Google Data » Jonathan Simon

Webmaster Tools’ Holiday Update

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:21:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Just in time for the holidays, the Webmaster Tools team has updated the "Search queries" and "Links to your site" features.

Search queries with top pages:
Throughout the past year we’ve made some significant changes to the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. We've received lots of feedback about this tremendously popular feature. One frequent request we heard was that people wanted to be able to see search queries data for their site’s individual pages. Well, we totally agreed that this would be useful and promptly set out to add this functionality to search queries. The fruits of our effort have finally ripened enough on the vine and are ready for you to enjoy. Now when you visit the search queries feature in Webmaster Tools you'll see a new tab titled "Top Pages." The "Top Pages" tab lists impression, click, and position data for the top pages on your site based on their performance in Google's search results.

If you click on one of the individual pages listed you’ll see a list of the queries driving traffic to that page, along with impressions and number of clicks for each query.

Just like in the "Top queries" view, you can click on a specific query to see more detailed data and evaluate how the query is performing across the whole site.

To make filtering in search queries even easier, we've added pie charts to show visually the proportions of search type, location and traffic. Also in the "Top queries" view, you can now specify “containing” or “not containing” when filtering queries.

Links to your site with intermediate links:
Links to your site now shows when a particular URL redirects. If there's a link to your site that links to URL1 which then redirects to URL2, we are now showing the link from URL1 to URL2 as an intermediate link. We also added a "Download all links" option to all the tables in the Links to your site feature.

Now that you know about these updates, please take a few minutes to check them out for your site. We hope it will provide you with a little bit of extra joy this holiday season. Let us know what you think by submitting a comment here or posting in our Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Holidays from the Webmaster Tools team!

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Controlling crawling and indexing now documented on code.google.com

Jonathan Simon — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Webmaster level: All

Do you know how Google's crawler, Googlebot, handles conflicting directives in your robots.txt file? Do you know how to prevent a PDF file from being indexed? Do you know Googlebot’s favorite song? The answers to these questions (except for the last one :)), along with lots of other information about controlling the crawling and indexing of your site, are now available on code.google.com:

Controlling crawling and indexing

Now site owners have a comprehensive resource where they can learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directives. Please share your comments, and if you have questions you can post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Tools – Links to your site updated

Jonathan Simon — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

The "Links to your site" feature in Webmaster Tools is now updated to show you which domains link the most to your site, in addition to other improvements. On the overview page you'll notice that there are three main sections: the domains linking most to your site, the pages on your site with the most links, and a sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site.

Who links the most
Clicking the “More »” link under the “Who links the most” section will take you to a new view that shows a listing of all the domains that link to your site. Each domain in the list can be expanded to display a sample of pages from your site which are linked to by that domain.

The "More »" link under each specific domain lists all the pages linked to by that domain. At the top of the page there's a total count of links from that domain and a total count of your site's pages linked to from that domain.

Your most linked content
If you drill into the “Your most linked content” view from the overview page, you’ll see a listing of all your site’s most important linked pages. There's also a link count for each page as well as a count of domains linking to that page. Clicking any of the pages listed will expand the view to show you examples of the leading domains linking to that page and the number of links to the given page from each domain listed. The data used for link counts and throughout the "Links to your site" feature is more comprehensive now, including links redirected using 301 or 302 HTTP redirects.

Each page listed in the "All linked pages" view has an associated "More »" link which displays all the domains linking to that specific page on your site.

Each domain listed leads to a report of all the pages from that domain linking to your specific page.

We hope the updated “Links to your site” feature in Webmaster Tools will help you better understand where the links to your site are coming from and improve your ability to track changes to your site’s link profile. Please post any comments you have about this updated feature or post your questions in the Webmaster Help Forum. We appreciate your feedback since it helps us to continue to improve the functionality of Webmaster Tools.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Tools: Updates to Search queries, Parameter handling and Messages

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 20:45:00 +0000

Webmaster level: All

We've just released updates to several features in Webmaster Tools to provide you with more detail and more control of how your site appears in search results.

Search queries: Time does not stand still and neither should your site. With that in mind we've added a "Change" column next to the impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR) and position columns, making it easier to identify trends for each of these important metrics. The change column is tied to the date range you specify, which should help when you're trying to pinpoint when a particular change occurred.

Each query listed in Search queries now links to a query details page which includes a graph of impressions and clicks for that specific query, providing a quick visual of its performance in the search results over time. Below the graph is a table listing of the pages returned in search results for that query, along with impressions, clicks and CTR. Each column in the table is sortable, offering a quick way to re-sort the data based on what's most interesting to you. If you'd rather use your own favorite tool to slice and dice the data you can use the "Download this table" link to export all the information from the main Search queries page or from each individual query details page.

Better Parameter Handling: We've moved this feature under its own tab in the Settings section of Webmaster Tools, and introduced a new action to manage parameters. When we introduced Parameter Handling last year, we allowed you to specify URL parameters and whether they should be ignored or not. When you choose to ignore a parameter, you are telling us that this parameter has no impact on the displayed content. For example, consider a session id parameter, like “sid” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish

Assuming that these three URLs display exactly the same product page for tasty Swedish fish candy, Google only needs to crawl and index one of them. You can simply select action “Ignore” for parameter “sid” in Webmaster Tools and Google will just crawl and index one of these URLs, avoiding duplicates.

