WebProNews

Tag: Google Webmaster Tools

  • Google Is Changing How It Sends Webmasters Messages

    Google Is Changing How It Sends Webmasters Messages

    Google announced that over the coming weeks it’s going to be changing the way it sends messages in Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) and to whom it sends them.

    Google Webmaster Trends analyst Gary Illyes announced this in a post on Google+ on Tuesday morning (via Search Engine Land). Here’s how he described the changes:

    After the change, we will send messages only to the direct owners of a particular site; owners of parent properties will no longer be sent messages for their child properties.

    For example: Currently, if the site https://example.com/dont/panic/have/a/towel triggers a message, all of the following sites will be sent the message:
    https://example.com/dont/panic/have/a/towel (the site triggering the message)
    https://example.com/dont/panic/have/a
    https://example.com/dont/panic/have
    https://example.com/dont/panic
    https://example.com/dont
    https://example.com

    With the upcoming change, only the owners of https://example.com/dont/panic/have/a/towel will receive the message triggered by their own site.

    Illyes says the change will affect most messages, but notes that critical messages like hacked site alerts “might” still be sent to all parent site owners.

    The change, he says, is designed to lighten they email loads of users.

    What do you think of the changes?

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Webmaster Tools Changed To Google Search Console

    Google Webmaster Tools Changed To Google Search Console

    Recognizing that a lot of different types of people use Webmaster Tools beyond just traditional webmasters, Google has decided to rebrand its popular product to reflect that. From now on, Google Webmaster Tools will be known as Google Search Console. Here’s the logo:

    “For nearly ten years, Google Webmaster Tools has provided users with constantly evolving tools and metrics to help make fantastic websites that our systems love showing in Google Search,” wrote product manager Michael Fink in a blog post. “In the past year, we sought to learn more about you, the loyal users of Google Webmaster Tools: we wanted to understand your role and goals in order to make our product more useful to you.”

    “It turns out that the traditional idea of the ‘webmaster’ reflects only some of you,” he added. “We have all kinds of Webmaster Tools fans: hobbyists, small business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, designers, app developers, and, of course, webmasters as well. What you all share is a desire to make your work available online, and to make it findable through Google Search. So, to make sure that our product includes everyone who cares about Search, we’ve decided to rebrand Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console.”

    Google did not announce any new features beyond the rebranding.

    Google webmaster trends analyst John Muller had this to say on Google+:

    I remember … back when Google Webmaster Tools first launched as a way of submitting sitemap files. It’s had an awesome run, the teams have brought it a long way over the years. It turns out that the traditional idea of the “webmaster” reflects only some of you. We have all kinds of Webmaster Tools fans: hobbyists, small business owners, SEO experts, marketers, programmers, designers, app developers, and, of course, webmasters as well. So, to make sure that our product includes everyone who cares about Search, we’ve decided to rebrand Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console .

    The rebranding does seem much more user-friendly than the term Webmaster Tools, which some with limited web experience may have found a little intimidating. In an era where businesses must have and maintain a web presence, the offering is more important than ever, and the rebranding could just lead to more businesses utilizing the Webmaster Tools features.

    Image via Google

  • Google Is Replacing The Most Used Feature In Webmaster Tools

    Google Is Replacing The Most Used Feature In Webmaster Tools

    Google announced the release of the new Search Analytics report in Webmaster Tools, which it promises will deliver webmasters more precise data. It is replacing the Search Queries report, which the company says is the most used feature in Webmaster Tools.

    “If you manage a website, you need a deep understanding of how users find your site and how your content appears on Google’s search results,” says Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji “Until now, this data was shown in the Search Queries report, probably the most used feature in Webmaster Tools. Over the years, we’ve been listening to your feedback and features requests. How many of you wished they could compare traffic on desktop and mobile? How many of you needed to compare metrics in different countries? or in two different time frames?”

    The new report is designed to help you solve such problems. You can break down your site’s search data and filter it in “many different ways”. Google specifically suggests using it to compare your mobile traffic before and after the big Google Mobile-Friendly update (Mobilegeddon).

    You can use it to find the countries where people search most for your brand by choosing impressions, filtering by your brand name, and grouping results by country.

    These are just a couple examples Google gave, but you should be able to do a lot more with the report than that.

