WebProNews

Tag: Webmasters

  • Tips for Diagnosing A Drop In Google Rankings, From Matt Cutts

    Google has posted a new Webmaster Help video. As usual, Head of Web Spam Matt Cutts has answered a user-submitted question. The question is:

    “When you notice a drastic drop in your rankings and traffic from Google, what process would you take for diagnosing the issue?”

    “One thing I would do very early on, is I would do ‘site:mydomain.com’ and figure out are you completely not showing up in Google or do parts of your site show up in Google?” he begins. “That’s also a really good way to find out whether you are partially indexed. Or if you don’t see a snippet, then maybe you had a robots.txt that blocked us from crawling. So we might see a reference to that page, and we might return something that we were able to see when we saw a link to that page, but we weren’t able to see the page itself or weren’t able to fetch it.”

    “You might also notice in the search results if we think that you’re hacked or have malware, then we might have a warning there,” he adds. “And that could, of course, lead to a drop in traffic if people see that and decide not to go to the hacked site or the site that has malware.”

    Then it’s on to Webmaster Tools.

    “The next place I’d look is the webmaster console,” says Cutts. “Google.com/webmasters prove that you control or own the site in a variety of ways. And we’re doing even more messages than we used to do. Not just things like hidden text, park domains, doorway pages. Actively quite a few different types of messages that we’re publishing now, and when we think there’s been a violation of our quality guidelines. If you don’t see any particular issue or message listed there, then you might consider going to the Webmaster Forum.”

    “As part of that, you might end up asking yourself, is this affecting just my site or a lot of other people? If it’s just your site, then it might be that we thought that your site violated our guidelines, or of course, it could be a server-related issue or an issue on your site, of course, on your side,” he says. “But it could also be an algorithmic change. And so if a bunch of people are all seeing a particular change, then it might be more likely to be something due to an algorithm.”

    We’ve certainly seen plenty of that lately, and will likely see more tweaks to Panda for the time being, based on this recent tweet from Cutts:

    @mattcutts
    Matt Cutts    Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%). 7 days ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    “You can also check other search engines, because if other search engines aren’t listing you, that’s a pretty good way to say, well, maybe the problem is on my side. So maybe I’ve deployed some test server, and maybe it had a robots.txt or a noindex so that people wouldn’t see the test server, and then you pushed it live and forgot to remove the noindex,” Cutts continues in the video. “You can also do Fetch as Googlebot. That’s another method. That’s also in our Google Webmaster console. And what that lets you do is send out Googlebot and actually retrieve a page and show you what it fetched. And sometimes you’ll be surprised. It could be hacked or things along those lines, or people could have added a noindex tag, or a rel=canonical that pointed to a hacker’s page.”

    “We’ve also seen a few people who, for whatever reason, were cloaking, and did it wrong, and shot themselves in the foot,” he notes. “And so they were trying to cloak, and instead they returned normal content to users and completely empty content to Googlebot.”

    “Certainly if you’ve changed your site, your hosting, if you’ve revamped your design, a lot of that can also cause things,” he says. “So you want to look at if there’s any major thing you’ve changed on your side, whether it be a DNS, host name, anything along those lines around the same time. That can definitely account for things. If you deployed something that’s really sophisticated AJAX, maybe the search engines are[n’t] quite able to crawl that and figure things out.

    Cutts, of course advises filling out a reconsideration request, once you think you’ve figured the issue.

  • Google Launches Important New Tools for Webmasters

    Google made a couple relatively quiet announcements this week that have pretty big ramifications for webmasters who want to get more traffic to their sites.

    If you’re a Webmaster Tools user, you can thank Google for a new “Site Health” feature. In a nutshell, it’s Google’s way of helping you prioritize what you’re doing in WMT by highlighting the “health problems” your site has. In fact, they’ve even redesigned the homepage around this concept.

    Do you like the new design? Share your opinion in the comments.

    The thinking is that you can see what needs attention the most, in order, according to Google. Given how much sites generally rely on Google for the majority of their traffic, whose advice would you rather take in this department?

    If you don’t want to see sites listed by priority, you have the ability to view them alphabetically like before.

    webmaster tools homepage  

    Site Health  

    The new home page is only available if you have 100 or fewer sites in your account, but they don’t all have to be verified. Google says it will be available for all accounts in the future. If you have over 100, you can still access Site Health info from the top of the dashboard for each site.

    So what’s included in this site health data? Malware detection, important pages that have been removed with Google’s URL removal tool, and important pages that are blocked from crawling in robots.txt.

    Google will provide additional info about any of these things as they’re found.

