One of the things I'm thinking about in 2009 is how Google can be even more transparent and communicate more. That led me to a personal goal for 2009: if I give a substantial conference presentation (not just a question and answer session), I'd like to digitize the talk so that people who couldn't attend the conference can still watch the presentation.
In that spirit, here's a belated holiday present. In November 2008 I spoke on a panel about "Preventing Virtual Blight" at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. A few weeks later I ended up recreating the talk at the Googleplex and we recorded the video. In fact, this is a "director's cut" because I could take a little more time for the presentation. Here's the video of the presentation:
And if you'd like to follow along at home, I'll include the actual presentation as well:
You can also access the presentation directly. By the way thanks to Wysz for recording this not just on a shoestring budget but for free. I think we've got another video ready to go pretty soon, too.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Introducing the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel
In his State of the Index presentation, Matt Cutts said that one of the things to look for from Google in 2009 is continued communication with webmasters. On the Webmaster Central team, we've found that using video is a great way to reach people. We've shown step-by-step instructions on how to use features of Webmaster Tools, shared our presentations with folks who were unable to make it to conferences, and even taken you through a day in the life of our very own Maile Ohye as she meets with many Googlers involved in webmaster support.
We plan on releasing more videos like these in the future, so we've opened up our own channel on YouTube to host webmaster-related videos. Our first video is already up, and we'll have more to share with you soon. If you want to be the first to know when we release something new, you can subscribe to us using your YouTube account, or grab this RSS feed if you'd like to keep track in your feed reader. Please let us know how you like the channel, and use the comments in this post to share your ideas for future videos.
And while we'll all do our best to make sure Matt Cutts understands that Rick Rolling is so last year, be careful where you click on April 1st.
We plan on releasing more videos like these in the future, so we've opened up our own channel on YouTube to host webmaster-related videos. Our first video is already up, and we'll have more to share with you soon. If you want to be the first to know when we release something new, you can subscribe to us using your YouTube account, or grab this RSS feed if you'd like to keep track in your feed reader. Please let us know how you like the channel, and use the comments in this post to share your ideas for future videos.
And while we'll all do our best to make sure Matt Cutts understands that Rick Rolling is so last year, be careful where you click on April 1st.
Canonical Link Element: presentation from SMX West
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 6:50 AM
A little while ago, Google and other search engines announced support for a canonical link element that can help site owners with duplicate content issues. I recreated my presentation from SMX West and you can watch it below:You can access the slides directly or follow along here:
By the way, Ask just announced that they will support the canonical link element. Read all about it in the Ask.com blog entry.
Thanks again to Wysz for turning this into a great video.
Thanks again to Wysz for turning this into a great video.
In fact, you might not have seen it, but we recently created a webmaster videos channel on YouTube. If you're interested, you can watch the new webmaster channel. If you subscribe to that channel, you'll always find out about new webmaster-related videos from Google.
Google Webmaster Help Forums in more languages
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 10:48 AM
Traditionally when we launch a new communication channel, we also give the shareholders a chance to introduce themselves. We did so when we opened webmaster help communities for European webmasters almost two years ago, and also more than a year ago, when we were able to expand and add groups in three more languages. Last December we were very happy to announce the re-launch of two of our Help Forums in a new and cool look and feel.Today, we're happy to announce that we keep on increasing the global dialogue with webmasters, opening an Arabic and a Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help Forum. Furthermore, we would like to highlight the support we offer in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While we've offered support to Chinese webmasters for a little more than a year, the Japanese and Korean forums are only a few weeks old. Keeping with tradition, the guides monitoring our new forums would like to introduce themselves to the global webmaster family:
Arabic Webmaster Help Forum
مرحبا! My name is Adel and I'll be monitoring the Arabic Webmaster Help Forum. I'm originally from Beirut, Lebanon. After finishing computer science studies, I joined Google, some 18 months ago.
Besides working on search quality in Arabic and building a community on our forum, I enjoy traveling and listening to really loud heavy metal music; sometimes I get to do both at the same time! ;-)
I am looking forward to a lot of questions regarding Arabic Google Search and of course ranking and indexing issues on your sites to come. I hope I'll see you there soon!
- Adel
Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help ForumZdravím! I am Marcel, the Google Guide on the Czech/Slovak Webmaster Help Forum. I am originally from Slovakia. After graduating in New Media and Industrial Design, it took me some time and traveling around the globe before moving to Dublin and eventually joining Google some 3 years ago.
Ever since, I've been working in different teams. I was lucky to be part of the AdSense team where I participated in launching AdSense for Content for Czech and Slovak. Since my transition to Search Quality, I enjoy working on improving the quality of our natural search results in Czech, Slovak, and Polish.
