September 9th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AdvancedIf you have a global site containing pages where the:template (i.e. side navigation, footer) is machine-translated into various languages,main content remains unchanged, creating largely duplicate pages,and sometimes search res…
September 8th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllWebmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this mea…
September 3rd, 2010 | by Jonathan Simon | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllNow 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 curr…
September 2nd, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllSince the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microfo…
September 1st, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllYou can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s inform…
August 20th, 2010 | by Jonathan Simon | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllToday 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 [e…
August 18th, 2010 | by Sean Harding | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllNobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you’re ready to verify ownership of your site in oth…
August 17th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllYou can now check your Video Sitemap for even more errors right in Webmaster Tools! It’s a new Labs feature to signal issues in your Video Sitemap such as:URLs disallowed by robots.txtThumbnail size errors (160x120px is ideal. Any…
August 16th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: All
If you want to add video information to a Sitemap or mRSS feed you must specify the location of the video. This means you must include one of two tags, either the video:player_loc or video:content_loc. In the case of an mRSS feed, these equivalent tags are media:player or media:content, respectively. We need this information to verify that there is actually a live video on your landing page and to extract metadata and signals from the video bytes for ranking. If one of these tags is not included we will not be able to verify the video and your Sitemap/mRSS feed will not be crawled. To reduce confusion, here is some more detail about these elements.
Video Locations Defined
Player Location/URL: the player (e.g., .swf) URL with corresponding arguments that load and play the actual video.
Content Location/URL: the actual raw video bytes (e.g., .flv, .avi) containing the video content.
The Requirements
One of either the player video:player_loc or content video:content_loc location is required. However, we strongly suggest you provide both, as they each serve distinct purposes: player location is primarily used to help verify that a video exists on the page, and content location helps us extract more signals and metadata to accurately rank your videos.
URL extensions at a glance:
Sitemap: mRSS: Contents: The playpage URL (url attribute) The SWF URL (url attribute) The FLV or other raw video URL NOTE: All URLs should be unique (every URL in your entire Video Sitemap and mRSS feed should be unique)
If you would like to better ensure that only Googlebot accesses your content, you can perform a reverse DNS lookup.
For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search for answers check out our Help Forum.
Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager, Video Search
July 26th, 2010 | by Jonathan Simon | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllWhen 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 informatio…
July 16th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllWe know that some of you, or your clients or colleagues, may be new to online video publishing. To make it easier for everyone to understand video indexing and Video Sitemaps, we’ve created a video — narrated by Nelson Lee, Video…
June 29th, 2010 | by Jonathan Simon | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllHave 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 wit…
June 21st, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shar…
June 11th, 2010 | by Maile Ohye | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllWe’d like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries yo…
June 7th, 2010 | by Jonathan Simon | published in Google Webmaster Central
Webmaster Level: AllToday 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 rathe…