    “There are some differences between Search Analytics and Search Queries,” Bahajji notes. “Data in the Search Analytics report is much more accurate than data in the older Search Queries report, and it is calculated differently. To learn more read out Search Analytics Help Center article’s section about data. Because we understand that some of you will still need to use the old report, we’ve decided to leave it available in Google Webmaster Tools for three additional months. To learn more about the new report, please read our Search Analytics Help Center article.”

    The default view of the report shows your site’s click count coming from Google search results for the previous four weeks. Just select one or more metric checkboxes at the top to change what it shows. Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position are the available metrics.

    Images via Google

  • Google Deprecates Old Webmaster Tools API

    Back in September, Google launched an update to its Webmaster Tools API to make it more consistent with other Google APIs. Those using other APIs from the company would find the new one easier to implement, the company said.

    Now, Google has announced that with the pending shutdown of ClientLogin, the old version will be shut down on April 20.

    “If you’re still using the old API, getting started with the new one is fairly easy,” says Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller. “The new API covers everything from the old version except for messages and keywords. We have examples in Python, Java, as well as OACurl (for command-line fans & quick testing). Additionally, there’s the Site Verification API to add sites programmatically to your account. The Python search query data download will continue to be available for the moment, and replaced by an API in the upcoming quarters.”

    When it introduced the new API, Google said it made it easier to authenticate apps or web services, and provided access to some of the main Webmaster Tools features. These are some specific things you can do with it:

    • list, add, or remove sites from your account (you can currently have up to 500 sites in your account)
    • list, add, or remove sitemaps for your websites
    • get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps
    • get a time-series of all kinds of crawl errors for your site
    • list crawl error samples for specific types of errors
    • mark individual crawl errors as “fixed” (this doesn’t change how they’re processed, but can help simplify the UI for you)

    You can find the links for the Python, Java, and OACurl examples here.

    Mueller says that comments and questions about the API should be posted in this blog post or this forum.

    Image via Google

  • Google: Clicks On App Deep Links Jumped By 10x Last Quarter

    Google started testing app indexing on Android in October of last year, adding deep links from apps within search results on its operating system. In June, they opened it up to everyone.

    On Tuesday, Google provided an update on what’s going on with it, encouraging more webmasters to take advantage. What’s going on with it is that clicks on app deep links jumped by 10x last quarter, according to the company, with 15% of signed-in Google searches on Android now returning deep links.

    In other words, the amount of these types of results is growing, and people are clicking on them more, so you might want to get your app in the mix, especially considering that Google is increasingly focusing on a site’s mobile user experience when it comes to ranking mobile results (though they do still take desktop signals into consideration).

    Google’s app indexing update includes four steps to monitor app performance and drive user engagement, which include: Give your app developer access to Webmaster Tools; Understand how your app is doing in search results; Make sure key app resources can be crawled; and Watch out for Android App errors. Obviously they go into more detail about how to achieve all of this.

    Information related to app indexing that Google shows in Webmaster Tools includes: errors in indexed pages within apps, weekly clicks and impressions from app deep links via Google search; and stats on your sitemap (if that’s how you implemented the app deep links). Google says it will be adding a lot more in the coming months.

    There are two new ways to track performance for your app deep links. Google will send a weekly clicks and impressions update to the Message center in in WMT, and you can now track how much traffic app deep links drive to your app using referrer information (referrer extra in the ACTION_VIEW intent). The company says it’s working to integrate this info with Google Analytics.

    “Blocked resources are one of the top reasons for the ‘content mismatch’ errors you see in Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Mariya Moeva. “We need access to all the resources necessary to render your app page. This allows us to assess whether your associated web page has the same content as your app page.”

    “To help you identify errors when indexing your app, we’ll send you messages for all app errors we detect, and will also display most of them in the ‘Android apps’ tab of the Crawl errors report,” Moeva says.

    Google has three new error types that go along with the existing “content mismatch” and “intent URI not supported” error alerts: APK not found, no first-click free, and back button violation. Check out the original post for more on all of this.

    You can bet that app indexing is only going to become a bigger part of mobile search, so if you have an app, you should probably start paying attention to this stuff. Otherwise, you might find yourself left behind on mobile search. And who knows? That could even affect you on the desktop eventually.

