Google Data » Amanda https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:58:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 Better geographic choices for webmasters https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/better-geographic-choices-for-webmasters/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/better-geographic-choices-for-webmasters/#comments Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:09:00 +0000
Starting today Google Webmaster Tools helps you better control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level. The information you give us will help us determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improves our search results for geographic queries.

We currently only allow you to associate your site with a single country and location. If your site is relevant to an even more specific area, such as a particular state or region, feel free to tell us that. Or let us know if your site isn't relevant to any particular geographic location at all. If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we'll continue to make geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.

For example, if we wanted to associate www.google.com with Hungary:


But you don't want www.google.com/webmasters/tools" associated with any country...


This feature is restricted for sites with a country code top level domain, as we'll always associate that site with the country domain. (For example, google.ru will always be the version of Google associated with Russia.)


Note that in the same way that Google may show your business address if you register your brick-and-mortar business with the Google Local Business Center, we may show the information that you give us publicly.

This feature was largely initiated by your feedback, so thanks for the great suggestion. Google is always committed towards helping more sites and users get better and more relevant results. This is a new step as we continue to think about how to improve searches around the world.

We encourage you to tell us what you think in the Webmaster Tools section of our discussion group.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/better-geographic-choices-for-webmasters/feed/ 0 Las Vegas Pubcon 2006 https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/las-vegas-pubcon-2006/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/las-vegas-pubcon-2006/#comments Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:31:00 +0000 WebmasterWorld PubCon 2006! But instead of talking bets and odds, I'll be talking about how Google can help webmasters improve their sites. I love chatting with webmasters about all the work that goes into creating a great website. Several other Googlers will be there too, so if you have a burning question or just wanna talk about random stuff feel free to stop us and say hi. Besides the sessions, we'll be at the Google booth on Wednesday and Thursday, so come by and introduce yourself.

Here's the list of Google events at PubCon:

Tuesday 14

10:15 - 11:30 SEO and Big Search Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

1:30 - 2:45 PPC Search Advertising Programs Frederick Vallaeys, Senior Product Specialist, AdWords

2:45 - 4:00 PPC Tracking and Reconciliation Brett Crosby, Senior Manager, Google Analytics

Wednesday 15

10:15 - 11:30 Contextual Advertising Optimization Tom Pickett, Online Sales and Operations

11:35 - 12:50 Site Structure for Crawlability Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Duplicate Content Issues Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

5:30 - 7:30 Safe Bets From Google Cocktail party!

Thursday 16

11:35 - 12:50 Spider and DOS Defense Vanessa Fox, Product Manager, Google Webmaster Central

1:30 - 3:10 Interactive Site Reviews Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

3:30 - 5:00 Super Session Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

You can view this schedule on Google Calendar here:

Come to "Safe Bets From Google" on Wednesday 5:30-7:30pm -- it's a cocktail party where you can mingle with other webmasters and Googlers, learn about other Google products for webmasters, and in typical Google style enjoy some great food and drinks. I'll be there with some other engineers from our Seattle office. Don't miss it!
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/las-vegas-pubcon-2006/feed/ 0 Debugging blocked URLs https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/debugging-blocked-urls/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/debugging-blocked-urls/#comments Tue, 19 Sep 2006 23:36:00 +0000 blocked by robots.txt" errors, and I wanted to share the steps I take when debugging robots.txt problems:

A handy checklist for debugging a blocked URL

Let's assume you are looking at crawl errors for your website and notice a URL restricted by robots.txt that you weren't intending to block:
http://www.example.com/amanda.html URL restricted by robots.txt Sep 3, 2006

Check the robots.txt analysis tool
The first thing you should do is go to the robots.txt analysis tool for that site. Make sure you are looking at the correct site for that URL, paying attention that you are looking at the right protocol and subdomain. (Subdomains and protocols may have their own robots.txt file, so https://www.example.com/robots.txt may be different from http://example.com/robots.txt and may be different from http://amanda.example.com/robots.txt.) Paste the blocked URL into the "Test URLs against this robots.txt file" box. If the tool reports that it is blocked, you've found your problem. If the tool reports that it's allowed, we need to investigate further.

At the top of the robots.txt analysis tool, take a look at the HTTP status code. If we are reporting anything other than a 200 (Success) or a 404 (Not found) then we may not be able to reach your robots.txt file, which stops our crawling process. (Note that you can see the last time we downloaded your robots.txt file at the top of this tool. If you make changes to your file, check this date and time to see if your changes were made after our last download.)

Check for changes in your robots.txt file
If these look fine, you may want to check and see if your robots.txt file has changed since the error occurred by checking the date to see when your robots.txt file was last modified. If it was modified after the date given for the error in the crawl errors, it might be that someone has changed the file so that the new version no longer blocks this URL.