In addition to the old functionality, you now have the ability to choose a specific value among the known values for a given URL parameter. This is important when a parameter is relevant to the content, but different values of this parameter lead to similar pages. For example, consider a sorting parameter, like “sort-by” in the following URLs:

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2

These four URLs show products in the candy category. There are enough items in this category to fill two pages, and the products shown can be sorted by price, in ascending or descending order. Selecting action “Ignore” for parameter “sort-by” would be incorrect and could potentially limit our indexing of the site. This is because, after ignoring “sort-by”, we would consider the first two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with ascending sort order. We would also consider the last two URLs equivalent and may choose to index the URL with descending sort order. In this scenario, we would be indexing the candy category inconsistently, with some candy products appearing in both of the pages selected for the index, while other candy products not appearing in either of them. The right solution comes from the new action “Use specific value” now available in Webmaster Tools. To avoid duplicates but still keep our indexing consistent, you can simply select action “Use specific value” for parameter “sort-by” and choose one of the valid values, say “asc-price”. After this, our indexing would be fully consistent, as we would focus only on the pages with products sorted by ascending price.

Messages: Some sites receive lots of messages in the Webmaster Tools Message Center. With this update we've added the ability to "star" specific messages that you deem important. There's now a separate "Starred" view where you can see all the messages that you’ve starred, making tracking and finding the most important messages for your site a breeze.

We hope these updates make Webmaster Tools even more useful for your site. Please post a comment if you have feedback on any of these updates; or if you have questions, post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

New ways to view Webmaster Tools messages

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:15:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Now there’s a new way to see just the messages for a specific site. A new Messages feature will appear on all site pages. The feature is just like the Message Center on the home page, except it‘ll show only messages for the currently selected site. This gives you more freedom to choose how you want to view your messages: either for all your sites, or for just one site at a time.

Alerts (formally known as SiteNotice messages) will now be more prominent in the Message Center. These messages tell you about significant changes we’ve noticed related to your site which may indicate serious problems. For instance, alerts may warn you about an increase in crawl errors, an increase in 404 errors, or about possible outages. With their newfound prominence comes a new name: what used to be “SiteNotice messages” will now simply be known as “alerts.”

Messages containing alerts will be marked with an icon to make them quickly distinguishable from other messages. Each site’s Dashboard will display a notification whenever the site has unread alerts. The Dashboard notification will lead to the new site Message Center with a filter enabled to show only alerts for the current site.

You can also enable the alerts filter yourself. On the home page, enabling the alerts filter across all your sites is a great way to see alerts you may have missed and may help you find problems common across multiple sites. Even with these changes we recommend you use the email forwarding feature to receive these important alerts without having to visit Webmaster Tools.

We hope these new features make it easier to manage your messages. If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Written by Steve Geluso, Software Engineering Intern

Showing more results from a domain

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:40:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:

Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

Written by Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer

New Message Center notifications for detecting an increase in Crawl Errors

Jonathan Simon — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:50:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

When Googlebot crawls your site, it’s expected that most URLs will return a 200 response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever we’re unable to reach your content, we show this information in the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error). Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.

A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:

We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You’ll only receive these notifications if you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don't want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.

If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.

Posted by Pooja Shah and Jonathan Simon

Sitemaps: One file, many content types

Jonathan Simon — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:48:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Have you ever wanted to submit your various content types (video, images, etc.) in one Sitemap? Now you can! If your site contains videos, images, mobile URLs, code or geo information, you can now create—and submit—a Sitemap with all the information.

Site owners have been leveraging Sitemaps to let Google know about their sites’ content since Sitemaps were first introduced in 2005. Since that time additional specialized Sitemap formats have been introduced to better accommodate video, images, mobile, code or geographic content. With the increasing number of specialized formats, we’d like to make it easier for you by supporting Sitemaps that can include multiple content types in the same file.

The structure of a Sitemap with multiple content types is similar to a standard Sitemap, with the additional ability to contain URLs referencing different content types. Here's an example of a Sitemap that contains a reference to a standard web page for Web search, image content for Image search and a video reference to be included in Video search:



        xmlns:image="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
        xmlns:video="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
   
    http://www.example.com/foo.html 
    
       http://example.com/image.jpg 
    
     
    http://www.example.com/videoABC.flv    
      Grilling tofu for summer

Here's an example of what you'll see in Webmaster Tools when a Sitemap containing multiple content types is submitted:

We hope the capability to include multiple content types in one Sitemap simplifies your Sitemap submission. The rest of the Sitemap rules, like 50,000 max URLs in one file and the 10MB uncompressed file size limit, still apply. If you have questions or other feedback, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Crawl Errors now reports soft 404s

Jonathan Simon — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:17:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Today we’re releasing a feature to help you discover if your site serves undesirable "soft” or “crypto” 404s. A "soft 404" occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn't exist rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found. Soft 404s can limit a site's crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content.