    Image via Google

  • Google Webmaster Tools Adds Mobile Usability Tracking

    Google Webmaster Tools Adds Mobile Usability Tracking

    Google announced the addition of a new Mobile Usability feature to Webmaster Tools, which shows you issues Google has found with your site. It includes graphs that look at issues over time, so you can see any progress you’ve made.

    The offering further underscore’s Google’s emphasis on the importance of the mobile experience to webmasters. If your site sucks on mobile, then it doesn’t look good on Google’s part either when it shows that site in search results. You don’t want to sacrifice your search positioning just because you haven’t taken the time to provide a pleasant experience on mobile devices.

    Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller writes in a blog post, “A mobile-friendly site is one that you can easily read & use on a smartphone, by only having to scroll up or down. Swiping left/right to search for content, zooming to read text and use UI elements, or not being able to see the content at all make a site harder to use for users on mobile phones. To help, the Mobile Usability reports show the following issues: Flash content, missing viewport (a critical meta-tag for mobile pages), tiny fonts, fixed-width viewports, content not sized to viewport, and clickable links/buttons too close to each other.”

    Mueller adds, “We strongly recommend you take a look at these issues in Webmaster Tools, and think about how they might be resolved; sometimes it’s just a matter of tweaking your site’s template! More information on how to make a great mobile-friendly website can be found in our Web Fundamentals website (with more information to come soon).”

    Earlier this month, we learned that Google is likely adding mobile user experience as an actual ranking signal, and the addition of the new feature to Webmaster Tools, would seem to confirm that.

    Google has already been giving users notifications in search results when a result uses Flash. It’s also been notifying webmasters about faulty redirects, trying to save users from tapping on results that would redirect them to the site’s mobile homepage.

    There’s no question that improving the mobile web has been a major focus of the search engine in recent months.

    Image via Google

  • Google Wants To Watch You While You Work

    Google revealed that it wants to start going to people’s places of business, and watch them work. It says it wants to learn about how it can help you manage your sites easier.

    Google’s Gary Illyes talked about it in a Google+ update (via Search Engine Land).

    “We are looking for companies, agencies, and website owners willing to let us observe for a couple days (at most) how they are managing their sites’ content and infrastructure,” he said. “We would meet with & observe the developers, designers, content creators, SEOs, and decision makers, we would take notes and ask questions. If your site is managed by an agency, we want to hear about that, too! All this to create internal reports that we’ll use for improving our communication, support, and web-search related products like Webmaster Tools.”

    “This is for everyone! It doesn’t matter if your site is huge or small, we’re interested in all kind of sites,” he adds.

    Actually, it’s not quite for everyone. It’s for businesses in Europe and North Africa. These are the places Google is willing to cover with this initiative at its own cost, at least for now.

    At the end of its visits, Illyes says, Google will be happy to try and answer questions “within reason”.

    I guess that means you can’t expect them to give you any inside information about the algorithm. I wonder if you really have to wait until the end of two days to ask questions at your own business.

    Image via Google+

  • Google Updates Webmaster Tools API

    Google announced that it has updated the Webmaster Tools API to make it more consistent with other Google APIs. Those who already use other Google APIs, the company says, should find this one easy to implement.

    According to Google, the updated API makes it easier to authenticate for apps or web services, and provides access to some of the main Webmaster Tools features. This is what you can specifically do with it:

    • list, add, or remove sites from your account (you can currently have up to 500 sites in your account)
    • list, add, or remove sitemaps for your websites
    • get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps
    • get a time-series of all kinds of crawl errors for your site
    • list crawl error samples for specific types of errors
    • mark individual crawl errors as “fixed” (this doesn’t change how they’re processed, but can help simplify the UI for you)

    Google has examples for Python, Java, and OACurl. It’s encouraging developers to link to projects that use Google APIs in the comments of its announcement post.

    Image via Google

  • Google Notifies Webmasters About Their Annoying Faulty Redirects

    Google announced a couple months ago that it would start calling out sites in mobile results for faulty redirects. This was aimed at saving users the “common annoyance” of tapping a search result only to be redirected to a site’s mobile homepage.

