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More on 404
Now that we've bid farewell to soft 404s , in this post for 404 week we'll answer your burning 404 questions. How do you treat the response code 410 "Gone"? Just like a 404. Do you index content or follow links from a page with a 404...
Farewell to soft 404s
We see two kinds of 404 ("File not found") responses on the web: "hard 404s" and "soft 404s." We discourage the use of so-called "soft 404s" because they can be a confusing experience for users and search engines...
It's 404 week at Webmaster Central
This week we're publishing several blog posts dedicated to helping you with one response code: 404. Response codes are a numeric status (like 200 for "OK", 301 for "Moved Permanently") that a webserver returns in response to a...
To infinity and beyond? No!
When Googlebot crawls the web, it often finds what we call an "infinite space". These are very large numbers of links that usually provide little or no new content for Googlebot to index. If this happens on your site, crawling those URLs may...
Improved Flash indexing
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...
Duplicate content due to scrapers
Written by Sven Naumann, Search Quality Team Since duplicate content is a hot topic among webmasters, we thought it might be a good time to address common questions we get asked regularly at conferences and on the Google Webmaster Help Group . Before...
Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol
Written by Prashanth Koppula, Product Manager Web publishers often ask us how they can maximize their visibility on the web. Much of this has to do with search engine optimization -- making sure a publisher's content shows up on all the search engines...
How Google defines IP delivery, geolocation, and cloaking
Written by Maile Ohye Many of you have asked for more information regarding webserving techniques (especially related to Googlebot ), so we made a short glossary of some of the more unusual methods. Geolocation : Serving targeted/different content to...
Best practices when moving your site
Posted by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site's performance in Google search results? Your aim is to make the...
Crawling through HTML forms
Written by Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, Crawling and Indexing Team Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages...
Speaking the language of robots
Written by Sean Harding, Webmaster Tools Team We all know how friendly Googlebot is . And like all benevolent robots, he listens to us and respects our wishes about parts of our site that we don't want crawled. We can just give him a robots.txt file...
Tips for making information universally accessible
Written by T.V. Raman , Research Scientist Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the profound impact it...
First date with the Googlebot: Headers and compression
Written by Maile Ohye as the website, Jeremy Lilley as the Googlebot Name/User-Agent : Googlebot IP Address : Verify it here Looking For : Websites with unique and compelling content Major Turn Off : Violations of the Webmaster Guidelines Googlebot -...
Remove your content from Google
Posted by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team Confused about the best uses of robots.txt, nofollow, URL removal tool? Wondering how to keep some of your pages off the web? Our webspam lead, Matt Cutts, talks about the best ways to stop Google from crawling...
Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search
Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich In writing and maintaining accurate meta tags (e.g., descriptive titles and robots information), you help Google to more accurately crawl, index and return your site in search results. Meta tags...
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