    In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa writes, “A word about ‘important pages: ‘as you know, you can get a comprehensive list of all URLs that have been removed by going to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL; and you can see all the URLs that we couldn’t crawl because of robots.txt by going to Diagnostics > Crawl errors > Restricted by robots.txt. But since webmasters often block or remove content on purpose, we only wanted to indicate a potential site health issue if we think you may have blocked or removed a page you didn’t mean to, which is why we’re focusing on ‘important pages.’ Right now we’re looking at the number of clicks pages get (which you can see in Your site on the web > Search queries) to determine importance, and we may incorporate other factors in the future as our site health checks evolve.”

    “Obviously these three issues—malware, removed URLs, and blocked URLs—aren’t the only things that can make a website ‘unhealthy;’ in the future we’re hoping to expand the checks we use to determine a site’s health, and of course there’s no substitute for your own good judgment and knowledge of what’s going on with your site,” she adds. “But we hope that these changes make it easier for you to quickly spot major problems with your sites without having to dig down into all the data and reports.”

    It’s important to note that it may take several days for Google’s health warnings to go away after you fix the problems. Hopefully they can do something to speed that up in the future as well. If you’re still seeing it after a week, Moskwa says, the problem may not be resolved.

    Feedback from webmasters about site health has been generally positive, but some still want more. For example, on Moskwa’s post, Antonio Ooi comments, “We’re more interested to know what is missing, critical level (high, moderate, low) and recommended action/solution. For example, which image alt, meta tags, video sitemap etc are missing/invalid and how to fix. Or what else that has yet to be implemented on our site to take advantage of the new Google search engine’s cool features and so on. This will not only make us work smarter, this will also make Google team work smarter.”

    Another commenter going by “knowj” says, “It would be a great feature if the Webmasters Tools API allowed developers to feed error reports/logs into for websites/applications.This could generate an RSS feed/alerts ordered by priority/severity. This would create a useful single location for keeping track of the health of websites.”

    What do you think? What else should Google show you as part of its site health feature? Let us know in the comments.

    Now on the Analytics side of things…

    In addition to launching a premium version of Google Analytics for bigger sites, Google announced the launch of Real-Time Analytics. What this means is that you can now see how your traffic is coming in as it happens, which could be huge for helping you shape your promotion strategies, and play to your strengths.

    Essentially, it can help you do what you’re already doing with the data you get from Google Analytics and do it faster.

    “One way that I like to use these reports is to measure the immediate impact of social media. Whenever we put out a new blog post, we also send out a tweet,” says John Jersin of Google’s Analytics team. “With Real-Time, I can see the immediate impact to my site traffic.”

    “For example, last week we posted about the latest episode of Web Analytics TV and also tweeted about the post,” he adds. “By campaign tagging the links we shared, we could see how much traffic each channel is driving to the blog as it happened. We could also see when we stopped receiving visits from the tweet, which helps know when to reengage.”

    He says he also uses real-time analytics to make sure campaign tracking is correctly implemented before launching a new campaign.

    The new real-time reports are only available in the new version of Google Analytics. You can find a link to the new version at the top of Google Analytics if you’re not already using it. So far, only a few users have access to the reports, but they will be available for all in the coming weeks.

    Do you think real-time analytics data will help you improve the your site’s traffic? Tell us what you think.

  • Google Webmater Tools – Changes To Link Categorization

    Google announced that it is changing the way it categorizes link data in Webmaster Tools.

    “As you know, Webmaster Tools lists links pointing to your site in two separate categories: links coming from other sites, and links from within your site,” says Google Webmaster Trends analyst Susan Moskwa. “Today’s update won’t change your total number of links, but will hopefully present your backlinks in a way that more closely aligns with your idea of which links are actually from your site vs. from other sites.”

    For one, subdomains are now counted as internal links, which makes a great deal of sense. Here’s a chart showing how links have changed:

    Link categorization

    “If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links,” says Moskwa. “We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.”

    She does note that if you own a root domain, your number of external links may appear to go down.

  • Google Algorithm Testing – Search Giant Calls for Help Detecting Scrapers

    Google Algorithm Testing – Search Giant Calls for Help Detecting Scrapers

    Google announced that it is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites – blog scrapers in particular. The company is calling on users to help them.

    “We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve our algorithms,” the company says on a “Report Scraper Pages” form, found here.

    Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, tweeted about the new initiative:

    @mattcutts
    Matt Cutts    Scrapers getting you down? Tell us about blog scrapers you see: http://t.co/6HPhROS We need datapoints for testing. 1 day ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    This testing comes after months of iterations of Google’s Panda Update, designed to improve the quality of search results, though there has been no shortage of complaints about scrapers ranking over original content in that time.

