawl errors, which tell you if there were any problems crawling the articles in your News Sitemaps, or, for that matter, any articles on your site that Google News reaches through its normal crawl.

Freshness is important for news, so we recrawl all News Sitemaps frequently. The News Sitemaps XML definition lets you specify a publication date and time for each article to help us process fresh articles in timely fashion. You can also specify keywords for each article to inform the placement of the articles into sections on Google News.

If your English-language news site is currently included in Google News, the news features are automatically enabled in webmaster tools; just add the site to your account. Here's how the new summary page will look:

The presence of the News crawl link on the left indicates that the news features are enabled. A few things to note:

• You will only have the news features enabled if your site is currently included in Google News. If it's not, you can request inclusion.

• In most cases, you should add the site for the hostname under which you publish your articles. For example, if you publish your articles at URLs such as http://www.example.com/business/article123.html, you should add the site http://www.example.com/. Exception: If your site is within a hosting site, you should add the site for your homepage, e.g., http://members.tripod.com/mynewssite/. If you publish articles under multiple hostnames, you should add a site for each of them.

• You must verify your site to enable the news features.

We'll be working to make the news features available to publishers in more languages as soon as possible.

Petits fours in your search results

Webmaster Level: All

Recently we made a change to show more results from a domain for certain types of queries -- this helped searchers get to their desired result even faster. Today we’re expanding the feature so that, when appropriate, more queries show additional results from a domain. As a webmaster, you’ll appreciate the fact that these results may bring targeted visitors directly to the pages they’re interested in.

Here’s an example: in the past, the query [moma] (the Museum of Modern Art), might have triggered two results from the official site:

With this iteration, our search results may show:

• Up to four web results from each domain (i.e., several domains may have multiple results)
• Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact

As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.

Like all the hundreds of changes we make a year, we’re trying to help users quickly reach their desired result. Even though we’re constantly improving our algorithms, our general advice still holds true: create compelling, search-engine friendly sites in order to attract users, buzz, and often targeted traffic!

Written by Harvey Jones, Software Engineer

Joint support for the Sitemap Protocol

We're thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As part of this development, we're moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org.

If you've already submitted a Sitemap to Google using the previous namespace and version number, we'll continue to accept it. If you haven't submitted a Sitemap before, check out the documentation on www.sitemaps.org for information on creating one. You can submit your Sitemap file to Google using Google webmaster tools. See the documentation that Yahoo! and Microsoft provide for information about submitting to them.

If any website owners, tool writers, or webserver developers haven't gotten around to implementing Sitemaps yet, thinking this was just a crazy Google experiment, we hope this joint announcement shows that the industry is heading in this direction. The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites. In our view, the experiment is still underway.

Badware alerts for your sites

As part of our efforts to protect users, we have been warning people using Google search before they visit sites that have been determined to distribute badware under the guidelines published by StopBadware. Warning users is only part of the solution, though; the real win comes from helping webmasters protect their own users by alerting them when their sites have been flagged for badware -- and working with them to remove the threats.

It's my pleasure to introduce badware alerts in Google webmaster tools. You can see on the Diagnostic Summary tab if your site has been determined to distribute badware and can access information to help you correct this.

If your site has been flagged and you believe you've since removed the threats, go to http://stopbadware.org/home/review to request a review. If that's successful, your site will no longer be flagged -- and your users will be safer as a result of your diligence.

This version is only the beginning: we plan to continue to provide more data to help webmasters diagnose issues on their sites. We realize that in many cases, badware distribution is unintentional and the result of being hacked or running ads which lead directly to pages with browser exploits. Stay tuned for improvements to this feature and others on webmaster tools.

Update: this post has been updated to provide a link to the new form for requesting a review.


Update: More information is available in our Help Center article on malware and hacked sites.

Las Vegas Pubcon 2006

As if working at Google isn't already a party, today I'm traveling to Las Vegas for WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006! But instead of talking bets and odds, I'll be talking about how Google can help webmasters improve their sites. I love chatting with webmasters about all the work that goes into creating a great website. Several other Googlers will be there too, so if you have a burning question or just wanna talk about random stuff feel free to stop us and say hi. Besides the sessions, we'll be at the Google booth on Wednesday and Thursday, so come by and introduce yourself.

Here's the list of Google events at PubCon:

Tuesday 14

10:15 - 11:30 SEO and Big Search Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

1:30 - 2:45 PPC Search Advertising Programs Frederick Vallaeys, Senior Product Specialist, AdWords

2:45 - 4:00 PPC Tracking and Reconciliation Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics

Wednesday 15

10:15 - 11:30 Contextual Advertising Optimization Tom Pickett, Online Sales and Operations

11:35 - 12:50 Site Structure for Crawlability Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Duplicate Content Issues Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

5:30 - 7:30 Safe Bets From Google Cocktail party!

Thursday 16

11:35 - 12:50 Spider and DOS Defense Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Interactive Site Reviews Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

3:30 - 5:00 Super Session Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

You can view this schedule on Google Calendar here:

Come to "Safe Bets From Google" on Wednesday 5:30-7:30pm -- it's a cocktail party where you can mingle with other webmasters and Googlers, learn about other Google products for webmasters, and in typical Google style enjoy some great food and drinks. I'll be there with some other engineers from our Seattle office. Don't miss it!

Video: Creating a SEO strategy (with Webmaster Tools!)

