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Videos are one of the most common types of results on Google and we want to make sure that your videos get indexed. Today, we're also launching video support for schema.org. Schema.org is a joint effort between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Yandex and is now the recommended way to describe videos on the web. The markup is very simple and can be easily added to most websites.
Adding schema.org video markup is just like adding any other schema.org data. Simply define an i...
It’s a moment any site owner both looks forward to, and dreads: a huge surge in traffic to your site (yay!) can often cause your site to crash (boo!). Maybe you’ll create a piece of viral content, or get Slashdotted, or maybe Larry Page will get a tattoo and your site on tech tattoos will be suddenly in vogue.
Many people go online immediately after a noteworthy event—a political debate, the death of a celebrity, or a natural disaster—to get news and informatio...
Update on February 2, 2012: The new Google+ badge is now out of preview and available to all users on all sites.
When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we're adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose...
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:
The Sitemaps page displays details based on content-type. Now statistics from Web, Videos, Images and News are featured prominently. This lets you see how many items of each type w...
Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.
An example
Let’s say Nick searched for [bacon] and URLs from your site appeared in positions 3, 6, and 12. Jane also searched for [bacon] and URLs from your si...
One of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form – shopping and registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the goals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like our names and addresses on different sites across the web – a tedious task that causes many to give up and abandon the flow entirely.
Chrome’s Autofill and other form-filling pro...
In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ...
Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.
We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might no...
For all the developers who have expressed interest in getting programmatic access to the search queries data for their sites in Webmaster Tools, we've got some good news. You can now get access to your search queries data in CSV format using a open source Python script from the webmaster-tools-downloads project. Search queries data is not currently available via the Webmaster Tools API, which has been a common API user request that we're considering for the next API ...
As the team responsible for tens of thousands of Google’s informational web pages, the Webmaster Team is here to offer tips and advice based on their experiences as hands-on webmasters.
If you’ve never tested or analyzed usage of your website, ask yourself if you really know whether your site is useful for your target audience. If you’re unsure, why not find out? For example, did you know that on average users scroll down 5.9 times as often as they scroll up, meani...
When users come to Google, they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for, but they need help deciding which result might have the information that best suits their needs. So, the challenge for Google is to make it very clear to our users what content exists on a page in both a useful and concise manner. That’s why we have rich snippets.
Essentially, rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. Whether your site co...
Webmaster level: All
With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones. Today we are happy to announce that Googlebot-Mobile now crawls with a smartphone user-agent in addition to its previous feature phone user-agents. This is to increase our coverage of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.
Here are the main user-agent strings that Googlebo...
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)
With the latest improvements to the way authorship annotations look in search and the addition of authorship to Google News, authors have been really excited about getting more visibility, and users benefit from seeing the name, photo, and way to connect with the person who created the content.
Authors have also been giving us a lot of feedback on what else they'd like to see, so today we're introducing “Author Stats” in Webmast...
Webmaster level: All
Some webmasters on our forums ask about hosting-related issues affecting their sites. To help both hosting providers and webmasters recognize, diagnose, and fix such problems, we’d like to share with you some of the common problems we’ve seen and suggest how you can fix them.
Blocking of Googlebot crawling. This is a very common issue usually due to a misconfiguration in a firewall or DoS protection system and sometimes due to the content management system the site run...
Today we're going further with our support for multilingual content with improved handling for these two scenarios:
Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. Example: English webpages for Austral...
At Google, we help grow your audience by connecting you with new users. We introduced the +1 button so your site would stand out on search and your users could easily share your content on Google+. But, sometimes you want to join the conversation and post content directly to where people are sharing.
Today we’re introducing Google+ for Business, a collection of tools and products that help you grow your audience. At the core of this is Google+ Pages, your site’s ident...
As the web evolves, Google’s crawling and indexing capabilities also need to progress. We improved our indexing of Flash, built a more robust infrastructure called Caffeine, and we even started crawling forms where it makes sense. Now, especially with the growing popularity of JavaScript and, with it, AJAX, we’re finding more web pages requiring POST requests -- either for the entire content of the page or because the pages are missing information an...
Webmaster level: Advanced
A piece of content can often be reached via several URLs, not all of which may be on the same domain. A common example we’ve talked about over the years is having the same content available on more than one URL, an issue known as duplicate content. When we discover a group of pages with duplicate content, Google uses algorithms to select one representative URL for that content. A group of pages may contain URLs from the same site or from different sites. When the repr...
SSL encryption on the web has been growing by leaps and bounds. As part of our commitment to provide a more secure online experience, today we announced that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will become the default experience for signed in users on google.com. This change will be rolling out over the next few weeks.
What is the impact of this change for webmasters? Today, a web site accessed through organic search results on http://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see b...
