Google Webmaster Central Blog

QuickSprout is also a good resource, but their advice like Moz is mostly anecdotal (we tried this and it appears to work) mixed with what Google says. http://www.quicksprout.com/university/ But the best resource is Google and Matt Cutts in particular: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/ http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//webmaster…

Google can and does crawl Javascript driven web apps. Last year they even deprecated the AJAX crawling scheme that they used to recommend on the basis that they can now crawl web apps: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/deprecating-our-…

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2015/10/deprecating-our-ajax… >tl;dr: We are no longer recommending the AJAX crawling proposal we made back in 2009. Google is now saying they will probably be able to just index your Angular app without any extra effort on your side.

Best to read this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/mdudas/status/638792939842469893 This only applies to page covering ads for app installs. Not other interstitials. In fact Google recently did a study showing how 69% of people leave the page when faced with an interstitial [1], yet they also recently released an updated format for their own Google overlay ad [2] (although this is for apps). They don't want to lose web/search traffic to apps, but they make plenty of money running these formats themselves. A good summary of the various conflicts of interest is here [3]. 1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/google-case-study-o… 2. http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/08/beautiful-new-designs-for-full-scr… 3. http://searchengineland.com/google-goes-app-interstitial-protecting-co…

I'd love to hear about that experiment in more detail. People often cite Google's Understanding web pages better[1] as evidence that it's now OK to render everything with JS, but this is the first time I've seen someone publish actual evidence. [1]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-p…

It's still true that SPAs suffer from slow startup time. Google may be able to index SPAs but they can't do it nearly as effectively as static HTML - which is why still recommend you use progressive enhancement rather than going JavaScript-only: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-techni…

I'd like to see them gradually downgrade all non-PFS connections. Non-PFS connections should be considered medium-to-highly vulnerable, and shouldn't receive a green icon in browsers. Unfortunately, they've just recommended everyone to use "2048-bit keys" when they announced the HTTPS Google ranking policy. A lot of developers won't understand the difference between a 2048-bit RSA key and a 256-bit ECC key, so they'll just pick RSA, since "Google said 2048-bit keys!". Sooo...maybe this policy will come in 10 years. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-si…

The main use for robots.txt is to prevent crawling of infinite URL spaces: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.br/2008/08/to-infinity-and-… Alongside tagging links to such resources with nofollow.

Great exposé, I think the author uses "Phineus Upham" and nickname so prominently in the hopes of using the article to hit back in poor Phin's reputation management. Given enough buzz, soon the article will come up for "Phineus Upham" too. The online "arms race" between Google and those trying to game Google seems to me to be speeding up. Google is making a lot of reactionary moves like the "Panda"[1] updates and its "Disavow Links Tool"[2] after articles like this one expose tactics or businesses successfully gaming the results. [1] http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/26/business/la-fi-google-search-2… [2]http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disav…

While 5 million pages is a very big number (that probably requires a lot more planning) this might be the Google document you are looking for: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83… Moving your site If you're planning on moving your site to a new domain, here are some tips that will help you retain your site's ranking in Google's search results. Edit: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-to-a-new-web-host/ (2005) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2008/04/best-practices-when-… (2008)

Google does view URLs with/without slashes differently, but since Google follows 301 redirects and they represent permanent moves, you should be fine. For more information, see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-…

A correction: Google has eliminated the April 29 deadline and (for now) again seems to be suggesting GV hosting/links will work indefinitely: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/update-on-google-vi… Also, the example of a great video that will be disappearing was actually copied over to YouTube in 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtFroEJN1nI I suspect Google's own TechTalk series will remain accessible via Google's preferred video portal no matter what happens to GV.

Our quality guidelines are here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe… We've talked a lot about why buying/selling links that pass PageRank violates our guidelines. The best starting point is probably this blog post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-b…

I don't quite understand why this article doesn't recommend using <link rel="canonical" href="..."> as described at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canoni… (resp. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate… Such an easy solution to this problem.