    This happens when a site isn’t properly set up to handle requests from smartphones. As Google noted, it happens so frequently that there are actually comics about it.

    Now, webmasters are getting notifications from Google Webmasters Tools indicating when their sites are guilty of this. Here’s one Marie Haynes tweeted out:

    This was reported on earlier by Search Engine Land, which also reports that Google has added a new color-coded syntax to the Fetch as Google feature within Webmaster Tools, which should make things a little easier at times.

    Image via Google

  • Google Webmaster Tools Gets Updated Robots.txt Testing Tool

    Google has released an updated robots.txt testing tool in Webmaster Tools. The tool can be found in the Crawl section.

    The aim of the new version of the tool is to make it easier to make and maintain a “correct” robots.txt file, and make it easier to find the directives within a large file that are or were blocking individual URLs.

    “Here you’ll see the current robots.txt file, and can test new URLs to see whether they’re disallowed for crawling,” says Google’s Asaph Amon, describing the tool. “To guide your way through complicated directives, it will highlight the specific one that led to the final decision. You can make changes in the file and test those too, you’ll just need to upload the new version of the file to your server afterwards to make the changes take effect. Our developers site has more about robots.txt directives and how the files are processed.”

    “Additionally, you’ll be able to review older versions of your robots.txt file, and see when access issues block us from crawling,” Amon explains. “For example, if Googlebot sees a 500 server error for the robots.txt file, we’ll generally pause further crawling of the website.”

    Google recommends double-checking the robots.txt files for your existing sites for errors or warnings. It also suggests using the tool with the recently updated Fetch as Google tool to render important pages, or using it to find the directive that’s blocking URLs that are reported as such.

    Google says it often sees files that block CSS, JavaScript, or mobile content, which is problematic. You can use the tool to help you fix that if it’s a problem with your site.

    Google also added a new rel=alternate-hreflang feature to Webmaster Tools. More on that here.

    Image via Google

  • Google Webmaster Tools Gets New rel-alternate-hreflang Feature

    Google announced on Monday that it is adding a new feature to Google Webmaster Tools to make it easier to debug rel-alternate-hreflang annotations. These are the attributes Google uses to serve the correct language or regional URL in search results.

    Google’s Maile Ohye talks about using rel-alternate-hreflang in the following video.

    The Language Targeting section of “International Targeting” in Webmaster Tools lets you identify missing return links and incorrect hreflang values.

    Regarding missing return links, Google’s Gary Illyes explains, “Annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly. For each error of this kind we report where and when we detected them, as well as where the return link is expected to be.

    For incorrect hreflang values, he says, “The value of the hreflang attribute must either be a language code in ISO 639-1 format such as ‘es’, or a combination of language and country code such as ‘es-AR’, where the country code is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. In case our indexing systems detect language or country codes that are not in these formats, we provide example URLs to help you fix them.”

    Google has also moved the geographic targeting setting to the International Targeting feature.

    You can learn more about using rel-alternate-hreflang here.

    Images via Google

  • ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Notices Hit Webmaster Tools

    Last week, Google started honoring “right to be forgotten” requests in search results, showing the following notice on search results pages for some name searches:

    Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more

    Now, reports are coming out indicating that webmasters are getting “right to be forgotten” notices in Webmaster Tools. Alex Graves at David Naylor writes:

    Arriving into the office this morning we have seen as many as five instances across a number of clients that have received messages through the Webmaster Tools platform, informing them of specific URLs that Google are “no longer able to show”, pointing out that rather than a full removal the pages will be simply omitted from “certain searches on European versions of Google”.

    …

    URLs that are affected within the notifications seem to vary, the majority seeming to be profile related content while others seem to be focused towards user uploaded content.

    Barry Schwartz from RustyBrick has also seen some notices in WMT. He shares a screenshot of one, which reads:

    Notice of removal from Google Search

    We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google…

    It then lists the affected links.

    Others have also noted receiving such notices:

    This could start getting fun for Webmasters as more and more requests are submitted. Google got 12,000 of them before it even launched the actual request tool.

    Image via Google

  • Google Gives Webmasters New Page Rendering Tool

    Last week, Google named some JavaScript issues that can negatively impact a site’s search results, and said it would soon be releasing a tool to help webmasters better understand how it renders their site. The tool has now been announced.