Besides my work I have a few more passions, such as listening to live music in Irish pubs, challenging my colleagues in occasional Soulcalibur skirmishes on Playstation and testing burger places all over the world :-) If you want to discuss any of these topics or maybe something about your sites, please join the community. I am looking forward to meeting you there :-)
- Marcel
Chinese Webmaster Help Forum你 好! Hi from the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum team! The Chinese Webmaster Help Forum has received great support from webmasters since its launch in March 2008. In March 2009, the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum moved to a new system with many more user-friendly features for better information sharing. It has become a good platform for webmasters to share their knowledge of Google search and Webmaster Tools and to communicate with Google.
The Chinese Forum now has 6 Google Guides: Xiang (降龙十巴掌), Eric (趙錢孫李), Marina (小馬過河), Chris (城镇), Hyson (草帽路飞), and Fa (法人戴表). We are from many different provinces of mainland China. When not spending time in the forum, we enjoy playing ping-pong and foosball in the office. A few of us are huge video game fans. You may learn more about us when you participate in the forum :)
A big thank you to everyone who has taken part in forum discussions! We hope to see both familiar faces and newcomers join in the Chinese Webmaster Help Forum!
- Xiang (降龙十巴掌), Eric (趙錢孫李), Marina (小馬過河), Chris (城镇), Hyson (草帽路飞), and Fa (法人戴表)
Japanese Webmaster Help Forum
こんにちは! Hello from the Japanese Webmaster Help Forum team! Our names are Nao ( なお ), Kaede ( 楓 ), Haru ( ハル ), and Kyotaro. We are the four guides working in Google Search Quality for Japanese. We've just launched our forum on March 6th.
All of us were born in Japan and grew up here. Nao has also lived in Greece, the Netherlands, and New York. Haru is from the west side of Japan, which is known for its talkative culture and traditional Japanese comedy. Maybe you will read Haru's unique communication on our forum :)
As for our interests, we love eating and drinking! Between posting on the forum, we enjoy Google's excellent lunches and sweets a lot. After working, of course, we sometimes go out for a drink with our team members :) Kaede knows all the nice bars in Tokyo.
Nao and Kyotaro love Sumo wrestling. We've watched two tournaments this year with Googlers from other locations. Haru, of course, loves watching comedies!
We are really excited and happy to see many users joining our forum and sharing tips with each other. Looking forward to seeing you there!
- Nao ( なお ), Kaede ( 楓 ), Haru ( ハル ), and Kyotaro
Korean Webmaster Help Forum안 녕하세요! Hello everyone, my name is Joowon and I work in Google Search Quality for Korean. I was born in Germany and lived in Korea for a few years before moving to Hawaii, California and New York to attend high school and college. After all that traveling, I'm only fluent in Korean and English, with a bit of proficiency in Japanese. Some of the interests I've developed over the years are design, wine, cooking, yoga, and sustainability issues.
Currently I'm back in Seoul and enjoying the dynamic atmosphere here, with lots of interesting people and great food. The Korean Webmaster Help Forum was launched only a few weeks ago, and I'm very much looking forward to talking to all of you. See you in the forum!
- Joowon
Hello world! ;) I am Andrew and I am part of the Search Quality team in Seoul. I grew up in a port city in the southern part of Korea. Ironically, I don't eat seafood because it looks scary to me :( Many of my friends and colleagues love to make jokes about that, but I still don't eat any seafood yet. Playing drums, traveling and photography are my main interests. Currently I'm a drummer of "Spring Fingers", the first band of Google Korea, and we'll have our first concert at the end of April!
I love playing around with web technologies/APIs and find it very exciting to exchange information and ideas on the web. The Korean Webmaster Help Forum was recently launched and I hope to see you there!
- Andrew
If you're curious about our Webmaster Help Forums in other languages, please feel free to peak in. Here's a list of our currently monitored Webmaster Help Forums: Arabic, Chinese, Czech/Slovak, Dutch, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
'Latest software version' notifications for your site
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 9:30 AM
Webmaster level: AllOne of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on.
This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website. For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded. There are a few reasons a webmaster might not upgrade to the newer version and one of the reasons could be that they just don't know a new version exists. This is where we think we can help. We hope to let webmasters know about new versions of their software by sending them a message via Webmaster Tools. This way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they would like to upgrade.
One of the ways we identify sites to notify is by parsing source code of web pages that we crawl. For example, WordPress and other CMS applications include a generator meta tag that specifies the version number. This has proven to be tremendously helpful in our efforts to notify webmasters. So if you're a software developer, and would like us to help you notify your users about newer versions of your software, a great way to start would be to include a generator meta tag that tells the version number of your software. If you're a plugin or a widget developer, including a version number in the source you provide to your users is a great way to help too.