Custom Search Engines (CSEs) enable you to create Google-powered customized search experiences for your sites. You can search over one or more sites, customize the look and feel to match your site, and even make money with AdSense for Search. Now it’s even easier to get started directly from Webmaster Tools.
If you’ve never created a CSE, just click on the “Custom Search” link in the Labs section and we’ll automatically create a default CSE that searches just your site....
Webmaster level: All
The TC Summit was a blast! As we wrote in our announcement post, we recently invited more than 250 Top Contributors from all over the world to California to thank them for being so awesome and to give them the opportunity to meet some of our forum guides, engineers and product managers in person.
Our colleagues Adrianne and Brenna already published a recap post on the Official Google Blog. As for us, the search folks at Google, there's not much left to say except that w...
Earlier this year we announced a limited pilot for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search queries data from Webmaster Tools. Thanks to valuable feedback from our pilot users, we’ve made several improvements and are pleased to announce that the following reports are now publicly available in the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics.
Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queriesLanding Pages: impr...
We consistently hear from webmasters that they have to prioritize their time. Some manage dozens or hundreds of clients’ sites; others run their own business and may only have an hour to spend on website maintenance in between managing finances and inventory. To help you prioritize your efforts, Webmaster Tools is introducing the idea of “site health,” and we’ve redesigned the Webmaster Tools home page to highlight your sites with health problems. This should allow you to ...
Much like rel=”canonical” acts a strong hint for duplicate content, you can now use the HTML link elements rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series. Throughout the web, a paginated series of content may take many shapes—it can be an article divided into several component pages, or a product category with items spread across several pages, or a forum thread divided into a sequence of URLs. Now...
User testing has taught us that searchers much prefer the view-all, single-page version of content over a component page containing only a portion of the same information with arbitrary page breaks (which cause the user to click “next” and load another URL).
Searchers often prefer the view-all vs. paginated content with arbitrary page breaks and worse latency.
Therefore, to improve the user experience, when we detect that a content series (e.g. pag...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
Today the White House announces a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and support for W3C's Do Not Track technology. The announcement includes: "In response to calls from the Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), leading Internet companies and online advertising networks are committing to use Do Not Track technology from the World Wide Web Consortium in most major web browsers to make it easier for users to control online tracking."
W3C is building consensus around global Web te...
The RDB2RDF Working Group has published two Candidate Recommendation documents that help to bring relational database information to the Semantic Web: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF. The former describes R2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the ma...
The Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of Clipboard API and events. This specification defines the common clipboard operations of cutting, copying and pasting, in such a way that they are exposed to Web Applications and can be adapted to provide advanced functionalities. Its goal is to provide for compatibility where possible with existing implementations. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity.
The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) has updated How to Make Presentations Accessible to All. This WAI resource helps you make presentations, meetings, training, conferences, etc. accessible to all of your potential audience, including people with disabilities and others. It covers planning, preparing slides, considerations during your presentation, providing accessible material, and other topics for conference organizers and presenters. Learn mor...
The Web Performance Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of Timing control for script-based animations. This document defines an API web page authors can use to write script-based animations where the user agent is in control of limiting the update rate of the animation. The user agent is in a better position to determine the ideal animation rate based on whether the page is currently in a foreground or background tab, what the current load on the CPU is, and so on. Using thi...
W3C launched today a new Privacy Interest Group, whose mission is to improve the support of privacy in Web standards by monitoring ongoing privacy issues that affect the Web, investigating potential areas for new privacy work, and providing guidelines and advice for addressing privacy in standards development. The group may consider issues such as online tracking; location, health and financial data; eGovernment initiatives; and online social networking and identity. Where appropriate, the In...
W3C announces today the opening of a new Russia Offices, as part of increasing inclusion and participation in W3C. The Office is hosted by the National Research University "Higher School of Economics" (HSE), founded in 1992. As one of Moscow's leading Universities, HSE will work with W3C to strengthen ties to both industry and research in Russia as well as HSE's many international academic and industry partners.
"I am happy to welcome W3C in Russia," said Victor Klintsov, Deputy Director of I...
The SOAP-JMS Binding Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of SOAP over Java Message Service 1.0. This document specifies how SOAP binds to a messaging system that supports the Java Message Service (JMS) [Java Message Service]. Binding is specified for both SOAP 1.1 and SOAP 1.2 using the SOAP 1.2 Protocol Binding Framework. This specification also describes how to use WSDL documents to indicate and control the use of this binding. Learn more about the Web Services Activity.
The Voice Browser Working Group has published a Working Draft of State Chart XML (SCXML): State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction. This document describes SCXML, or the "State Chart extensible Markup Language". SCXML provides a generic state-machine based execution environment based on CCXML and Harel State Tables. Learn more about the Voice Browser Activity.
