Google Data » Reid Yokoyama

Google Webmaster Help Forums in more languages

Reid Yokoyama — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:48:00 +0000

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 Forum

Zdravím! 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 Forum

안녕하세요! 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.

Written by Joowon Ahn, Andrew Baek, Adel Saud, Kaspar Szymanski, Fa Wang, Reid Yokoyama, and Marcel Zavacky, Search Quality Team

Seamless verification of Google Sites and Blogger with Webmaster Tools

Reid Yokoyama — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Note: Verification of Blogger blogs in Webmaster Tools has changed significantly. Please see the more recent blog post "Verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools" for more details.

Verifying that you own a site is the first step towards accessing all of the great features Webmaster Tools has to offer, such as crawl errors and query statistics. The Google Sites and Blogger teams have worked hard to make site verification as simple as possible. In the following videos, I'll walk you through how to verify sites created in Google Sites and Blogger.

Google Sites:

Blogger:

These videos are available in our Help Center if you have additional questions about verifying a Google Site or Blogger blog with Webmaster Tools. And as always, you can find me and many other Googlers and webmasters in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

Reintroducing your English Webmaster Help Google Guides

Reid Yokoyama — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 04:30:00 +0000

When we announced our latest round of Bionic Posters in the old Help Group, an astute webmaster noted that we had never fully introduced ourselves to the webmaster community. With our announcement of a new English Webmaster Help forum, I'm happy to (re)introduce you all to the Google Guides from around the world who will be hanging out in the English forum:

Guides in Mountain View, California (from left to right): Adam, Maile, Matt Cutts, Chris, Wysz, Matt, Chark, and Adi.

Also in Mountain View: Evan, Jessica, and Nate.

Guides in Kirkland, Washington: Susan, Riona, and Jonathan.

Guides in Zürich, Switzerland: John Mueller and Balázs.

Guides in Hyderabad, India: Koti, Reid (visiting from Mountain View), and Jayan.

Guide in ~~Ottowa~~ Ottawa :), Ontario: Oliver.

All of us look forward to seeing you around the forum! Our Google Guides in non-English Webmaster Help Groups introduce themselves here.

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

Your burning questions – Answered!

Reid Yokoyama — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:55:00 +0000

In a recent blog post highlighting our Webmaster Help Group, I asked for your webmaster-related questions. In our second installment of Popular Picks, we hoped to discover which issues webmasters wanted to learn more about, and then respond with some better documentation on those topics. It looks like it was a success, so please get clicking:

Image Search ranking: Starting things off, JimAtArtsnovaDotCom asked about how Google indexes images. Evan details the factors that account for a site's images appearing in Google's image search.
Sitelinks and Webmaster Tools: Maile tackled Red Cardinal's request by providing a more detailed explanation of sitelinks, particularly what happens when they are blocked by a user.
Reconsideration Requests: Want to learn more about reconsideration requests? In response to Chibcha's message, Susan provides additional context on when you should file a reconsideration request and other tips to address your site's performance.
Redirects: In response to Cristina's question about site moves and redirects, John explains how Googlebot handles absolute and relative URLs in your redirect to a new domain.
Communication with webmasters: Finally, I responded to bluegill01's message, noting the scenarios when you can expect to receive a message from Google.

Thanks again for your questions! See you around the group.

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

The Impact of User Feedback, Part 2 (and more Popular Picks!)

Reid Yokoyama — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:41:00 +0000

As a follow-up to my recent post about how user reports of webspam and paid links help improve Google's search results for millions of users, I wanted to highlight one of the most essential parts of Google Webmaster Central: our Webmaster Help Group. With over 37,000 members in our English group and support in 15 other languages, the group is the place to get your questions answered regarding crawling and indexing or Webmaster Tools. We're thankful for a fabulous group of Bionic Posters who have dedicated their time and energy to making the Webmaster Help Group a great place to be. When appropriate, Googlers, including myself, jump in to clarify issues or participate in the dialogue. One thing to note: we try hard to read most posts in the group, and although we may not respond to each one, your feedback and concerns help drive the features we work on. Here are a few examples:

Sitemap details
Submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools is one way to let know Google know about what pages exist on your site. Users were quick to note that even though they submitted a Sitemap of all the pages on their site, they only found a sampling of URLs indexed through a site: search. In response, the Webmaster Tools team created a Sitemaps details page to better tell you how your Sitemap was processed. You can read a refresher about the Sitemaps details page in Jonathan's blog post.

Contextual help
One request we received early on with Webmaster Tools was for better documentation on the data displayed. We saw several questions about meta description and title tag issues using our Content Analysis tool, which led us to beef up our documentation on that page and link to that Help Center article directly from that page. Similarly, we discovered that users needed clarification on the distinction between "top search queries" and "top clicked queries" and how the data can be used. We added an expandable section entitled "How do I use this data?" and placed contextual help information across Webmaster Tools to explain what each feature is and where to get more information about it.