We've seen divided opinions over time about whether it's a good security practice to include a version number in source code, because it lets hackers or worm writers know that the website might be vulnerable to a particular type of exploit. But as Matt Mullenweg pointed out, "Where [a worm writer's] 1.0 might have checked for version numbers, 2.0 just tests [a website's] capabilities...". Meanwhile, the advantage of a version number is that it can help alert site owners when they need to update their site. In the end, we tend to think that including a version number can do more good than harm.
We plan to begin sending out the first of these messages soon and hope that webmasters find them useful! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment here.
One million YouTube views!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 at 12:34 PM
Earlier this year, we launched our very own Webmaster Central channel on YouTube. Just today, we saw our total video views exceed one million! On the road to this milestone, we uploaded 154 videos, for a total of nearly 11 hours of webmaster-focused media. These videos have brought you conference presentations, updates on tools for webmasters, general tips, and of course answers to your "Grab bag" questions for Matt Cutts.To celebrate our one million views, we're sharing a fun video with you in which Matt Cutts shows us what happened when he lost a bet with his team:
We're also pleased to announce that we've added captions to all of our videos and plan to do so for our future videos as well. Thank you to everyone who has watched, shared, and commented on our videos. We look forward to the next million views!
Spanish Site Clinic now live
Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 6:09 AM
The Google Webmaster Central blog in Spanish has launched a Site Clinic especially for the Spanish-speaking market. We're offering to analyze a series of websites in order to share some best practices with our community using real web sites. The plan is to offer constructive advice on accessibility and improvements that can lead to better visibility in Google's search results.
Posted by Esperanza, Search Quality Team
Webmaster Central YouTube update for July 6th - 10th
Monday, July 13, 2009 at 5:55 PM
Want to see what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Check out the answers to the latest Grab Bag questions:
Below is Matt's clarification about Google's use of the meta description tag:
Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.
GENERIC CIALIS on my website? I think my site has been hacked!
Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:23 AM
How to use "Fetch as Googlebot", part 1Webmaster level: Intermediate
Has your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results? Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques? Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party "hacks" a website: they penetrate the security of a site and insert undesirable content. Sophisticated attackers can camouflage this spammy or dangerous content so that it doesn't appear for normal users, and appears only to Googlebot, which could negatively impact your site in Google's results.
In such cases it used to be very difficult to detect the problem, because the site would appear normal in the eyes of the user. It may be possible that only requests with a User-agent: of Googlebot and coming from Googlebot's IP could see the hidden content. But that's over: with Fetch as Googlebot, the new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools, you can see exactly what Googlebot is seeing, and avoid any kind of cloaking problems. We'll show you how:
Let's imagine that Bob, the administrator of www.example.com, is searching for his site but he finds this instead:
That's strange, because when he looks at the source code of www.example.com, it looks fine:
With much surprise Bob may receive a notice from Google warning him that his site is not complying with Google's quality guidelines. Fortunately he has his site registered with Webmaster Tools, let's see how he can check what Googlebot sees:
First Bob logs into Webmaster Tools and selects www.example.com. The Fetch as Googlebot feature will be at the bottom of the navigation menu, in the Labs section:
The page will contain a field where you can insert the URL to fetch. It can also be left blank to fetch the homepage.
Bob can simply click Fetch and wait a few seconds. After refreshing the page, he can see the status of the fetch request. If it succeeds, he can click on the "Success" link...
...and that will show the details, with the content of the fetched page:
Aha! There's the spammy content! Now Bob can be certain that www.example.com has been hacked.
Confirming that the website has been hacked (and perhaps is still hacked) is an important step. It is, however, only the beginning. For more information, we strongly suggest getting help from your server administrator or hoster and reading our previous blog posts on the subject of hacked sites:
- My site's been hacked - now what?
- A quick security checklist for webmasters
- Message center warnings for hackable sites
- Best practices against hacking
If you have any questions about how to use the Fetch as Googlebot feature, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum. If you feel that your website might be hacked but are having problems resolving it, you might want to ask the experts in our "Malware and Hacked sites" category.
Get your website ready for the holidays: Webmasters - make your list and check it twice!
Are the holidays an important season for your website or online business? We think so! And to help make sure you're in good shape, we wanted to invite you to our Holiday Webmaster Webinar.
This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!
Topic: Holiday Webmaster Webinar
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Meeting Number: 574 659 815
Meeting Password: webmaster
Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.
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To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)
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1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click "Join Now".
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To join the teleconference only
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Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
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For assistance
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".
This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!
Topic: Holiday Webmaster Webinar
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Meeting Number: 574 659 815
Meeting Password: webmaster
Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.
-------------------------------------------------------
To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click "Join Now".
-------------------------------------------------------
To join the teleconference only
-------------------------------------------------------
Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------
For assistance
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".
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