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Tag: Google Webmaster Central

  • Google Introduces Style Guide For HTML And CSS

    I have a good friend who defines himself as a street coder. He taught himself all the code he knows and he sometimes uses strange code that nobody would ever think to use. It gets him by and sometimes is even better, but there are standards for a lot of reasons. It’s especially helpful when you have teams of coders, because nothing is worse than two guys working on the same application using two different styles of code.

    To combat this and maybe even help sites optimize their code and content, the company has published an HTML and CSS style guide. It contains the standards that their own developers and programmers adhere to. While your company of choice may use a different style guide, Google offers up their own for those who may not have one yet.

    Most of the style guide deals with formatting and its implications on the code you write. The style guide, however, also contains best practices to encourage better coding etiquette. Google also says that they find style guide authors arguing over whether code should be descriptive or prescriptive. Google takes an approach that includes both so that the code can retain some stability, but allow developers to express themselves more openly through their code.

    The HTML and CSS style guide is just another in a long line of style guides published by Google. They have previously released style guides for C++, Objective-C, Python, JavaScript and an XML document format style guide.

    The wealth of information contained in the style guide might not be surprising to code masters, but it should be incredibly helpful to those just starting to learn code or amateurs who might need some guidance on standards. It’s also just interesting to see what Google views as good style when it comes to HTML.

    You can check out the HTML and CSS style guide here. You should definitely check it out. You won’t be disappointed and you might even learn something. You might even rise to the rank of a mighty street coder one day.

  • Google Explains Its Responsive Webpage Design

    Though Google realizes that multiple versions of a website can help tailor that site for display on a specific device, Google uses a different approach for displaying websites on a wide variety of devices. Instead of having separate websites for PC’s, iPhones, Androids, feature phones, etc., Google uses dynamic page shaping they call responsive design to make sure their web pages display properly, or at least legibly, on any type of device. Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the Google Webmaster Team has Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog%29″>outlined the process for webmasters who are tired of updating multiple sites for the same content.

    Google developed this process while following three rules: pages should render legibly at any resolution, only one set of content should be marked up and be viewable on any device, and a horizontal scrollbar should never be shown, no matter the window size. Using these guidelines, the team set up a liquid layout that is able to reformat the page dynamically based on the pixel-width of the browser it is displaying in. Instead of giving container elements a fixed width, they specified a max-width. Likewise, they used min-height instead of a set height. From there, media queries are used to rearrange content as the width of the browser changes.

    The examples used are the Google about page, seen above, and Google’s Cultural Institute page. The about page begins to shift non-essential content down to the bottom of the page when the browser width narrows, while the Cultural Institute page allows larger photos to be cropped until a certain pixel width is reached and it then transforms into a list-type view. Unfortunately, the blog points out that a quarter of website visits are still made with older browsers that don’t support some of these features, such as media queries:

    It’s worth bearing in mind that there’s no simple solution to making sites accessible on mobile devices and narrow viewports. Liquid layouts are a great starting point, but some design compromises may need to be made. Media queries are a useful way of adding polish for many devices, but remember that 25% of visits are made from those desktop browsers that do not currently support the technique and there are some performance implications. And if you have a fancy widget on your site, it might work beautifully with a mouse, but not so great on a touch device where fine control is more difficult.

    You can find out more, including the CSS code which enables Google’s liquid layout at Google’s Webmaster Central Google+Webmaster+Central+Blog%29″>Blog. Make sure, though, to leave a comment here and let us know your opinion on whether this process would be right for your website.

  • Google Adds More Top Search Query Data

    Google has been adding more and more value to their Webmaster tools which really should help those of you just starting a Website or perhaps just need more help in attracting traffic. Either way, one of the best tools available is the ability to look at the top search query data. Google is making that data even more valuable.

    Google announced today that Webmasters can now see up to 90 days of search query historical data. The previous limit was set to only 35 days, so that’s a huge jump in data. It should give Webmasters a better idea of how their Website has been doing over the past few months instead of just the last month.