    It comes in the form of an addition to the Fetch as Google tool, which lets you see how Googlebot renders a page. Submit a URL with “Fetch and render” in the Fetch as Google feature under Crawl in Webmaster Tools.

    “In order to render the page, Googlebot will try to find all the external files involved, and fetch them as well,” writes Shimi Salant from Google’s Webmaster Tools team. “Those files frequently include images, CSS and JavaScript files, as well as other files that might be indirectly embedded through the CSS or JavaScript. These are then used to render a preview image that shows Googlebot’s view of the page.”

    “Googlebot follows the robots.txt directives for all files that it fetches,” Salant explains. “If you are disallowing crawling of some of these files (or if they are embedded from a third-party server that’s disallowing Googlebot’s crawling of them), we won’t be able to show them to you in the rendered view. Similarly, if the server fails to respond or returns errors, then we won’t be able to use those either (you can find similar issues in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools). If we run across either of these issues, we’ll show them below the preview image.”

    Google recommends making sure Gooblebot can access any embedded resource that contributes to your site’s visible content or layout in any meaningful way to make it easier to use the new tool. You can leave out social media buttons, some fonts and/or analytics scripts, as they don’t “meaningfully contribute”. Google says these can be left disallowed from crawling.

    Image via Google

  • Google Adjusts Index Status Data In Webmaster Tools

    Google announced an adjustment to the way sites’ index status data appears in Webmaster Tools. The index status feature now tracks a site’s indexed URLs for both HTTP and HTTPS as well as for verified subdirectories. In the past, it didn’t show data for HTTPS sites independently. Everything was included in the HTTP report.

    The move makes a great deal of sense as more and more sites move over to HTTPS (at least partially), and according to the company, people have been asking for this change.

    Google’s John Mueller said, “If you’re a data-driven SEO (or just love to see how your site’s indexed), you’ll love this change.”

    Now, each of these will show their own data in the Webmaster Tools Index Status report as long as they’re each verified separately:

    http://www.example.com/
    https://www.example.com/
    http://example.com
    https://example.com
    http://www.example.com/folder/
    https://www.example.com/folder/
    http://example.com/folder/
    https://example.com/folder/

    Google notes that if you have a site on HTTPS or if some of your content is indexed under different subdomains, you’ll see a change that looks something like this:

    “In order to see your data correctly, you will need to verify all existing variants of your site (www., non-www., HTTPS, subdirectories, subdomains) in Google Webmaster Tools. We recommend that your preferred domains and canonical URLs are configured accordingly,” says Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji. “Note that if you wish to submit a Sitemap, you will need to do so for the preferred variant of your website, using the corresponding URLs. Robots.txt files are also read separately for each protocol and hostname.”

    You can read up more on all of this here.

    Image via Google

  • Google Launches WordPress Plugin For AdSense, Webmaster Tools Management

    Google announced the launch of its new Google Publisher Plugin for WordPress (in beta). This lets people place AdSense ads on their sites, and verify their sites in Webmaster Tools right from WordPress.

    The plugin links your site to your AdSense account, and lets you place ads without having to manually modify code. If you already have an AdSense account, the plugin will detect it and show your publisher info (make sure it’s correct). If you already have AdSense ads on your site and just want to manage them through the plugin, you can do so, but you’ll have to remove the existing ads first, then place new ones.

    For Webmaster Tools verification, it’s just a matter of a single click. Verification simply happens when you set up the plugin. Then, to open Webmaster Tools, open the plugin, and click the “manage site” button under “Webmaster Tools.”

    Product manager Michael Smith said in a blog post, “If you own your own domain and power it with WordPress, this new plugin will give you access to a few Google services — and all within WordPress. Please keep in mind that because this is a beta release, we’re still fine-tuning the plugin to make sure it works well on the many WordPress sites out there.”

    The Plugin can be found in the WordPress plugin directory.

    Image via WordPress.org

  • Google Webmaster Tools ‘Search Queries’ Feature Gets Some New Tweaks

    Google has announced a couple of changes to the Search Queries feature in Webmaster Tools, improving stats for mobile sites and getting rid of rounding.

