As a follow-up to my recent
post about how user reports of
webspam and
paid links help improve Google's search results for millions of users, I wanted to highlight one of the most essential parts of Google Webmaster Central: our
Webmaster Help Group. With over 37,000 members in our English group and support in
15 other languages, the group is the place to get your questions answered regarding crawling and indexing or Webmaster Tools. We're thankful for a fabulous group of
Bionic Posters who have dedicated their time and energy to making the Webmaster Help Group a great place to be. When appropriate, Googlers, including myself, jump in to clarify issues or participate in the dialogue. One thing to note: we try hard to read most posts in the group, and although we may not respond to each one, your feedback and concerns help drive the features we work on. Here are a few examples:
Sitemap details
Submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools is one way to let know Google know about what pages exist on your site.
Users were quick to note that even though they submitted a Sitemap of all the pages on their site, they only found a sampling of URLs indexed through a site: search. In response, the Webmaster Tools team created a Sitemaps details page to better tell you how your Sitemap was processed. You can read a refresher about the Sitemaps details page in Jonathan's
blog post.
Contextual helpOne request we received early on with Webmaster Tools was for better documentation on the data displayed. We saw
several questions about meta description and title tag issues using our Content Analysis tool, which led us to beef up our
documentation on that page and link to that Help Center article directly from that page. Similarly, we discovered that
users needed clarification on the distinction between
"top search queries" and "top clicked queries" and how the data can be used. We added an expandable section entitled "How do I use this data?" and placed contextual help information across Webmaster Tools to explain what each feature is and where to get more information about it.
Blog postsThe Webmaster Help Group is also a way for us to keep a pulse on what overarching questions are on the minds of webmasters so we can address some of those concerns through this blog. Whether it's how to
submit a reconsideration request using Webmaster Tools,
deal with duplicate content,
move a site, or
design for accessibility, we're always open to hearing more about your concerns in the Group. Which reminds me...
It's time for more Popular Picks! Last year, we devoted two weeks to soliciting and answering five of your most pressing webmaster-related questions. These
Popular Picks covered the following topics:
Seeing as this was a well-received initiative, I'm happy to announce that we're going to do it again. Head on over to
this thread to ask your webmaster-related questions. See you there!
Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality
Back in March, we announced the
beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've
heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.
Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can
sign in to Ad Manager today. If not,
apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.
Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.
We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:
- Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
- Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
- Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
- Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
- Day and Time Targeting: Don't want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
We also continue to roll out new features for the
DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including
DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.
If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the
Ad Manager Help Center.
Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager
Since both tennis and table tennis are in the Olympics, perhaps you're wondering: if there's soccer, why not "table soccer?" Of course, we know table soccer by another name; and while foosball may not be an Olympic sport, we still cheered
Nathan Johns and
Jan Backes—two members of our Search Quality team—as they brought home the foosball silver medal at the
search engine foosball smackdown at SES San Jose.
"Smackdown" doesn't quite equate to "Olympics," but check out the intensity—you could hear a pin drop!
The gold medal (cup) went to the
search engine down the road. :)
Yahoo's first place winners Daniel Wong and Jake Rosenberg.Just to be sure they weren't ringers, I quizzed Daniel and Jake, "How can you prevent a file from being crawled?" They correctly answered, "
robots.txt."
Gold cup well deserved.
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
We'd like to remind you that once you've been approved for AdSense, you can place the code from your account on any page that complies with our
program policies. Simply
generate new code and paste it onto your site -- we don't need to update your account, so there's no need to contact us about your new site (although we appreciate the thought!). Even if your sites relate to completely different topics, our system will display appropriate ads for each site. This is because your ad targeting is based on the content of your pages, rather than set within your account. In addition, please keep in mind that publishers may only maintain one account per payee name, so there's no need for you to submit a new application.
If you run multiple websites, you may wish to view separate reports for each domain. Simply create a
URL channel for each one. You won't need to modify your code in any way, and your URL channels will begin tracking data almost immediately. If you need to send these reports to other people who manage your site with you, you can set up
emailable reports.
But what if you've sold the website you applied to AdSense, and now you run another one? We don't need to update your account information in any way. Just remove your ad code from the old site, paste new code onto your current site, and our system will automatically take care of the rest.
Finally, we'd like to note that we do constantly review sites displaying Google ads to make sure that they're complying with the AdSense program policies. If we find that a site isn't compliant with our policies, we'll contact the publisher whose ad code appears on the site to address the situation. If you're concerned about others placing your ad code on non-policy compliant pages, we recommend using our
Allowed Sites feature.