I am surprised no one has mentioned this yet: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/googles-seo-report-… Google recently published an internal SEO audit. The report is more or less a blueprint of what you should follow on an on-site level with your own site and I would have to imagine that was the intent.

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog: "Try to use Flash only where it is needed... this makes you[r] site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA." http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.… I can think of a few good examples of web sites which use Flash effectively, e.g. the BBC 'Get Cooking' site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/get_cooking/ However, Flash normally seems to be used for displaying pointless, obnoxious splash screens which add no value for the user.

A couple of things: 1) webtorrent [1] will be used to build the next generation of The Pirate Bay. Media companies will have to realize that suing teens for infringing copyright is not an option, since participating in file sharing is no longer a deliberate act when WebRTC is enabled by default. 2) io.js [2] will heavily influence the future of Node. 3) Angular 2.0 will probably be released at the end of the year [reference?]. People might start establishing an Angular fork (similar to what happened in the Node world). 4) Full stack Google: Angular, Dart and Go. 5) We'll find out if there is a tech bubble [3]. 6) One of the following will happen: 1) Developers might tend to use bigger and bigger frameworks, or 2) substack-like extreme modularization (current situation in the npm-world). 7) People will move away from native app development. [4] 8) More frameworks will evolve to "reinvent" the DOM. DOM updates will still be expensive as hell. React was just the beginning. 9) Everything will be a SPA. Now that Google executes JavaScript [5], there is no more reason to render websites on the server. (Unless you're using HN, where 50% of the users are using Lynx). [1] https://github.com/feross/webtorrent [2] https://github.com/iojs/io.js [3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/17/technology-bubble-ub… [4] Disclaimer: I work for famo.us. These are my own thoughts and might not express the thoughts of the company I'm working for. [5]…

You raise a good point though, SSL/TLS Certs are trying to deal with two separate problems: 1. Over the wire encryption (which this handles) 2. As a bad, but the best we've got site identification system for stopping phishing mechanism. Currently, for even the cheapest certs (domain+email validated) - the CAs will reject SSL cert requests for anything that might be a phishing target. Detecting "wellsfargo.com" is pretty easy, where it gets tricky is things like "wellsforgo.com", "wellsfàrgo.com" etc. Which if I'm looking at this right will just sail through with LetsEncrypt. I suspect we're going to actually end up with two tiers of SSL certs as the browser makers have started to really de-emphasize domain validated certs [1] like this vs the Extended Validation (really expensive) certs, to the point where in most cases now having a domain cert does not know green (and maybe doesn't even show a lock) at all. As a side note, Google had announced that they were going to start using SSL as a ranking signal [2] (sites with SSL would get a slight bump in rankings), from this perspective the "high" cost of a cert was actually a feature as it made life much more expensive on blackhat SEOs who routinely are setting up hundreds of sites. 1 - Screenshots: https://www.expeditedssl.com/pages/visual-security-browser-ssl-icons-a… 2 - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-si…

I have a website 5000best.com/tools with a ranking of web tools, and I received so far about 40-50 link removal requests. I rejected them all. First I answered to those people, later I stopped answering, because that's waste of my time. The reason of all that nonsense seems to be this article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notifications-a… and notifications in Google Webmaster Tools that tell people that spammy links point to their website, but do not tell them specifically which links Google does not like. I understand that Google uses link data mainly to estimate popularity of a website. I don't understand why so large company, a global monopoly with so large revenue, and so much data gathered, can't figure out which sites are more popular than others without wasting webmasters' time. What's so difficult about that task? Why shift any work burden on website owners? If this task is too difficult, maybe it's time to support the competition, or create a serious competition. Maybe Google does not deserve to be the largest search engine and get all the profits.