The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content. Additionally, soft 404s can potentially be confusing for your site's visitors as described in our past blog post, Farewell to Soft 404s.

You can find the new soft 404s reporting feature under the Crawl errors section in Webmaster Tools.

Here’s a list of steps to correct soft 404s to help both Google and your users:

Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:
1. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
2. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
3. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.

We hope that you’re now better enabled to find and correct soft 404s on your site. If you have feedback or questions about the new "soft 404s" reporting feature or any other Webmaster Tools feature, please share your thoughts with us in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Top Search Queries is now Search Queries with Average Position and Stars

Jonathan Simon — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:41:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Since we released the latest version of Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools we've gotten a bunch of feedback, most of which was overwhelmingly positive. Today, we're happy to bring even more improvements to Top Search Queries that we've implemented as a direct result of your feedback. First of all we've shortened "Top Search Queries" to be just "Search Queries" to better reflect all of the data provided by this feature. In addition to the name change you'll notice that Search Queries has several new updates. As requested by many of you, we're now showing an "Average position" column right on the main Search Queries page. This provides a quick at-a-glance way to see where your site is showing in the search results for specific queries. The other change you'll notice is that we're showing a "Displaying" number for Impressions and Clicks. This number represents a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries including the "long tail" of queries which are not displayed in the Search Queries table. When the "Displaying" number is not visible, such as when you select a specific country from the "All countries" drop-down menu, then the bold number is the total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table.

We've also added an Average position column to the Search Queries download.

The other addition we've made to Search Queries is a "Starred" tab. Next to each Query on the Search Queries page there is now a clickable star icon. You can click the star icon for all of the queries that are of most interest to you. All of the queries that you "star" will be consolidated under the Starred tab providing a super easy way to view just the queries you care about.

We hope that this update makes Search Queries even more useful. If you've got feedback or suggestions for Search Queries please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

URL removal explained, Part III: Removing content that you don’t own

Jonathan Simon — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Welcome to the third episode of our URL removals series! In episodes one and two, we talked about expediting the removal of content that's under your control and requesting expedited cache removals. Today, we're covering how to use Google's public URL removal tool to request removal of content from Google’s search results when the content originates on a website not under your control.

Google offers two tools that provide a way to request expedited removal of content:

1. Verified URL removal tool: for requesting to remove content from Google’s search results when it’s published on a site of which you’re a verified owner in Webmaster Tools (like your blog or your company’s site)

2. Public URL removal tool: for requesting to remove content from Google’s search results when it’s published on a site which you can’t verify ownership (like your friend’s blog)

Sometimes a situation arises where the information you want to remove originates from a site that you don't own or can't control. Since each individual webmaster controls their site and their site’s content, the best way to update or remove results from Google is for the site owner (where the content is published) to either block crawling of the URL, modify the content source, or remove the page altogether. If the content isn't changed, it would just reappear in our search results the next time we crawled it. So the first step to remove content that's hosted on a site you don't own is to contact the owner of the website and request that they remove or block the content in question.

Removed or blocked content

If the website owner removes a page, requests for the removed page should return a "404 Not Found" response or a "410 Gone" response. If they choose to block the page from search engines, then the page should either be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file or contain a noindex meta tag. Once one of these requirements is met, you can submit a removal request using the "Webmaster has already blocked the page" option.

Sometimes a website owner will claim that they’ve blocked or removed a page but they haven’t technically done so. If they claim a page has been blocked you can double check by looking at the site’s robots.txt file to see if the page is listed there as disallowed.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /blocked-page/
Another place to check if a page has been blocked is within the page’s HTML source code itself. You can visit the page and choose “View Page Source” from your browser. Is there a meta noindex tag in the HTML “head” section?

blocked page

...
If they inform you that the page has been removed, you can confirm this by using an HTTP response testing tool like the Live HTTP Headers add-on for the Firefox browser. With this add-on enabled, you can request any URL in Firefox to test that the HTTP response is actually 404 Not Found or 410 Gone.

Content removed from the page

Once you've confirmed that the content you're seeking to remove is no longer present on the page, you can request a cache removal using the 'Content has been removed from the page' option. This type of removal--usually called a "cache" removal--ensures that Google's search results will not include the cached copy or version of the old page, or any snippets of text from the old version of the page. Only the current updated page (without the content that's been removed) will be accessible from Google's search results. However, the current updated page can potentially still rank for terms related to the old content as a result of inbound links that still exist from external sites. For cache removal requests you’ll be asked to enter a "term that has been removed from the page." Be sure to enter a word that is not found on the current live page, so that our automated process can confirm the page has changed -- otherwise the request will be denied. Cache removals are covered in more detail in part two of the "URL removal explained" series.
Removing inappropriate webpages or images that appear in our SafeSearch filtered results

Google introduced the SafeSearch filter with the goal of providing search results that exclude potentially offensive content. For situations where you find content that you feel should have been filtered out by SafeSearch, you can request that this content be excluded from SafeSearch filtered results in the future. Submit a removal request using the 'Inappropriate content appears in our SafeSearch filtered results' option.

