Google Data » Chark https://googledata.org Everything Google: News, Products, Services, Content, Culture Fri, 10 Apr 2015 22:28:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz? https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-did-you-do-on-the-webmaster-quiz/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-did-you-do-on-the-webmaster-quiz/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:25:00 +0000
Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!

1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:

Correct answer: a) 301 redirect

Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?

Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests

Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?

Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site

Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.

6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?

Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.

Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.

9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:

Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.

Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!

40/40:
  • ChrisRaimondi
  • theopeek
  • beussery
39/40:
  • Petro
  • pornel
  • Ian Macfarlane
  • g1smd
  • Mattman
  • thinkpragmatic
  • GLV
  • GoalGorilla
  • rssmarketer
38/40:
  • BartVB
  • Kim Minh Kaplan
  • Ippi
  • Erik Dafforn
  • scole01
  • Konstantin
  • John
  • fer.vazquez
  • eMBe
  • Todd Nemet
  • p.jaroszynski
  • ph0b

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-did-you-do-on-the-webmaster-quiz/feed/ 0 Test your webmaster know-how! https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/test-your-webmaster-know-how/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/test-your-webmaster-know-how/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:00:00 +0000
Webmaster Level: All

We thought it might be fun and educational to create a quiz for webmasters about issues we commonly see in the Webmaster Help Forum. Together with our awesome Bionic Posters, we've tried to come up with questions and answers that reflect recurring concerns in the forum and some information that may not be well known. Some things to keep in mind when taking this quiz:
  • The quiz will be available to take from today until Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST.
  • It doesn't cover all facets of webmaster problems that arise, and—as with any test—it is at best only a fun way to test your webmaster prowess ;). We leave discussion of specific cases to the forum.
  • We've set up the quiz using our very own Google Docs. This means you won't see results right away, but we plan to write a follow-up blog post explaining answers and listing top scorers. Be sure to save your answers or print out your completed quiz before submitting! This way you can check your answers against the correct ones when we publish them.
  • It's just for fun!

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/test-your-webmaster-know-how/feed/ 0 Using stats from site: and Sitemap details https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/using-stats-from-site-and-sitemap-details/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/using-stats-from-site-and-sitemap-details/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:40:00 +0000
Every now and then in the webmaster blogosphere and forums, this issue comes up: when a webmaster performs a [site:example.com] query on their website, the number of indexed results differs from what is displayed in their Sitemaps report in Webmaster Tools. Such a discrepancy may smell like a bug, but it's actually by design. Your Sitemap report only reflects the URLs you've submitted in your Sitemap file. The site operator, on the other hand, takes into account whatever Google has crawled, which may include URLs not included in your Sitemap, such as newly added URLs or other URLs discovered via links.

Think of the site operator as a quick diagnosis of the general health of your site in Google's index. Site operator results can show you:
  • a rough estimate of how many pages have been indexed
  • one indication of if your site has been hacked
  • if you have duplicate titles or snippets
Here is an example query using the site operator:



Your Sitemap report provides more granular statistics about the URLs you submitted, such as the number of indexed URLs vs. the number submitted for crawling, and Sitemap-specific warnings or errors that may have occurred when Google tried to access your URLs.

Sitemap report

Feel free to check out our Help Center for more on the site: operator and Sitemaps. If you have further questions or issues, please post to our Webmaster Help Forum, where experienced webmasters and Googlers are happy to help.

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/using-stats-from-site-and-sitemap-details/feed/ 0 How to start a multilingual site https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-to-start-a-multilingual-site/ https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-to-start-a-multilingual-site/#comments Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:50:00 +0000
Site structure
 The first thing you'll want to consider is if it makes sense for you to buy country-specific top-level domains (TLD) for all the countries you plan to serve. So your domains might be ilovebackpacking.co.uk, ichlieberucksackreisen.de, and irdemochilero.es.es. This option is beneficial if you want to target the countries that each TLD is associated with, a method known as geo targeting. Note that this is different from language targeting, which we will get into a little more later. Let's say your German content is specifically for users from Germany and not as relevant for German-speaking users in Austria or Switzerland. In this case, you'd want to register a domain on the .de TLD. German users will identify your site as a local one they are more likely to trust. On the other hand, it can be pretty expensive to buy domains on the country-specific TLDs, and it's more of a pain to update and maintain multiple domains. So if your time and resources are limited, consider buying one non-country-specific domain, which hosts all the different versions of your website. In this case, we recommend either of these two options:
  1. Put the content of every language in a different subdomain. For our example, you would have en.example.com, de.example.com, and es.example.com.
  2. Put the content of every language in a different subdirectory. This is easier to handle when updating and maintaining your site. For our example, you would have example.com/en/, example.com/de/, and example.com/es/.
Matt Cutts wrote a substantial post on subdirectories and subdomains, which may help you decide which option to go with.

Geographic targeting vs. Language targeting
As mentioned above, if your content is especially targeted towards a particular region in the world, you can use the Set Geographic Target tool in Webmaster Tools. It allows you to set different geographic targets for different subdirectories or subdomains (e.g., /de/ for Germany).

If you want to reach all speakers of a particular language around the world, you probably don't want to limit yourself to a specific geographic location. This is known as language targeting, and in this case, you don't want to use the geographic target tool.

Content organization
 The same content in different languages is not considered duplicate content. Just make sure you keep things organized. If you follow one of the site structure recommendations mentioned above, this should be pretty straightforward. Avoid mixing languages on each page, as this may confuse Googlebot as well as your users. Keep navigation and content in the same language on each page.

If you want to check how many of your pages are recognized in a certain language, you can perform a language-specific site search. For example, if you go to google.de and do a site search on google.com, choose the option below the search box to only display German results.
If you have more questions on this topic, you can join our Webmaster Help Group to get more advice.

Posted by Charlene Perez and Juliane Stiller, Search Quality Team
]]> https://googledata.org/google-webmaster-central/how-to-start-a-multilingual-site/feed/ 0