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Posted by Jeff Fisher & Stephanie Liu, Google Data APIs TeamWe've added a lot of new tools and functionality to the YouTube APIs in the past year (we launched the new Google Data-based API last August!), and we recently gave our
overview page a face-lift to help developers figure out what will work best for them.
The new
Getting Started Guide goes more in-depth about each of the different offerings. For example, we want to highlight the efforts of the AJAX API Team in providing the
Video Bar and
Video Search Control widgets that can be easily embedded in any website. These tools allow you to surface YouTube content on your site with
minimal effort. There are also summaries about our player API offerings and the in-depth integrations possible with the Data API.
If you've been meaning to add a little (or a lot) of videos to your applications, now's a good time to check it out :)
This post is for anyone who has been
emailed or notified by Google about
badware, received a
badware warning when browsing their own site using Firefox, or has come across
malware-labeled search results for their own site(s). As you know, these warnings are produced by our automated scanning systems, which we've put in place to ensure the quality of our results by
protecting our users. Whatever the case, if you are dealing with badware, here are a few recommendations that can help you out.
1. If you have badware, it usually means that your web server, your website, or a database used by your website has been compromised. We have a nifty post on
how to handle being hacked. Be very careful when inspecting for malware on your site so as to avoid exposing your computer to infection.
2. Once everything is clear and dandy, you can follow the steps in our post about
malware reviews via Webmaster Tools. Please note the screen shot on the previous post is outdated, and the new malware review form is on the Overview page and looks like this:
- Other programs, such as Firefox, also use our badware data and may not recognize the change immediately due to their caching of the data. So even if the badware label in search is removed, it may take some time for that to be visible in such programs.
3. Lastly, if you believe that your rankings were somehow affected by the malware, such as compromised content that violated our Webmaster Guidelines [i.e. hacked pages with hidden pharmacy text links], you should fill out a
reconsideration request. To clarify, reconsideration requests are usually used for when you notice issues stemming from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines and are separate from malware requests.
If you have additional questions, please review our
documentation or post to the
discussion group with the URL of your site. We hope you find this updated feature in
Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems.
Written by Evan Tang, Search Quality Team
This Saturday, August 23rd, our engineers will be performing site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in during these hours, but we'll continue to track your earnings and serve ads to your pages. For those of you located in different time zones, we've provided the maintenance start time for a few international cities:
London - 6pm Saturday
Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Bangalore - 10:30pm Saturday
Hanoi - 12am Sunday
Auckland - 5am Sunday
Finally, you may have noticed that we're posting this message a little earlier than usual. Based on your feedback, we'll do our best to post these maintenance reminders earlier in the week to help you plan ahead. Thanks for the suggestion!
Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support
Posted by Eric Bidelman & Austin Chau, Google Data APIs TeamThe Google Data team has developed client libraries in .NET, Java, JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Objective-C. With the popularity of other languages like Ruby, many developers have taken it upon themselves to build libraries for their favorite Google Data API. Here are two examples:
Base 4 Ruby:
A ruby gem that allows developers to create, update, and delete items using the Google Base Data API.
libgcal:
A C/C++ library to interact with the Google Calendar and Contacts APIs.
For those of you who want to get involved in open source development, feel free to contribute to these projects or help us to improve Google's officially supported client libraries. If you're interested in starting fresh, checkout Jeff Scudder's presentation on Creating a Google Data API Client.
Hack away!
Implemented your own client? Leave a comment.
Your visitors may stumble into a
404 "Not found" page on your website for a variety of reasons:
- A mistyped URL, or a copy-and-paste mistake
- Broken or truncated links on web pages or in an email message
- Moved or deleted content
Confronted by a 404 page, they may then attempt to manually correct the URL, click the back button, or even navigate away from your site. As hinted in an
earlier post for
"404 week at Webmaster Central", there are various ways to help your visitors get out of the dead-end situation. In our quest to make 404 pages more useful, we've just added a section in
Webmaster Tools called "Enhance 404 pages". If you've created a
custom 404 page this allows you to embed a widget in your 404 page that helps your visitors find what they're looking for by providing suggestions based on the incorrect URL.
Example: Jamie receives the link
www.example.com/activities/adventurecruise.html in an email message. Because of formatting due to a bad email client, the URL is truncated to
www.example.com/activities/adventur. As a result it returns a 404 page. With the 404 widget added, however, she could instead see the following:
In addition to attempting to correct the URL, the 404 widget also suggests the following, if available:
- a link to the parent subdirectory
- a sitemap webpage
- site search query suggestions and search box
How do you add the widget? Visit the "Enhance 404 pages" section in Webmaster Tools, which allows you to generate a JavaScript snippet. You can then copy and paste this into your custom 404 page's code.