If you encounter any issues with the public URL removal tool or have questions not addressed here, please post them to the Webmaster Help Forum or consult the more detailed removal instructions in our Help Center. If you do post to the forum, remember to use a URL shortening service to share any links to content you want removed.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

More data and charts in Top Search Queries

Jonathan Simon — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:47:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

We've got good news for site owners who are frequent users of the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools: we’re now providing more detailed data for each individual search query. We previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Impressions are the number of times that your site’s pages appeared in the search results for the query. Clickthrough is the number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site. In addition to impressions and clickthrough numbers, you’ll also see a list of your site's pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query. As we went about increasing the amount of data available, we also implemented measures to increase the detail of the data overall.

It used to be that you could only see Top search queries data for your site's top 100 queries. We’ve significantly increased the number of queries we show. Now if your site ranks for more than 100 queries, you’ll see new pagination buttons at the bottom of the Top Search Queries table allowing you to page through a much larger sampling of the queries that return your site in search results.

Previously, if you wanted to visualize your Top search queries data you could download your site's data and generate your own charts. To save you some time and effort, we're now generating a chart for you, and displaying it right within the page.

The Top search queries chart includes a date range selector similar to what Google Analytics offers. So now if you really want to see what your site's top search queries were for a particular week in the past, you can see the data for just that slice in time.

Finally, for sites that have numerous keywords that change frequently, we’ve added the ability to search through your site’s top search queries so that you can filter the data to exactly what you’re looking for in your query haystack.

We hope you enjoy these updates to the Top search queries feature and that it's even more useful for understanding how your site appears and performs in our search results. If you've got feedback or questions about the new Top search queries, please share your thoughts in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

When and why was my site flagged for malware? Learn in near real-time!

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:59:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

We’ve been hearing this question for many years from webmasters. That’s why we built features such as the Safe Browsing API, the malware review form, and our Malware details Labs feature.

As of today, once we notice your site is infected, we’ll do our best to send an e-mail to the address you have associated with your account in Webmaster Tools. We believe malware is such an important issue for site owners that being quickly informed is beneficial to you and your website’s visitors.

In addition, we’ve promoted our Malware details feature out of Labs and placed it under Diagnostics. The malware data is now updated four times faster than before, we’ve updated our algorithms for identifying injected content, and we’re now able to identify exploits which we were unable to catch earlier.

We hope this allows you to stay up-to-date with any malware issues we detect on your site, and to fix them quickly.

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback or questions about how to fix malware-related issues in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools Team

Will the Real Please Stand Up?

Jonathan Simon — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 17:07:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

In our recent post on the Google Online Security Blog, we described our system for identifying phishing pages. Of the millions of webpages that our scanners analyze for phishing, we successfully identify 9 out of 10 phishing pages. Our classification system only incorrectly flags a non-phishing site as a phishing site about 1 in 10,000 times, which is significantly better than similar systems. In our experience, these “false positive” sites are usually built to distribute spam or may be involved with other suspicious activity. If you find that your site has been added to our phishing page list (”Reported Web Forgery!”) by mistake, please report the error to us. On the other hand, if your site has been added to our malware list (”This site may harm your computer”), you should follow the instructions here. Our team tries to address all complaints within one day, and we usually respond within a few hours.

Unfortunately, sometimes when we try to follow up on your reports, we find that we are just as confused as our automated system. If you run a website, here are some simple guidelines that will allow us to quickly fix any mistakes and help keep your site off our phishing page list in the first place.

- Don’t ask for usernames and passwords that do not belong to your site. We consider this behavior phishing by definition, so don’t do it! If you want to provide an add-on service to another site, consider using a public API or OAuth instead.

- Avoid displaying logos that are not yours near login fields. Someone surfing the web might mistakenly believe that the logo represents your website, and they might be misled into entering personal information into your site that they intended for the other site. Furthermore, we can’t always be sure that you aren’t doing this intentionally, so we might block your site just to be safe. To prevent misunderstandings, we recommend exercising caution when displaying these logos.

- Minimize the number of domains used by your site, especially for logins. Asking for a username and password for Site X looks very suspicious on Site Y. Besides making it harder for us to evaluate your website, you may be inadvertently teaching your visitors to ignore suspicious URLs, making them more vulnerable to actual phishing attempts. If you must have your login page on a different domain from your main site, consider using a transparent proxy to enable users to access this page from your primary domain. If all else fails...

- Make it easy to find links to your pages. It is difficult for us (and for your users) to determine who controls an off-domain page in your site if the links to that page from your main site are hard to find. All it takes to clear this problem up is to have each off-domain page link back to an on-domain page which links to it. If you have not done this, and one of your pages ends up on our list by mistake, please mention in your error report how we can find the link from your main site to the wrongly blocked page. However, if you do nothing else...

- Don’t send strange links via email or IM. It’s all but impossible for us to verify unusual links that only appeared in your emails or instant messages. Worse, using these kinds of links conditions your users/customers/friends to click on strange links they receive through email or IM, which can put them at risk for other Internet crimes besides phishing.

While we hope you consider these recommendations to be common sense, we’ve seen major e-commerce and financial companies break these guidelines from time to time. Following them will not only improve your experience with our anti-phishing systems, but will also help provide your visitors with a better online experience.