Check for redirects of the URL
If you can be certain that this URL isn't blocked, check to see if the URL redirects to another page. When Googlebot fetches a URL, it checks the robots.txt file to make sure it is allowed to access the URL. If the robots.txt file allows access to the URL, but the URL returns a redirect, Googlebot checks the robots.txt file again to see if the destination URL is accessible. If at any point Googlebot is redirected to a blocked URL, it reports that it could not get the content of the original URL because it was blocked by robots.txt.

Sometimes this behavior is easy to spot because a particular URL always redirects to another one. But sometimes this can be tricky to figure out. For instance:
  • Your site may not have a robots.txt file at all (and therefore, allows access to all pages), but a URL on the site may redirect to a different site, which does have a robots.txt file. In this case, you may see URLs blocked by robots.txt for your site (even though you don't have a robots.txt file).
  • Your site may prompt for registration after a certain number of page views. You may have the registration page blocked by a robots.txt file. In this case, the URL itself may not redirect, but if Googlebot triggers the registration prompt when accessing the URL, it will be redirected to the blocked registration page, and the original URL will be listed in the crawl errors page as blocked by robots.txt.

Ask for help
Finally, if you still can't pinpoint the problem, you might want to post on our forum for help. Be sure to include the URL that is blocked in your message. Sometimes its easier for other people to notice oversights you may have missed.

Good luck debugging! And by the way -- unrelated to robots.txt -- make sure that you don't have "noindex" meta tags at the top of your web pages; those also result in Google not showing a web site in our index.
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/debugging-blocked-urls/feed/ 0 Back from SES San Jose https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/back-from-ses-san-jose/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/back-from-ses-san-jose/#comments Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:59:00 +0000 Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last week!

I had a great time meeting people and talking about our new webmaster tools. I got to hear a lot of feedback about what webmasters liked, didn't like, and wanted to see in our Webmaster Central site. For those of you who couldn't make it or didn't find me at the conference, please feel free to post your comments and suggestions in our discussion group. I do want to hear about what you don't understand or what you want changed so I can make our webmaster tools as useful as possible.

Some of the highlights from the week:

This year, Danny Sullivan invited some of us from the team to "chat and chew" during a lunch hour panel discussion. Anyone interested in hearing about Google's webmaster tools was welcome to come and many did -- thanks for joining us! I loved showing off our product, answering questions, and getting feedback about what to work on next. Many people had already tried Sitemaps, but hadn't seen the new features like Preferred domain and full crawling errors.

One of the questions I heard more than once at the lunch was about how big a Sitemap can be, and how to use Sitemaps with very large websites. Since Google can handle all of your URLs, the goal of Sitemaps is to tell us about all of them. A Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs and should be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. But if you have more URLs than this, simply break them up into several smaller Sitemaps and tell us about them all. You can create a Sitemap Index file, which is just a list of all your Sitemaps, to make managing several Sitemaps a little easier.

While hanging out at the Google booth I got another interesting question: One site owner told me that his site is listed in Google, but its description in the search results wasn't exactly what he wanted. (We were using the description of his site listed in the Open Directory Project.) He asked how to remove this description from Google's search results. Vanessa Fox knew the answer! To specifically prevent Google from using the Open Directory for a page's title and description, use the following meta tag:
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP">

My favorite panel of the week was definitely Pimp My Site. The whole group was dressed to match the theme as they gave some great advice to webmasters. Dax Herrera, the coolest "pimp" up there (and a fantastic piano player), mentioned that a lot of sites don't explain their product clearly on each page. For instance, when pimping Flutter Fetti, there were many instances when all the site had to do was add the word "confetti" to the product description to make it clear to search engines and to users reaching the page exactly what a Flutter Fetti stick is.

Another site pimped was a Yahoo! Stores web site. Someone from the audience asked if the webmaster could set up a Google Sitemap for their store. As Rob Snell pointed out, it's very simple: Yahoo! Stores will create a Google Sitemap for your website automatically, and even verify your ownership of the site in our webmaster tools.

Finally, if you didn't attend the Google dance, you missed out! There were Googlers dancing, eating, and having a great time with all the conference attendees. Vanessa Fox represented my team at the Meet the Google Engineers hour that we held during the dance, and I heard Matt Cutts even starred in a music video! While demo-ing Webmaster Central over in the labs area, someone asked me about the ability to share site information across multiple accounts. We associate your site verification with your Google Account, and allow multiple accounts to verify ownership of a site independently. Each account has its own verification file or meta tag, and you can remove them at any time and re-verify your site to revoke verification of a user. This means that your marketing person, your techie, and your SEO consultant can each verify the same site with their own Google Account. And if you start managing a site that someone else used to manage, all you have to do is add that site to your account and verify site ownership. You don't need to transfer the account information from the person who previously managed it.

Thanks to everyone who visited and gave us feedback. It was great to meet you!
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