Can you change the way it looks? Sure. We leave the HTML unstyled initially, but you can edit the CSS block that we've included. For more information, check out our
guide on how to customize the look of your 404 widget.
This feature is currently experimental -- we might not provide corrections and suggestions for your site but we'll be working to improve the coverage. In the meantime, let us know what you think in the comments below or in our
group discussion. Thanks for helping us make the Internet a more friendly place!
Written by Sahala Swenson, Webmaster Tools team
The Reader team has always been interested in politics, and we use Reader (of course) to stay current on all the political happenings. As we were reading and sharing amongst ourselves, it got us thinking: what would happen if political newsmakers used Reader too?
Today we're announcing Google Power Readers in Politics: leading political journalists and both U.S. presidential campaigns using Reader to read and share news. You can read what they read, and see what's on their minds as they share and discuss news. Each participant has created a reading list with a feed you can subscribe to in Reader (or any other feed reader), and is also publishing shared items. Here's the list of participants:
Visit http://www.google.com/powerreaders to get an overview, and subscribe to what you're most interested in using Reader. We're excited to see what's newsworthy this election season - we hope you will be too!
When you visit the
AdSense Setup tab in your account, you'll notice a new "AdSense for feeds" option. This means you can now use AdSense to place ads in your RSS feeds, allowing you to increase the reach of your content while earning revenue. Our salesforce will sell cost-per-impression (CPM) ads directly to the largest advertisers, while the rest of your inventory will be filled with contextually targeted cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM ads. This means that more of your feed items will be sold and with higher overall revenue, than with any other feed network.
At this point, you may either be thinking, "great!" or "umm...what's a feed?" For those of you in the second category, feeds allow your content to be delivered and subscribed to on the Web, often as headlines, summaries or articles. FeedBurner also has a
nifty tutorial that you might find useful.
And here are a few more reasons to try AdSense for feeds:
- Receive higher CPMs and maintain a positive user experience by displaying ads specifically optimized for RSS feeds.
- View detailed stats on your feed audience, distribution, and more through FeedBurner when you set up your feeds with AdSense.
- Manage monetization for your feeds through the same account that you use to manage other AdSense properties.
AdSense for feeds is currently enabled in all
languages supported by AdSense for content.
Want to learn more about what feeds are and how to get started with AdSense for feeds? Visit our
Help Center and watch our introductory video from Product Manager Steve Olechowski:
To set up AdSense for feeds now,
sign in and visit the
AdSense Setup page of your account, or
apply for an AdSense account.
Posted by Ryan Hayward - AdSense Product Marketing
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 response code?We aim to understand as much as possible about your site and its content. So while we wouldn't want to show a hard 404 to users in search results, we may utilize a 404's content or links if it's detected as a signal to help us better understand your site.
Keep in mind that if you want links crawled or content indexed, it's far more beneficial to include them in a non-404 page.
What about 404s with a 10-second meta refresh?Yahoo! currently utilizes this method on their 404s. They
respond with a 404, but the 404 content also shows:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.yahoo.com/?xxx">We feel this technique is fine because it reduces confusion by giving users 10 seconds to make a new selection, only offering the homepage after 10 seconds without the user's input.
Should I 301-redirect misspelled 404s to the correct URL?Redirecting/301-ing 404s is a good idea when it's helpful to users (i.e. not confusing like soft 404s). For instance, if you notice that the
Crawl Errors of Webmaster Tools shows a 404 for a misspelled version of your URL, feel free to 301 the misspelled version of the URL to the correct version.
For example, if we saw this 404 in Crawl Errors:
http://www.google.com/webmsters <-- typo for "webmasters"
we may first correct the typo if it exists on our own site, then 301 the URL to the correct version (as the broken link may occur elsewhere on the web):
http://www.google.com/webmastersHave you guys seen any good 404s?Yes, we have! (Confession: no one asked us this question, but few things are as fun to discuss as response codes. :) We've put together a list of some of our favorite 404 pages. If you have more 404-related questions, let us know, and thanks for joining us for 404 week!
http://www.metrokitchen.com/nice-404-page
"If you're looking for an item that's no longer stocked (as I was), this makes it really easy to find an alternative."
http://www.comedycentral.com/another-404
"Blame the robot monkeys"
-
Reid, tells really bad jokes
http://www.splicemusic.com/and-another
"Boost your 'Time on site' metrics with a 404 page like this."