Written by Colin Whittaker, Anti-Phishing Team

Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and Claim your Sidewiki comment – added to Webmaster Tools Labs!

Jonathan Simon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:03:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

Last October, we launched Webmaster Tools Labs and it has been a huge success. Malware Details have helped thousands of users identify pages on their site that may be infected with malicious code, and Fetch as Googlebot has given users more insight into our crawler.

Today, we're happy to announce two additional Labs features:

Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile
Create your Sidewiki page owner entry

Fetch as Gooblebot Mobile (developed by Ryoichi Imaizumi)

After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML.

Create your Sidewiki page owner entry (developed by Derek Prothro)

Sidewiki allows users to contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users.

After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, "How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?" With the feature that we're introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own.

We're really happy about these new features, and hope you enjoy them as much as we do. Let us know what you think!

Written by Sagar Kamdar, Product Manager, Webmaster Tools

Request visitors’ permission before installing software

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Google Korea Blog)

Webmaster Level: All

Legitimate websites may require that their visitors install software. These sites often do so to provide their users with additional functionality beyond what's available in standard web browsers, like viewing a special type of document. Please note, however, that if your site requires specific software for your visitors, the implementation of this software installation process is very important. Incorrect implementation can appear as though you're installing malware, triggering our malware detection filters, and resulting in your site being labeled with a 'This site may harm your computer' malware warning in our search results.

If using your site requires a special software install, you need to first inform visitors why they need to install additional software. Here are two bad examples and one good example of how to handle the situation of a new visitor to such a site:

Bad: Install the required software without giving the visitor a chance to choose whether or not they want to install the software.

Bad: Pop up a confirmation dialog box that prompts the visitor to agree to install the software, without providing enough detail for the visitor to make an informed choice. (This includes the standard ActiveX control installation dialog box, since it doesn't contain enough meaningful information for a visitor to make an informed decision about that particular piece of software.)

Good: Redirect the new visitor to an information page which provides thorough details on why a special software installation is required to use the site. From this page the visitor can initiate the installation of the required software if they decide to proceed with installation.

Has your site been labeled with a malware warning in our search results due to a poorly implemented software installation requirement? Updating the installation process to ensure that visitors are fully informed on why the installation is necessary, and giving them a chance to opt out, should resolve this issue. Once you've got this in place, you can go to Webmaster Tools and request a malware review to expedite the process of removing any malware warnings associated with your site in Google's search results.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

New User Agent for News

Jonathan Simon — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:02:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Today we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.

Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.

Here are a few examples for publishers:

Include pages in both Google web search and News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.

For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.

We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools

Jonathan Simon — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:48:00 +0000

Webmaster Level: All

You may have seen our recent announcement of changes to the verification system in Webmaster Tools. One side effect of this change is that blogs hosted on Blogger (that haven't yet been verified) will have to use the meta tag verification method rather than the "one-click" integration from the Blogger dashboard. The "Webmaster Tools" auto-verification link from the Blogger dashboard is no longer working and will soon be removed. We're working to reinstate an automated verification approach for Blogger hosted blogs in the future, but for the time being we wanted you to be aware of the steps required to verify your Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.

Step-By-Step Instructions:

In Webmaster Tools
1. Click the "Add a site" button on the Webmaster Tools Home page
2. Enter your blog's URL (for example, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) and click the "Continue" button to go to the Manage verification page
3. Select the "Meta tag" verification method and copy the meta tag provided

In Blogger
4. Go to your blog and sign in
5. From the Blogger dashboard click the "Layout" link for the blog you're verifying
6. Click the "Edit HTML" link under the "Layout" tab which will allow you to edit the HTML for your blog's template
7. Paste the meta tag (copied in step 3) immediately after the element within the template HTML and click the "SAVE TEMPLATE" button

In Webmaster Tools
8. On the Manage Verification page, confirm that "Meta tag" is selected as the verification method and click the "Verify" button

Your blog should now be verified. You're ready to start using Webmaster Tools!

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Google Friend Connect: No more FTP… just get started!

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:52:00 +0000

Until today, you had to upload a file to your website to activate Google Friend Connect features and gadgets. Today, we're dramatically simplifying the Friend Connect setup process. To get started with Friend Connect features, all you have to do is submit your website's name and URL after logging into www.google.com/friendconnect.

To learn more about the recent updates to Google Friend Connect, check out our post on the Google Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

One place for changing your site’s settings

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 01:03:00 +0000

One of the many useful features of Webmaster Tools is the ability to adjust settings for your site, such as crawl rate or geographic target. We've been steadily adding settings over time and have now gotten to the point where they merit their own page. That's right, Webmaster Tools now provides a single, dedicated page where you can see and adjust all the settings for your site.

The settings that have been moved to the new Settings page are:
1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control

Changing a Setting
Whenever you change a setting, you will be given an option to save or cancel the change.

Please note: The Save/Cancel option is provided on a per setting basis and hence if you change multiple settings, you'll have to click the Save button associated with each setting.