    For webmasters who manage mobile sites on separate URLs from the desktop versions (like m.example.com), Google will now show queries where the m. pages appeared in results for mobile browsers and queries where Google applied Skip Redirect.

    Skip Redirect

    “This means that, while search results displayed the desktop URL, the user was automatically directed to the corresponding m. version of the URL (thus saving the user from latency of a server-side redirect),” explains developer programs tech lead Maile Ohye. “Prior to this Search Queries improvement, Webmaster Tools reported Skip Redirect impressions with the desktop URL. Now we’ve consolidated information when Skip Redirect is triggered, so that impressions, clicks, and CTR are calculated solely with the verified m. site, making your mobile statistics more understandable.”

    The change enabling users to see search queries data without being rounded will become visible in Webmaster Tools over the next few days.

    “We hope this makes it easier for you to see the finer details of how users are finding your website, and when they’re clicking through,” says Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller.

    We wonder if these tweaks are related to Google’s recent call for ideas from users for Webmaster Tools improvements.

    Image: Google

  • Google Improves URL Removal Tool

    Google Improves URL Removal Tool

    Google has launched an improved version of its URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools, aimed at making it easier to request updates based on changes to other people’s sites.

    Google suggests that you could use the tool if a page has been removed completely or if it has changed, and you need the snippet and cached page removed.

    “If the page itself was removed completely, you can request that it’s removed from Google’s search results,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller. “For this, it’s important that the page returns the proper HTTP result code (403, 404, or 410), has a noindex robots meta tag, or is blocked by the robots.txt (blocking via robots.txt may not prevent indexing of the URL permanently). You can check the HTTP result code with a HTTP header checker. While we attempt to recognize ‘soft-404’ errors, having the website use a clear response code is always preferred.”

    For submitting a page for removal, just enter the URL and confirm the request.

    “If the page wasn’t removed, you can also use this tool to let us know that a text on a page (such as a name) has been removed or changed,” says Mueller. “It’ll remove the snippet & cached page in Google’s search results until our systems have been able to reprocess the page completely (it won’t affect title or ranking). In addition to the page’s URL, you’ll need at least one word that used to be on the page but is now removed.”

    Webmasters are instructed to enter the URL, confirm that the page has been updated or removed and that the cache and snippet are outdated, and enter a word that no longer appears on the live page, but still appears in the cache or snippet.

    Image: Google

  • Google Wants Some Ideas For Webmaster Tools. Got Any?

    In a recent article, we asked if Google is being transparent enough. While the question was asked broadly, much our discussion had to do specifically with webmasters. Is Google providing them with enough information?

    I mean after all, a single algorithm tweak can completely kill a business, or cause one to have to lay off staff. Webmasters want to know as much about how Google works, and how it views their site as possible.

    What do you think Webmaster Tools needs more than anything else? Let us know in the comments.

    We’re not asking that question just for conversation’s sake, though that should be interesting too. Google actually wants to know. Or at least one pretty important and influential Googler does.

    Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, has taken to his personal blog to ask people what they would like to see Google Webmaster Tools offer in 2014.

    So here’s your chance to have your voice heard.

    “At this point, our webmaster console will alert you to manual webspam actions that will directly affect your site,” he writes. “We’ve recently rolled out better visibility on website security issues, including radically improved resources for hacked site help. We’ve also improved the backlinks that we show to publishers and site owners. Along the way, we’ve also created a website that explains how search works, and Google has done dozens of ‘office hours’ hangouts for websites. And we’re just about to hit 15 million views on ~500 different webmaster videos.”

    I like to think we’ve played some small role in that.

    Cutts lists fourteen items himself as things he could “imagine people wanting,” but notes that he’s just brainstorming, and that there’s no guarantee any of these will actually be worked on.

    Among his ideas are: making authorship easier, improving spam/bug/error/issue reporting, an option to download pages from your site that Google has crawled (in case of emergency), checklists for new businesses, reports with advice for improving mobile/page speed, the ability to let Google know about “fat pings” of content before publishing it to the web, so Google knows where it first appeared, better duplicate content/scraper reporting tools, showing pages that don’t validate, showing pages that link to your 404 pages, show pages on your site that lead to 404s and broken links, better bulk URL removal, refreshing data faster, improving the robots.txt checker, and ways for site owners to tell Google about their site.