The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Backgrounds and Borders Module Level 3 for the purpose of updating the previous Candidate Recommendation. This module of CSS contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to borders and backgrounds. The main extensions compared to level 2 are borders consisting of images, boxes with multiple backgrounds, boxes with rounded corners and boxes with shadows. All persons are encouraged to review the chan...
The XML Core Working Group has published a Group Note of XInclude 1.1 Requirement and Use Cases. This document outlines the requirements and use cases for to changes to XInclude: support for RFC 5147 and improved communication between the pre- and post-inclusion Infosets. Learn more about the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Activity.
W3C is pleased to announce that registration is open for a new W3C mobile Web course, "Mobile Web 2: Applications". Developed by the W3C/MobiWebApp team and taught by Robin Berjon, chair of the W3C Device APIs Working Group and recently elected as a TAG member, this mobile Web course gives developers all the tools and knowledge necessary to write mobile Web applications that can ship both online and in application stores, using today's advanced technologies. The 8-week course begins 12 Marc...
The Media Annotations Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. This document defines the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0. The term "Ontology" is used in its broadest possible definition: a core vocabulary. The intent of this vocabulary is to bridge the different descriptions of media resources, and provide a core set of descriptive properties. This document defines a core set of metadata properties for media resources, along with their mappings to...
The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group has published a Working Draft of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers. This document defines a set of APIs to represent streaming media, including audio and video, in JavaScript, to allow media to be sent over the network to another browser or device implementing the appropriate set of real-time protocols, and media received from another browser or device to be processed and displayed locally. This specification is being developed...
The Multimodal Interaction Working Group has published a Working Draft of EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language Version 1.1. This document is part of a set of specifications for multimodal systems, and provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input. Examples of interpretation of user input are a transcription into words of a raw signal, for instance derived from speech, pen or keystroke input, a set of attribute/value...
Posted by thogenhaven
Two weeks ago, Tom Critchlow suggested that we work to close the gap between inbound marketing and content marketing communities. It's time to build bridges again, this time between inbound marketing and research. In this post, you'll find research on participation patterns, how to spot high-value users, seeding content in a new community, how to bring new life to old content, and a little bit of gamification.
Some research is already being shared with the inbound co...
Posted by Dr. Pete
In the wake of Google’s Panda updates, there’s been a lot of fear regarding user metrics and how they impact SEO. Many people are afraid that “bad” signals in analytics data, especially high bounce rates and low time-on-site, could potentially harm their rankings.
I don’t think Google is tapping into analytics data directly (I’ll defend that later), and I don’t think they have to. There are two user metrics that both Google and Bing have direct access to: (1) SERP CTR, ...
Posted by jennita
Conferences are always a great way to get out and meet the SEOmoz community. Luckily we have SMX West coming up next week and quite a few Mozzers will be attending, speaking, live blogging and tweeting. We want to get a chance to meet as many of you as possible so I forced everyone to decide on a schedule so you’ll know where to find us!
Before I get into talking about where we’ll be, it’s probably best to first introduce the Mozzers so you know who to look for.
Keri Mo...Posted by randfish
I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the social graph eventually subsuming the "natural" results with those biased to what our friends ...
Posted by iPullRank
The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of in...
Posted by shirtsthatgo
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
I own and run ShirtsThatGo, which is a small ecommerce site running on the Volusion platform. I started the company about three years ago and have been learning everything myself. I have taken a particular interest in the marketing piece, especiall...
Posted by Tom Anthony
At Distilled's SearchLove conference in London back in October, Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. This has a few uses, such as customising which social buttons you show your user or just for recording how many of your users are logged in to Facebook and then using this to show your boss that you guys should really be interacting with your visitors ...
Posted by Anthony D. Nelson
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Howdy Mozzers,
My name is Anthony and I'm from Fargo, ND. First-time YouMozzer here. After reading this post, I hope you (in?)voluntarily scroll back up to the top to follow me on twitter (@anthonydnelson) and check out my blog Northside SEO...
Posted by randfish
Hey gang - short blog post on a topic our product and marketing teams have been noodling around with. As many of you know, we've got our Linkscape index, which is crawled, processed and served out on a monthly basis (there's a new index about every 30 days). We also have a newer datasource, Blogscape, aka Freshscape (which is currently undergoing some repairs in Labs) which crawls a few million "fresh" RSS feeds and indexes full content.
The goal of Linkscape is to prese...
Four easy ways to make sure your content gets in, or back in, to the Bing index.
URL/Domain submit - submit your domain to us if you have a new website. Submit URL feature inside Bing Webmaster Tools, under the Index tabReinclusion request support via out email support form RSS feed submission via our Sitemap Submit feature under the Crawl tab inside Bing WMT
Back in October we posted this idea and got great feedback from folks. Today we're posting a quick review video on the topic. It's 3 minutes from your day that we hope will help get you pointed on the right path to becoming a true authority and reaping the benefits.