Expiration of a setting
Some of the settings are time-bounded. That is, your setting will expire after a certain time period. For example, the crawl rate setting has an expiration period of 90 days. After this period, it's automatically reset to the default setting. Whenever you visit the Settings page, you can view the date that your setting will expire underneath the setting name.

That's all there is to it!

We always like adding features and making our interface clearer based on your suggestions, so keep them coming! Please share your feedback (or ask questions) in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst and Nanda Kishore, Webmaster Tools Intern

Webmaster Tools shows Crawl error sources

Jonathan Simon — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:03:00 +0000

Ever since we released the crawl errors feature in Webmaster Tools, webmasters have asked for the sources of the URLs causing the errors. Well, we're listening! We know it was difficult for those of you who wanted to identify the cause of a particular "Not found" error, in order to prevent it in the future or even to request a correction, without knowing the source URL. Now, Crawl error sources makes the process of tracking down the causes of "Not found" errors a piece of cake. This helps you improve the user experience on your site and gives you a jump start for links week (check out our updated post on "Good times with inbound links" to get the scoop).

In our "Not Found" and "Errors for URLs in Sitemaps" reports, we've added the "Linked From" column. For every error in these reports, the "Linked From" column now lists the number of pages that link to a specific "Not found" URL.

Clicking on an item in the "Linked From" column opens a separate dialog box which lists each page that linked to this URL along with the date it was discovered. The source URL for the 404 can be within or external to your site.

For those of you who just want the data, we've also added the ability to download all your crawl error sources at once. Just click the "Download all sources of errors on this site" link to download all your site's crawl error sources.

Again, if we report crawl errors for your website, you can use crawl error sources to quickly determine if the cause is from your site or someone else's. You'll have the information you need to contact them to get it fixed, and if needed, you can still put in place redirects on your own site to the appropriate URL. Just sign in to Webmaster Tools and check it out for your verified site. You can help people visiting your site—from anywhere on the web—find what they're looking for.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst and Michael Williamson, Webmaster Tools Intern

Get Cooking with the Webmaster Tools API

Jonathan Simon — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:22:00 +0000

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Tools Team

As the days grow longer and summer takes full stage, many of us are flocking to patios and parks to engage in the time-honored tradition of grilling food. When it comes to cooking outdoors, the type of grills used span a spectrum from primitive to high tech. For some people a small campfire is all that's required for the perfect outdoor dining experience. For other people the preferred tool for outdoor cooking is a quad grill gas-powered stainless steel cooker with enough features to make an Iron Chef rust with envy.

An interesting off-shoot of outdoor cooking techniques is solar cooking, which combines primitive skills and modern ingenuity. At its most basic, solar cooking involves creating an "oven" that is placed in the sun and passively cooks the food it contains. It is simple to get started with solar cooking because a solar oven is something people can make themselves with inexpensive materials and a bit of effort. The appeal of simplicity, inexpensiveness and the ability to "do it yourself" has created a growing group of people who are making solar ovens themselves.

How all this relates to webmasters is that the webmaster community is also made up of a diverse group of people who use a variety of tools in a myriad of ways. Just like how within the outdoor cooking community there's a contingent of people creating their own solar ovens, the webmaster community has a subgroup of people creating and sharing their own tools. From our discussions with webmasters, we've consistently heard requests to open Webmaster Tools for third-party integration. The Webmaster Tools team has taken this request to heart and I'm happy to announce that we're now releasing an API for Webmaster Tools. The supported features in the first version of the Webmaster Tools API are the following:

Managing Sites

Retrieve a list of your sites in Webmaster Tools
Add your sites to Webmaster Tools
Verify your sites in Webmaster Tools
Remove your sites from Webmaster Tools

Working with Sitemaps

Retrieve a list of your submitted Sitemaps
Add Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools
Remove Sitemaps from Webmaster Tools

Although the current API offers a limited subset of all the functionality that Webmaster Tools provides, this is only the beginning. Get started with the Developer's Guide for the Webmaster Tools Data API to begin working with the API.

Webmasters... fire up your custom tools and get cooking!

iGoogle Gadgets for Webmaster Tools

Jonathan Simon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 18:59:00 +0000

by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Tools Team

When you plan to do something, are you a minimalist, or are you prepared for every potential scenario? For example, would you hike out into the Alaskan wilderness during inclement weather with only a wool overcoat and a sandwich in your pocket - like the naturalist John Muir (and you thought Steve McQueen was tough)?

Or are you more the type of person where even on a day hike, you bring a few changes of clothes, 3 dehydrated meals, a couple of kitchen appliances, a power inverter, and a foot- powered generator, because, well, you never know when the urge will arise to make toast?

The Webmaster Tools team strives to serve all types of webmasters, from the minimalist to those who use every tool they can find. If you're reading this blog, you've probably had the opportunity to use the current version of Webmaster Tools, which offers as many features as possible just shy of the kitchen sink. Now there's something for those of you who would prefer to access only the features of Webmaster Tools that you need: we've just released Webmaster Tools Gadgets for iGoogle.

Here's the simple process to start using these Gadgets right away. (Note: this assumes you've already got a Webmaster Tools account and have verified at least one site.)