Blog posts
The Webmaster Help Group is also a way for us to keep a pulse on what overarching questions are on the minds of webmasters so we can address some of those concerns through this blog. Whether it's how to submit a reconsideration request using Webmaster Tools, deal with duplicate content, move a site, or design for accessibility, we're always open to hearing more about your concerns in the Group. Which reminds me...

It's time for more Popular Picks!
Last year, we devoted two weeks to soliciting and answering five of your most pressing webmaster-related questions. These Popular Picks covered the following topics:

Seeing as this was a well-received initiative, I'm happy to announce that we're going to do it again. Head on over to this thread to ask your webmaster-related questions. See you there!

Posted by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

The Impact of User Feedback, Part 1

Reid Yokoyama — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:55:00 +0000

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality

About a year ago, in response to user feedback, we created a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. User feedback, through reporting paid links, webspam, or suggestions in our Webmaster Help Group, has been invaluable in ensuring that the quality of our index and our tools is as high as possible. Today, I'd like to highlight the impact that reporting paid links and webspam has had on our index. In a future post, I'll showcase how user feedback and concerns in the Webmaster Help Group have helped us improve our Help Center documentation and Webmaster Tools.

Reporting Paid Links

As mentioned in the post Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank, Google reserves the right to take action on sites that buy or sell links that pass PageRank for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. Even though we work hard to discount these links through algorithmic detection, if you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, please let us know. Over the last year, users have submitted thousands and thousands of paid link reports to Google, and each report can contain multiple websites that are suspected of selling links. These reports are actively reviewed, and the feedback is invaluable to improve our search algorithms. We also are willing to take manual action on a significant fraction of paid link reports as we continue to improve our algorithms. More importantly, the hard work of users who have already reported paid links has helped improve the quality of our index for millions. For more information on reporting paid links, check out this Help Center article.

Reporting Webspam

Google has also provided a form to report general webspam since November 2001. We appreciate users who alert us to potential abuses for the sake of the whole Internet community. Spam reports come in two flavors: an authenticated form that requires registration in Webmaster Tools, and an unauthenticated form. We receive hundreds of reports each day. Spam reports to the authenticated form are given more weight and are individually investigated more often. Spam reports to the unauthenticated form are assessed in terms of impact, and a large fraction of those are reviewed as well. As Udi Manber, VP of Engineering & Search Quality mentioned in his recent blog post on our Official Google Blog, in 2007 more than 450 new improvements were made to our search algorithms. A number of those improvements were related to webspam. It's not an understatement to say that users who have taken the time to report spam were essential to many of those algorithmic enhancements.

Going forward

As users' expectations of search increase daily, we know it's important to provide a high quality index with relevant results. We're always happy to hear stories in our Webmaster Help Group from users who have have reported spam with noticeable results in our Webmaster Help Group. Now that you know how Google uses feedback to improve our search quality, you may want to tell us about webspam you've seen in our results. Please use our authenticated form to report paid links or other types of webspam. Thanks again for taking the time to help us improve.

Making harmonious use of Webmaster Tools and Analytics

Reid Yokoyama — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:28:00 +0000

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality Team

Occasionally in the discussion group, webmasters ask, "Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?" Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools.

1. Make the most of your impressions
One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries. The data from the Top Search Queries allows you to quickly pinpoint what searches your site appears for and which of those searches are resulting in clicks. Let's look at last week's data for www.google.com/webmasters as an example.

As you can see, Google Webmaster Central is receiving a great number of impressions for the query [gadgets] but may not be fully capitalizing on these impressions with user clicks. Click on [gadgets] to see how your site appears in our search results. Does your title and snippet look appealing to users? As my colleague Michael recently wrote, it might be time to do some "housekeeping" on your website -- it's a great, low-to-no-cost way to catch the attention of your users. For example, we could work to improve our snippet from:

To something more readable such as "Use gadgets to easily add cool, dynamic content to your site..." by adding a meta description to the URL.

And what are users doing when they visit your site? Are they browsing your content or bouncing off your site quickly? To find out, Google Analytics will calculate your site's "bounce rate," or the percentage of single-page visits (e.g. someone just visiting your homepage and then leaving). This can be a helpful measure of the quality of your site's landing page and the traffic your site receives. After all, once you've worked hard to get your users to visit your site, you want to keep them there! Check out the Analytics blog for further information about "bounce rate."

2. Perform smart geo-targeting
Let's imagine you have a .com that you want to target at a Japanese market. Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target for your site, where you would probably pick Japan. But, doing so is not an immediate solution. You can confirm the location of your visitors using the map overlay of Analytics, right up to the city level. You can also discover what types of users are accessing your site - including their browser and connection speed. If users cannot access your website due to an incompatible browser or slower connection speeds, you may need to rethink your website's design. Doing so can go a long way toward achieving the level of relevant traffic you would like.

3. Control access to sensitive content
One day, you log into Analytics and look at your "Content by Title" data. You shockingly discover that users are visiting your /privatedata pages. Have no fear! Go into Webmaster Tools and use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from Google's search results. Modifying your robots.txt file will also block Googlebot from crawling that section of your site in the future.

For more tips and tricks on Analytics, check out the Analytics Help Center. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to comment below or in our Webmaster Help Group.