Earlier this week, folks using their Bing Webmaster Tools would have noticed a new tool slipped into the mix. On the "Crawl" tab, you can now find a link to the Markup Validation Tool. This tool is a great way to understand if the added code is actually going to be readable, as intended. While the markup code being inaccurate will not cause your page to render any differently in most cases, having the syntax incorrect can affect our ability to use the data as you intend. Now you can easil...
Whether you've decided to move your website to a new domain or you're moving content within a current website, it's important to know how to protect the trust value your current content has with the engines. Over time, links get built, content ages and acquires trust. You don't want to walk away from that if you can help it. Why start over when most of that value can be transferred to the content's new location?
The solution to your problem is the 301 redirect. This redirect is referred t...
It's conference season again, and we're looking forward to see folks at the shows again this year!
If you're planning to attend either the SMX West event, or the SES NY event, here are discount codes for each event.
SMX West : SMX10Bing will snag you a 10% discount
SES NY : 20Bing will snag you 20% off
If you want to hear what we have to say, we encourage you to join us at the following sessions.
SMX West - booth #406
Feb. 28 - 9AM - 10:15AM
Getting Personal, Part 1: How Google & Bing Person...
As you go about working on your websites, optimizing things and managing your social media programs, it’s easy to lose track of information, or overlook something. In this post we’ll take a look at some things you want to avoid doing. It may also be worth taking a look through your site and your programs to make sure you’re not doing any of these things moving forward.
Cloaking
Cloaking is the process where you determine who the visitor is coming to your website, then show content depending...
Ever wonder what’s behind the merging of social signals into search? Not too long ago, all SEOs had to worry about were the old standbys: title tags, links, content, etc. Today, and in the future, social signals play a larger part in ranking, so what’s an SEO to do?
Why it’s happening
This is fairly easy to explain. While most folks like to point to the rise of Facebook and Twitter (and other social sources) and say their growth has forced search to integrate social signals, the deeper ans...
2011 is almost in the history books, so now seems like a great time to take a look back over the year and remember what we’ve been up to here at Bing Webmaster Tools. First hand it’s easy to see how quickly a year can slip by. Being inside a search engine is an amazing place, and this year saw solid growth for our Webmaster program. We covered a lot of ground attending conferences all around the US, met a ton of folks face to face and brought an entirely new depth to our Webmaster tools. ...
When building or managing a website, it almost goes without saying that you need to be in control. You need to be able to make changes to certain elements if you home to optimize the website properly. Let’s take a look at nine items you should be sure are firmly within your control when you start optimizing a website. And we’re not just talking search engine optimization here. Think broader than that. Think of truly building a better, more useful website, for both the engines and your visi...
Malware. Just mention the word and watch people cringe in fear. No one likes it and most seek to even avoid saying the word out loud, lest they be stricken by something nefarious. The topic should not be taken lightly, as getting infected with malware can have dire consequences. From your brand being tarnished to identity theft, nothing involving malware is a joke.
Which is why it’s taken so seriously by the search engines.
In fact, you’ll notice, inside your Bing Webmaster Tools account,...
We’ve spent the better part of a year now hitting the shows, running surveys and holding focus groups. Along with the information we captured direct from the webmaster community through those sources, there is the daily flow of inbound suggestions and, yes, items needing to be fixed, that we can draw insights from. Today we’re rolling out the latest features and updates, most of which come directly from user feedback. You spoke, we listened, worked and are now delivering.
Continuing our co...
Everyone wants to be an authority. Everyone wants to be acknowledged for their, well, knowledge. Everyone wants the increased ranking and traffic that comes when an engine sees you as an authoritative resource. But so few actually plan a path to success, thinking instead that blasting everything they find across Twitter and auto-following everyone will boost their numbers and get them recognized as an authority.
Let’s take a look at what it really takes, shall we. And when we’re done here...
Dictionary.com shares this meaning of “syndication” (see #8) when used as a verb: to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places: Her column is syndicated in 120 papers.
In most cases, being syndicated is seen as a positive thing. You’ve hit the big time, you’re in demand, people what to hear from you. All good signs you’ve made it. Naturally syndicated content on the Internet, when exposed to search, c...
Almost every website will reach a point when they need to implement redirects. Whether it’s because you moved content around, or you’re moving to a new domain, redirects can help you keep the traffic flowing, pass the value URLs have been assigned by the engines and help keep bookmarks working for your loyal visitors.
You don’t need to fear implementing redirects, but you should understand which is best to use and their limitations. Let’s take a look at the most common redirects.
The 301 re...
With social playing such an important role today in your overall online marketing efforts, it’s important to get things right the first time. As the old saying goes, first impressions matter. Getting a do-over in today’s face-paced online business environment is tough, especially when everything you do is recorded, archived and essentially available to anyone willing to search almost forever.
Now you might be tempted to blast straight ahead in your quest to grow followers and friends. Mayb...
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