1. Visit Webmaster Tools and select any site that you've validated from the dashboard.
2. Click on the Tools section.
3. Click on Gadgets sub-section.
4. Click on the big "Add an iGoogle Webmaster Tools homepage" button.
5. Click the "Add to Google" button on the following confirm page to add the new tab to iGoogle.
6. Now you're in iGoogle, where you should see your new Google Webmaster Tools tab with a number of Gadgets. Enjoy!

You'll notice that each Gadget has a drop down menu at the top which lets you select from all the sites you have validated to see that Gadget's information for the particular site you select. A few of the Gadgets that we're currently offering are:

Crawl errors - Does Googlebot encounter issues when crawling your site?

Top search queries - What are people searching for to find your site?

External links - What websites are linking to yours?

We plan to add more Gadgets in the future and improve their quality, so if there's a feature that you'd really like to see which is not included in one of the Gadgets currently available, let us know. As you can see, it's a cinch to get started.

It looks like rain clouds are forming over here in Seattle, so I'm off for a hike.

New: Content analysis and Sitemap details, plus more languages

Jonathan Simon — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:48:00 +0000

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We're always striving to help webmasters build outstanding websites, and in our latest release we have two new features: Content analysis and Sitemap details. We hope these features help you to build a site you could compare to a fine wine -- getting better and better over time.

Content analysis

To help you improve the quality of your site, our new content analysis feature should be a helpful addition to the crawl error diagnostics already provided in Webmaster Tools. Content analysis contains feedback about issues that may impact the user experience or that may make it difficult for Google to crawl and index pages on your site. By reviewing the areas we've highlighted, you can help eliminate potential issues that could affect your site's ability to be crawled and indexed. This results in better indexing of your site by Google and other search engines.

The Content analysis summary page within the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools features three main categories. Click on a particular issue type for more details:

Title tag issues
Meta description issues
Non-indexable content issues

Selecting "Duplicate title tags" displays a list of repeated page titles along with a count of how many pages contain that title. We currently present up to thirty duplicated page titles on the details page. If the duplicate title issues shown are corrected, we'll update the list to reflect any other pages that share duplicate titles the next time your website is crawled.