    You can go back to the full 90 days by using the same date picker you’ve always used to see search query data in between particular dates. Here’s what a full 90 days of search data looks like:

    Google Adds More Top Search Query Data

    As always, there is a catch though. You can’t view 90 days worth of search data if you want to see changes with the previous time period. Changes are only available with 30 days of search data. Changes are also turned off by default, but you can turn them on with a button between the graph and the table.

    There are a few other changes being made to Webmaster Tools. One of them is that users can now view basic search data as soon as site ownership is verified. The other change is that Google now collects the top 2,000 queries that your site gets clicks for. They feel that 98 percent of sites will have full coverage in this regard, but a few Webmasters may see less than 2,000 results.

  • Google Combines Webmaster Resources In a Single Page

    Google has put together a new collection of resources for webmasters. This includes a page that provides all the different ways the company wants you to contact them if you want to tell them about a page you want to remove from search results, tell them about spam, tell them when you’ve fixed issues on your site, etc. 

    They’ve also collected various articles from their sites and put them with this information. 

    "We provide lots of information for webmasters across many different channels — you can stay up to date with the latest features here on our blog, browse articles in our Help Center, have discussions in our forums (in 17 languages!), watch videos on our YouTube channel, or even read in-depth interviews (in English, Portuguese, and other languages)," says  Mariya Moeva of Google’s Search Quality Team.

    Google Webmaster Central Central
    "There’s no shortage of useful information, but sometimes the relevant bits may be a bit difficult to locate, especially for novice webmasters," adds Moeva. "We see the same questions popping up over and over again, so we’ve tried to make our most frequently searched information as accessible and visible as possible: We analysed the questions asked over the past year and a half and identified the issues you are most interested in. We then picked out the relevant bits from across our different resources and collected the answers to those questions in one new convenient FAQ page in our Help Center (available in 20 languages)."

    Of course you can always check out Google’s Webmaster guidelines, Webmaster Central Blog, and Webmaster YouTube channel (where they post all the Q&A videos from Matt Cutts). Then there’s the Webmaster Help Forum and the search engine optimization guide. 

    However, these are all conveniently linked to from the new page. So you really only need to keep this one bookmarked, and you should be able to find the resources you need to refer to.

  • Webmasters Concerned About Lost Traffic Due to Google Notifications

    On Friday, Google aded a new notification to search results for letting people know when a site may have been hacked. As hacking is running rampant these days, it’s probably not a bad idea. However, not all webmasters are thrilled about it. 

    In the past, Google has let site owners know about this through messages at Webmaster Central, but Google was not receiving the response from sites that they’d like, with it often taking days, weeks, or even months for site owners to notice. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread in which Google’s Matt Cutts addressed this.

    "The fact is, not everyone logs into Webmaster Tools obsessively to see if they have any messages," says Cutts. "So we needed to find a way to surface this potential risk so that site owners would find out more quickly if they’ve been hacked."

    "We now have two different responses for sites with malware vs. sites that we think may be hacked. When we detect malware, we try harder to let users know that they may be stepping into a dangerous part of the web (e.g. an interstitial so that users really need to be sure they want to visit that page)," adds Cutts. "In contrast, a hacked site might not be immediately dangerous to users. But we still want to alert site owners, because if a site is hacked right now, in practice it’s not too much harder for a bad actor to add malware to the hacked page."

    Site Compromised in Search Results

    If a user clicks on the link in the search results that says, "This site may be compromised," they will be taken to an article at Google’s Help Center, which explains more. Users can still access the sites that are accompanied by these links at their own risk. 

    "We use a variety of automated tools to detect common signs of a hacked site as quickly as possible," said associate product manager Gideon Wald. "When we detect something suspicious, we’ll add the notification to our search results. We’ll also do our best to contact the site’s webmaster via their Webmaster Tools account and any contact email addresses we can find on the webpage. We hope webmasters will also appreciate these notices, because it will help you more quickly discover when someone may be abusing your site so you can correct the problem."

    Wald also acknowledged concern from webmasters about lost traffic, and made a point to say that once the problem has been fixed, the warning label will be automatically removed from the search results.