Syndication is an old term that just means running the same article in multiple outlets. For example, George Will's column is syndicated across a ton of different newspapers. The National Board of Realtors syndicates content through hundreds of local publications by providing articles for free. For SEO purposes it's a little different and not always easy to manage. This is a good article that I've found that talks about some of the practical issues that can pop up: http://smepals.com/small-business-seo/how-content-syndication-can-be-d… Yeah, title is a little negative, but it's still got some useful details on how to manage it intelligently. Not everyone who will syndicate or scrape your stuff will be willing to follow the rules. A lot of people will not even understand what you're asking them to do, so you'll have to spell it out for them as didactically as possible. If you can get them to follow the rules, it can be an effective way to 'borrow' the traffic and link equity for a certain page or post. More on rel=canonical from Google: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-w… And a Moz discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/syndication-link-back-vs-rel-canonical

You realize Google offers an official guide to SEO right[1]? Why would they offer a guide for 'tricking search engines into preferring your content'? The answer? They aren't offering a guide for tricking anything, they're offering a guide about how to properly structure your site so that it is easily crawlable and identifiable by their spiders so searchers can query for what you have to offer. The core purpose of SEO is to do exactly what you said here: "The whole premise of the open web is that natural selection would allow rich information to be filtered through because it is good." It's called Search Engine OPTIMIZATION for a reason. The goal is to build very well structured sites by following specific sets of best practices. Sure, there are lots of spammers out there. But just like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't necessarily a square, a spammer is an SEO but an SEO isn't necessarily a spammer. Stop spewing FUD. 1. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter…

1) stop "reading up" on SEO on the internet. really. just stop it. now. 80% of everything written about SEO on the internet is bullshit (this means 8 out of the 10 articles you have read reduce your knowledge about SEO (and the web in general)) 2) never ever mention the word page rank again. page-rank is thought-cancer (and does not mean what you think it means) 3) your site is indexed via your IP address http://173.254.8.113/, this site ranks for your obscure long tail search term. make a canonical tag to your main domain. then our site will rank for your obscure long tail search term. to understand canonical tags go to http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2010/09/seo-starter-guide-up… download the PDF and read it front to cover. 4) if you want to understand SEO, read a book http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Marketing-Inc-Companys/dp/01318529… last but not least: stop worrying and complaining about scrapper sites. they are here to stay. try to make the best shop website around. and as a side note: with a high probability your blogpost will - from now on - rank for "high quality Bitcoin hat" as it reached the front page of HN (it will get distributed a lot, via scrappers, HN web-app-websites, ...) and the blog post has - compared to your shop start page and your shop page - textual content.

Hello all I'm the author of this post. There are some suggestions for Javascript-based alternatives. A well-implemented Javascript overlay for the blackout message is a valid option, but keep in mind the following when thinking about it: 1. Googlebot does run some types of Javascript. We blogged about this recently: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/11/get-post-and-safely… This means that the content included via Javascript may be indexed until the next time we crawl and process the page and find it's gone. 2. Consider how the JS will affect your pages' instant previews. Overlays are likely to show up in the previews, and these will take some time to update as we re-generate the previews. 3. Consider your users. Some webmasters are suggesting keeping the blackout overlay visible without any means of hiding it. That may not be the best user experience, and may be annoying to your non-US based users. I'm happy to answer any other questions. Thanks, Pierre

The author is selling google way short here: "It's a little scary to think that one company (~85% of the world population searches the web with Google) can make such a trifle assumption and make a simple, clear cut spec like this virtually unusable." In short, I believe the author is making an unfounded and probably wrong assumption when he says that Google is making an assumption. It seems to me from reading Google's blog post on the subject (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-rel… that they're basing their behavior on what they believe to be preferential to their users based on the data they've collected. Here's an example: "Because view-all pages are most commonly preferred by searchers, we do our best to surface this version..." They don't say "we are assuming view-all pages are preferred," they actually know that they are. It's true that Google's post doesn't say something similar about why they choose to surface the first page in a sequence, but I think their reputation suggests that they have numbers to support the idea. In any case, I wouldn't assume that their behavior is based on an assumption.