Also, in the Title tag issues category, we show "Long title tags" and "Short title tags." For these issue types we will identify title tags that are way too short (for example "IT" isn't generally a good title tag) or way too long (title tag was never intended to mean ). A similar algorithm identifies potentially problematic meta description tags. While these pointers won't directly help you rank better (i.e. pages with length x aren't moved to the top of the search results), they may help your site display better titles and snippets in search results, and this can increase visitor traffic.<br /><br />In the "Non-indexable content issues," we give you a heads-up of areas that aren't as friendly to our more text-based crawler. And be sure to check out our posts on <a title="Flash" href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html" id="mb39">Flash</a> and <a title="images" href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html" id="f.d4">images</a> to learn how to make these items more search-engine friendly.</p><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_pHpYpU4sgSI/R2HBLKKDhaI/AAAAAAAAAGU/qI5gPSR5kr4/s1600-h/content-analysis-crawling.gif"><br /></a><br /><p></p><br /><b>Sitemap details page </b><b><br /></b><br />If you've submitted a Sitemap, you'll be happy when you see the additional information in Webmaster Tools revealing how your Sitemap was processed. You can find this information on the newly available Sitemap Details page which (along with information that was previously provided for each of your Sitemaps) shows you the number of the pages from your Sitemap that were indexed. Keep in mind the number of pages indexed from your Sitemap <a title="may not be 100% accurate" href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80488">may not be 100% accurate</a> because the indexed number is updated periodically, but it's more accurate than running a "site:example.com" query on Google.<br /><br />The new Sitemap Details page also lists any errors or warnings that were encountered when specific pages from your Sitemap were crawled. So the time you might have previously spent on crafting custom Google queries to determine how many pages from your Sitemap were indexed, can now be spent on improving your site. If your site is already the crème de la crème, you might prefer to spend the extra free time mastering your ice-carving skills or blending the perfect eggnog.<br /><br />Here's a view of the new <a title="Sitemap details page" href="http://google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=78808" id="eyev">Sitemap details page</a>:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_pHpYpU4sgSI/R2HCOKKDhcI/AAAAAAAAAGk/duQBz8JMObk/s1600-h/sitemap-details.png"></a><br /><p></p>Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Google about your site's most important pages, especially if you have new or updated content that we may not know about. If you haven't yet submitted a Sitemap or have questions about the process, visit our <a title="Webmaster Help Center" href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8476" id="lsuq">Webmaster Help Center</a> to learn more.<br /><br /><b> Webmaster Tools now available in Czech & Hungarian</b><br /><br />We love expanding our product to help more people and in their language of choice. We recently put in effort to expand the number of Webmaster Tools available languages to Czech and Hungarian, in addition to the 20 other languages we already support. We won't be stopping here. Our desire to support even more languages in the future means that if your language of choice isn't currently supported, stay tuned -- there'll be even more supported languages to come.<br /><br />We always love to hear what you think. Please visit our <a title="Webmaster Help Group" href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help" id="evf.">Webmaster Help Group</a> to share comments or ask questions.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Join us at cool SES San Jose – it’ll be hot!</h1> <p>Jonathan Simon — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:53:00 +0000</p> <span class="byline-author">Written by Jonathan Simon</span><br /><br /><div>As summer inches towards fall and in many places the temperature is still rising, you're probably thinking the best place to be right now is on the beach, by a pool or inside somewhere that's air-conditioned. These are all good choices, but next week there's somewhere else to be that's both hot and cool: the <a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/" title="Search Engines Strategies conference in San Jose">Search Engines Strategies conference in San Jose</a>. In addition to the many tantalizing conference sessions covering diverse topics related to search, there will be refreshments, food, and of course, air-conditioning.</div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_pHpYpU4sgSI/RsYo2cDmeGI/AAAAAAAAABQ/BNIn_qJqnYk/s1600-h/SES-San-Jose-Googlers.jpg"></a><br /><div>Additionally, on Tuesday evening at our Mountain View ‘plex we're hosting the “Google Dance” -- where conference attendees can eat, drink, play, dance, and talk about search. During the Google Dance be sure to attend the “Meet the Engineers” event where you’ll be able to meet and have a conversation with 25 or more engineers including <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/" title="Webmaster Central">Webmaster Central</a>’s own <a href="http://static.flickr.com/100/311046527_93b66892bd_m.jpg" title="Amanda Camp">Amanda Camp</a>. Also, if you get a spare minute from merry-making, head over to the <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/" title="Webmaster Tools">Webmaster Tools</a> booth, where you’ll find Maile Ohye offering lots of good advice.</div><br /><div>If you’re a night owl, you’ll probably also be interested in the unofficial late-night SES after-parties that you only know about if you talk to the right person. To stem the potential barrage of “where’s the party” questions, I'd like to make it clear that I unfortunately am not the right person. But if you happen to be someone who’s organizing a late night party, please consider inviting me. ;)</div><br /><div>"Enough about the parties -- what about the conference?," you ask. As you would expect, Google will be well-represented at the conference. Here is a sampling of the Search-related sessions at which Googlers will be speaking:</div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda.html#searcher_2" title="Universal & Blended Search">Universal & Blended Search</a><br />Monday, August 20<br />11:00am-12:30pm<br />David Baile<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda.html#searcher_3" title="Personalization, User Data & Search">Personalization, User Data & Search</a><br />Monday, August 20<br />2:00 - 3:30pm<br />Sep Kamvar<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda.html#searcher_4" title="Searcher Behavior Research Update">Searcher Behavior Research Update</a><br />Monday, August 20<br />4:00 - 5:30pm<br />Oliver Deighton<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda2.html#issues_4" title="Are Paid Links Evil?">Are Paid Links Evil?</a><br />Tuesday, August 21<br />4:45 - 6:00pm<br />Matt Cutts<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#keynote_2" title="Keynote Conversation">Keynote Conversation</a><br />Wednesday, August 22<br />9:00 - 9:45am<br />Marissa Mayer<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#industry_1" title="Search APIs">Search APIs</a><br />Wednesday, August 22<br />10:30am - 12:00pm<br />Jon Diorio<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#organic_1" title="SEO Through Blogs & Feeds">SEO Through Blogs & Feeds</a> <br />Wednesday, August 22<br />10:30am - 12:00pm<br />Rick Klau<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#organic_2" title="Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issue">Duplicate Content & Multiple Site Issues</a><br />Wednesday, August 22<br />1:30 - 2:45pm<br />Greg Grothaus<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#organic_3" title="CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines">CSS, AJAX, Web 2.0 & Search Engines</a><br />Wednesday, August 22<br />3:15 - 4:30pm<br />Amanda Camp<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda3.html#linking_4" title="Search Engine Q&A On Links">Search Engine Q&A On Links</a><br />Wednesday, August 22<br />4:45 - 6:00pm<br />Shashi Thakur<br /></div><br /><div><a href="http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/sew/sj07/agenda4.html#organic_2" title="Meet the Crawlers">Meet the Crawlers</a><br />Thursday, August 23<br />10:45am - 12:00pm<br />Evan Roseman<br /></div><br /><div>We will also have a large presence in the conference expo hall where members of the <a href="http://www.google.com/webmasters/" title="Webmaster Central">Webmaster Central</a> Team like Susan Moskwa and I will be present at the <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/" title="Webmaster Tools">Webmaster Tools</a> booth to answer questions, listen to your thoughts and generally be there to chat about all things webmaster related. Bergy and Wysz, two more of us who tackle tough questions in the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help" title="Webmaster Help Groups">Webmaster Help Groups</a>, will be offering assistance at the Google booth (live and in person, not via discussion thread).</div><br /><div>If you're reading this and thinking, "I should go and grab the last frozen juice bar in the freezer," I suggest that you save that frozen juice bar for when you return from the conference and find that your brain's overheating from employing all the strategies you've learned and networking with all the people you've met.<br /></div><br /><div>Joking aside, we are psyched about the conference and hope to see you there. Save a cold beverage for me!<br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> </main></body></html>