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Wondering how to begin creating an organic search strategy at your company? What’s a good way to integrate your company’s various online components, such as the website, blog, or YouTube channel? Perhaps we can help! In under fifteen minutes, I outline a strategic approach to SEO for a mock company, Webmaster Central, where I pretend to be the SEO managing the Webmaster Central Blog.

Fifteen-minute video to help your create the SEO strategy at your company

The video covers these high-level topics (and you can skip to the exact portion of the video that might be of interest):

Creating a SEO strategy

• Using Webmaster Central as mock company
• Building an SEO strategy
1. Understand searcher persona workflow
2. Determine company and website goals
3. Audit your site to best reach your audience
4. Execute and make improvements
• Overcoming obstacles

Feel free to reference the slides as well.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Huawei U8836D / Ascend G500 Pro / Shine (Dual SIM with 3G support)

Introduction

After being very pleased with the performance of ZTE V970, I've decided to test a fresh new smartphone from Huawei. Also powered by MediaTek MT6577 chipset, one of the most promising dual SIM smartphones is Huawei U8836D / Ascend G500 Pro (also known as Shine).

Huawei is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company. It is nowadays  the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, having overtaken Ericsson.

Specifications

Chipset
Name:	MediaTek MT6577
CPU:	Dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex™-A9
GPU:	PowerVR™ SGX 531
Instruction set:	ARMv7
Software environment
Embedded:OS:	Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
Body
Dimensions (width x height x depth):	130 x 65 x 11.2 millimetres
Weigth:	156 grams (battery included)
Color:	Black
Battery
Capacity:	1930 mAh
Memory
RAM:capacity:	1 GB
ROM-capacity:	4 GB
Expansion slot:	microSD memory card, supporting up to 32 GB
Network support
Primary phone:	GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900, UMTS900, UMTS2100
Secondary phone:	GSM850, GSM900, GSM1800, GSM1900
Data links:	GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA
Display
Type:	IPS-LCD capacitive touchscreen
Size:	4.3 inches, qHD resolution (540 x 960 pixels)
Protection:	Corning Gorilla glass
Camera
Main (rear):	5 megapixels with autofocus and single 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 and Light sensors
Analog Radio:	FM radio (87.5-108 MHz) with RDS radio receiver
Others:	Dedicated LED for notification of missed calls / new messages

Design and construction

In terms of design, it has some similarities with HTC Desire X. The outer bezel around the display is made of black painted metal while the back cover is made of a textured rubbery which provides firm grip and a nice feel when holding the phone, much like to the one we can find on ZTE V970. The overall built quality is great and you can even count with the strong screen protection due to the use of a glass from Corning.

Underneath the speaker grill, on the left side, it is placed the usual power charging LED (red colored). But in addition to that, there is also a green LED that becomes permanently lit when the battery is more than 90% charged and also blinks in order to notify the user of eventual missed calls / new messages received.

There are three soft-buttons in total - Back, Home and Menu, which are back-lit when the phone is turned on.

The volume rocker is placed on the right edge.

The microUSB port is located on the upper left edge.

The 3,5 mm headset jack and dedicated power button are located on the top edge.

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

Placed on the right side of the bottom edge, there is a small notch that allows you to easily remove the rear cover.

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

Display quality

This phone features a good quality IPS-LCD, whose colors are vivid and really vibrant. It has a pixel density of 256 ppi due to the qHD resolution (540 x 960) over a surface with a diagonal of 4.3 inches.

Moreover, a big plus of this phone is the fact that it features a Corning Gorilla protective glass, which is highly durable and strong.

Functionality

The phone comes pre-installed with Android 4.0.4. Here are some screenshots and details of the most important features with a special detail of the dual SIM functionality.

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 user interface of Android 4.0 is definitely very polished.

The dialer interface with the two buttons for calling from either SIM1 or SIM2. It supports smart dialing feature which works perfectly and very fast!

There is an option to easily switch between the default card for establishing phone calls. Within the call log history, calls can be filtered by received, established or missed calls, but can also be checked which SIM was used.

Under the dual SIM management menu several configurations can be set. 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 or set it to always ask. The same thing can be set for messaging and data connection purposes.

Android 4.0 adds new fancy controls for managing network data usage. The user can monitor total usage by network type and application and then set limits if needed. Of course, as mobile data can be enabled on SIM1 or SIM2, data usage of each SIM card can also be tracked.

It also natively supports tethering and portable hotspot feature, letting the user share mobile data connection through USB or over a wireless (Wi-Fi or even Bluetooth) network.

Just like it happened on the previous MediaTek platform, with the newest one (MT6577), 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.

The phone supports quad-band GSM as well as UMTS 900 MHz and 2100 MHz as confirmed under hidden MTK Engineer Mode.

The stock ROM from Huawei doesn't provide access to Google services, but that situation can be easily overcome by installing the latest version of Google apps.

After about a month of using this phone, I can say that battery typically lasts two to three days without putting it into charge. That it is pretty good, taking into consideration that I always keep Bluetooth turned on, 3G data connection always activated and make a few calls per day.

Final thoughts

If you don't want to take the risk of buying a phone from an unknown Chinese brand, then go for this one. Its performance is great, runs very stable and has a good battery lifetime. I would say without any doubts that it is the best phone with Dual SIM capability for business use.

And now the usual advertisement... in order to avoid questions regarding where to buy it from, you can always visit my partner shop (etotalk.com). Huawei U8836D Shine is available for 229 USD.

Highs:

• Good battery life
• Corning Gorilla glass protection

Lows:

• Lack of support for native video calls
• No magnetic field sensor (which means no compass support)