-
Susan, dabbler in music and Analytics
http://www.treachery.net/wow-more-404s
"It's not reassuring, but it's definitive."
-
Jonathan, has trained actual spiders to build websites, ants handle the 404s
http://www.apple.com/iPhone4g
"Good with respect to usability."
http://thcnet.net/lost-in-a-forest
"At least there's a mailbox."
http://lookitsme.co.uk/404
"It's pretty cute. :)"
http://www.orangecoat.com/a-404-page.html
"Flow charts rule."
http://icanhascheezburger.com/iz-404-page
"I can has useful links and even e-mail address for questions! But they could have added 'OH NOES! IZ MISSING PAGE! MAYBE TIPO OR BROKN LINKZ?' so folks'd know what's up."
Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Have you ever checked your reports and noticed that you have clicks reported, but no revenue? We'd like to explain why this may happen, as we frequently receive emails and questions on our
Help Forum about this issue. What you're seeing may be due to one of the following:
- Allowed Sites setup
The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where ads from your account may be displayed. If you're using this feature, you'll need to make sure that you've listed all sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
To check if this is the case, log into your account and visit the 'Allowed Sites' page under your AdSense Setup tab. If the radio button 'Allow any site to show ads for my account ' is populated, you're not being affected by this issue, and you should continue to #2 below. However, if 'Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account' is populated, review the list of sites in the box below -- are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is 'no', you won't be credited for clicks on the missing sites. Please be sure to add all of the sites where you'd like to display your AdSense ad code.
We've noticed some confusion among publishers who have entered the sites of advertisers they'd like to see on their pages into the Allowed Sites list. Please know that this is not the case, as it's not possible to request ads for a particular page - the sites you enter into this box can only be sites where your ads can be placed.
- Invalid clicks
It's possible that you have some clicks that our monitoring system has considered to be invalid. As we've mentioned before, we monitor all clicks and impressions on Google ads for any activity that may artificially drive up an advertiser's costs or a publisher's earnings. Any clicks that our system considers invalid will still appear on your 'Overview' page, under the Reports tab. However, because our advertisers aren't charged for these clicks and impressions, we won't show the earnings for this activity. If you're concerned about suspicious activity in your account, we recommend reviewing your site's logs and letting us know about the situation.
Rest assured that AdSense accounts are properly credited for all clicks and impressions we consider to be valid. We'll post your finalized earnings for a given month on your 'Payment History' page during the first week of the following month. For more information about invalid clicks, please review our Help Center.
Posted by the Google Ad Traffic Quality Team
And boy do we love it. The
Search Engine Strategies conference is right up our alley. Google will be there in force, sponsoring the show, with a giant booth for AdWords and Google Analytics. Googlers will be headlining or participating in numerous sessions, and we're all looking forward to meeting interested users and hearing what you think about our products. Google Analytics has been given a 20% discount code: 2OG00 (two-oh-gee-zero-zero). Feel free to use it when you
register here.
Here are a few highlights:
-
Monday: Author and analytics/testing thought leader
Bryan Eisenberg will be at the networking lunch on Monday signing copies of his new book,
Always Be Testing. At 11:15am,
Bryan and
Brett Crosby will be speaking at the Pay Per Conversation session.
-
Tuesday:
Tom Leung and
Avinash Kaushik will host the "What's new with Google Analytics and Website Optimizer" session at 2:45pm. Brett will be on the Measuring Success panel at 4pm. Also, come try some
TCHO chocolate at the booth, compliments of Google Analytics. And, don't forget to
register for Google Dance!
-
Thursday: Tom Leung will speak at the Post-Click Marketing session at 1:30pm.
Be sure to drop by the booth. We'll be there to answer your questions and hand out a few t-shirts. We're looking forward to seeing you there!
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Team
Today we're excited to announce several improvements in the way sharing works in Reader. You've given us lots of feedback on the way our experimental sharing features work and we heard you loud and clear: you want more control over your sharing. We've been working hard to create a more flexible way to let you choose who to share with; you can now manage a Friends list within Reader, separate from your Gmail chat contacts.
To get started, you can choose to either continue sharing with all of your chat buddies or create a custom Friends list with those that you hand-select.
People that you add to the Friends list will be able to automatically see your shared items in Reader (remember, shared items always have a public URL).
We've also made it easy to manage who shares with you. When someone decides to share with you, you will get a notification and the ability to preview and subscribe to their shared items. At that time, you can also choose to share your items with them (or not).
We hope that this increases the flexibility and control you have over who you share with. We always love to hear your feedback as we continue to improve the sharing experience in Reader.
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