tl;dr: Yes they are indexed separately, and yes it's up to site owner to decide which content may be indexed for Google News -- via proper META tags and robots.txt. There is an important difference in UI between Google Web Search and Google News: the Web Search presents a very short snippet of text and link, while Google News presents a bit more of the news content. Effectively, Web Search directs viewers straight to the original website, while News lets them just browse Google News, sending less traffic to the original website. [1] Which means Google News may provide less ad revenue to original website -- probably the crux of the problem here. To handle that, Google provides two different bots: one with user agent `Googlebot', the other with `Googlebot-News'. If a website wants its content only in Web Search, and not in News, it's supposed to return proper /robots.txt -- and that does the trick. Way quicker and cheaper than any lawsuit! http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-user-agent-for-… ---- [1] but hey, less is more! whoever makes it to the original site via Google News has clearly show elevated interest in the news piece, and thus should be worth more to ad providers.

I'm the guy whose site this is all about - iPadInsight.com. I only used that specific search in the forum thread because I discovered that was the single point on which the Adwords reviewer had judged that my site didn't produce original content. I sent back the results of the same search showing that links were either from legit aggregator sites (like alltop.com) linking back to my original review, or from a number of scraper sites that rip my content. Even when the review was overturned for Adwords I was told it would leave a black mark against my site because it had already been marked that way. Great system. Soon after all that hassle, my site suddenly lost 60% of its traffic. From what I can gather, mine is one of the quality sites that produce original content that has been mistakenly penalized in the Panda / Farmer / Whichever Other updates. Among the reasons I say my site is a quality site that produces original content, in accordance with this post at the Google Webmaster Central Blog (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-bu… and with all the logic I can apply to the subject, are: -- The site contains over 1,700 posts published in the last 15 months. I wrote around 1,550 of them myself. The remainder are written by three other occasional authors, who are colleagues and friends of mine. There's no 'outsourcing' of content creation or anything of that ilk. -- I spend tons of hours every day researching and…

Hi there, I realize neither this comment nor the one on Nick's blog from my Google colleague Greg are authenticated, so you'll just have to trust me that I'm me :). We do often remove entire domains from our index when there's evidence of hacking and/or malware... not to be mean, but rather to protect both visitors to that site and the site owner (from angry visitors). We can't be sure that the hacked links aren't or won't soon become particularly malicious (e.g., phishing sites), nor can we be certain that the server hasn't been or won't soon be more substantially compromised (with drive-by malware installs, etc.), so we fall on the side of caution. We do make a good faith effort to contact the webmasters affected... - Through e-mail addresses we believe to belong to that webmaster. - Via our free Webmaster Tools service, where webmasters can sign up and opt to get e-mails from Google on just such occasions as this. For more info, you can check out our most recent blog post on this topic: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/best-practices-agai… Hope this helps! Believe me, we want good content back in our index as soon as possible, too :)

Being ranked #1 in a Google search for 'calendar' does mean a lot. Also, let's say they are penalizing themselves, but the penalty isn't enough to change their ranking. Why, then, would they claim that they are making this change because it's better for users to not have these ads but to still run these ads themselves? > Our analysis shows that it is not a good search experience and can be frustrating for users because they are expecting to see the content of the Web page. https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/09/mobile-friendly-we… This would imply that they know the experience is bad for users, they know that the penalty won't hurt their ranking, and so they will continue to show the bad experience regardless? That's just as bad as them not penalizing themselves for the full page ad.

numerous other robots don't go there http://web.archive.org/web/20160119113309/http://cdmedia.github.io/cms… view source, that's what archive.org_bot is referencing eg. no content whatsoever if/when this site die, when you will browse the link above, you will see a blank page I would even say that on web.archive.org the effect is even more vicious, if you don't know any better, because you see the page archived you think it is indeed archived when in fact it's not but don't despair, there are other way to have the exact same result for your SEO tell me how it is different than rendering the whole page as Flash SWF file ? GoogleBot can read/parse SWF and even understand when dynamic text/xml is loaded https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2008/06/improved-flash-inde… since 2008