    Even if we don’t see all of these things come to Webmaster Tools in the near future, it’s interesting to see the things Cutts is openly thinking about.

    The post’s comments from Webmasters are already in the hundreds, so Google will certainly have plenty of ideas to work with. Googlers like Cutts have been known to peruse the WPN comments from time to time as well, so I wouldn’t worry about your response going unnoticed here either.

    What do you think Webmaster Tools needs more than anything? Let us know in the comments. Better yet, let us know what you think it might actually get.

    Image: Google

  • Google Webmaster Tools Alters How It Selects Sample Links

    Google announced on Thursday that it has made a change to how it decides what links to show webmasters when they push the “Download more sample links” button. The feature typically shows about 100,000 backlinks.

    “Until now, we’ve selected those links primarily by lexicographical order,” explains Yinnon Haviv, a software engineer with Google’s Webmaster Tools team. “That meant that for some sites, you didn’t get as complete of a picture of the site’s backlinks because the link data skewed toward the beginning of the alphabet.”

    “Based on feedback from the webmaster community, we’re improving how we select these backlinks to give sites a fuller picture of their backlink profile,” Haviv adds. “The most significant improvement you’ll see is that most of the links are now sampled uniformly from the full spectrum of backlinks rather than alphabetically. You’re also more likely to get example links from different top-level domains (TLDs) as well as from different domain names. The new links you see will still be sorted alphabetically.”

    Soon, Google says, when webmasters download their data, they’ll see a more diverse cross-section of links. The goal is for webmasters to more easily be able to separate the bad links from the good.

    More link profile clarity has to be a good thing, because people are freaking out about links these days, and Google itself is even mistakenly telling webmasters that legitimate links are bad in some cases. But like Google’s Matt Cutts said in a tweet, “I think that’s 1 of the benefits of more transparency is that it helps us improve on our side too.”

    Image: Google

  • Google Gives Webmasters Alternative To Markup With Data Highlighter

    Google announced the launch of Data Highlighter in Webmaster Tools, a tool for event data (and soon other types of data) that gives them an alternative to having to markup their sites. It lets webmasters show Google pieces of data on a typical event page on their site for use in Google’s structured data offerings in search results (like rich snippets and event calendars), by simply pointing and clicking.

    “If your page lists multiple events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will ‘learn’ that format as you apply tags, and help speed your work by automatically suggesting additional tags,” explains product manager Justin Boyan. “Likewise, if you have many pages of events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will walk you through a process of tagging a few example pages so it can learn about their format variations. Usually, 5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.”

    Data Highlighter

    “When you’re done, you can review a sample of all the event data that Data Highlighter now understands,” he adds. “If it’s correct, click ‘Publish.’”

    After you do all of this, Google will recognize your latest event listings and make them eligible for enhanced search results anytime it crawls your site.

    The tool can be found under “Optimization” in Webmaster Tools. For now, it’s only available in English, but more languages, as well as data types, will be added soon.

  • Webmaster Tools Gets “Associates” Feature For Your Managers Across Google Products

    Google announced a new Webmaster Tools feature that lets you add users who can act on behalf of your site in other Google products. These users will be referred to as “associates”.

    This seems to be another step towards Google’s unification of its various products, which has largely been helped by its recently consolidated privacy policy, and has been fueled by the integration of Google+ as the “social spine” of Google’s offerings.

    Google is starting the offering off with YouTube support (specifically, members of YouTube’s partner program), but says other Google product integrations will be on the way.

    YouTube associates

    “Many organizations have multiple presences on the web,” says Google software engineer Konstantin Roslyakov. “For example, Webmaster Tools lives at www.google.com/webmasters, but it also has a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. It’s important that visitors to these other properties have confidence that they are actually associated with the Webmaster Tools site. However to date it has been challenging for webmasters to manage which users can take actions on behalf of their site in different services.”

    “Unlike site owners and users, associates can’t view site data or take any site actions in Webmaster Tools, but they are authorized to perform specific tasks in other products,” says Roslyakov.

    For now, YouTube partner program members can link their YouTube channels to their site. More information on the set-up process here.

    What products do you want to see Google add next?