    The testing also follows a recent, big refresh of Google’s spam submission process, discussed here.

    This past week, Google shared an interesting video, providing an inside look at the search algorithm tweaking process. While no earth shattering information was necessarily contained, it did provide a rare visual glimpse into the process. Watch it below.

  • Google: Not Having Robots.txt is “A Little Bit Risky”

    Google: Not Having Robots.txt is “A Little Bit Risky”

    Robots.txt as you may know, lets Googlebot know whether you want it to crawl your site or not.

    Google’s Matt Cutts spoke about a few options for these files in the latest Webmaster Help video, in response to a user-submitted question: “Is it better to have a blank robots.txt file, a robots.txt that contains User-agent: *Disallow:” or no robots.txt file at all?”

    “I would say any of the first two,” Cutts responded. “Not having a robots.txt file is a little bit risky – not very risky at all, but a little bit risky because sometimes when you don’t have a file, your web host will fill in the 404 page, and that could have various weird behaviors. Luckily we are able to detect that really, really well, so even that is only like a 1% kind of risk.”

    “But if possible, I would have a robots.txt file whether it’s blank or you say User-agent: *Disallow nothing, which means everybody’s able to crawl anything they want is pretty equal,” said Cutts. “We’ll treat those syntactically as being exactly the same. For me, I’m a little more comfortable with User-agent: * and then Disallow: just so you’re being very specific that ‘yes, you’re allowed to crawl everything’. If it’s blank then yes, people were smart enough to make the robots.txt file, but it would be great to have just like that indicator that says exactly, ‘ok, here’s what the behavior is that’s spelled out.’ Otherwise, it could be like maybe somebody deleted everything in the file by accident.”

    “If you don’t have one at all, there’s just that little tiny bit of risk that your web host might do something strange or unusual like return a ‘you don’t have permission to read this’ file, which you know, things get a little strange at that point.,” Cutts reiterated.

    All of this, of course, assumes that you want Google to crawl your site.

    In another video from Cutts we looked at yesterday, he noted that Google will sometimes use DMOZ to fill in snippets in search results when they can’t otherwise see the page’s content because it was blocked by robots.txt. He noted that Google is currently looking at whether or not it wants to continue doing this.

  • Google’s War Against Spam Goes Way Beyond Panda

    For all of you webmasters still lamenting over Google’s infamous Panda update, it’s important that you don’t take it personally. You were simply a casualty–correctly or no–in Google’s never-ending war against spam content in its search results.

    Google has long been preaching the gospel of quality content, and they are committed to keeping their index as spam-free as possible. Does such knowledge make potential Panda casualties easier to understand? Let us know what you think.

    Think of it as collateral damage, those of you who feel you were undeservedly punished. As indicated, Panda is just another in a long line of updates designed to clean the trash out of Google’s search index, and thanks to an awesome infographic from SEO.com, Panda update victims can track the history of the war, one that started in earnest in 2003, which is around the same time Google’s hold over the search engine industry was entering the “iron-clad” stage.

    Perhaps the perspective will give them some solace, as well the willingness to be prepared against future Google purges. The infographic in question. It’s a large file–almost 3000 pixels tall even with the size reduction–so be sure to click it for the full version:

    Google War
    Click to enlarge

    While the information contained about each algorithm update is indeed intriguing, the bottom part of the graphic, is even more compelling. It demonstrates just how many content farms were crushed when Panda came rolling through:

    Google Tank

    Clearly, if Google even gets a hint that a site’s content is suspect–either poor quality or scraped–that site was nuked, er, Panda’d, by the purge, and while there were indeed a number of sites that got caught in the collateral damage crossfire, the infographic clues us in as to why such drastic measures are necessary.

    Google’s search index, left unattended, would be a wasteland of spam sites, content farms, and prescription drug outlets.

    Furthermore, if your site was one of the unintended victims, reports are, if the necessary corrections/alterations are made, Google will open the doors of its index and allow your site back in.

    Some interesting tidbits from the infographic, at least from this perspective:

  • Google makes 400 updates to its algorithm each year, so even if there isn’t a widely-publicized released update with a catchy name, Google is constantly tailoring.
  • There were over three years between the “Big Daddy” update (2006) and “Caffeine” (2009). Before that there were many major updates on a yearly basis. 2003 saw four separate ones, while there were two each in 2004, 5, and 6.

    • Does the extended wait between Big Daddy and Caffeine mean Google was actually satisfied with the quality of their index, save for the minor algorithm tweaks? Whatever the case, this graphic does a great job of informing webmasters about Google’s index-purging ways. It should also be a warning against complacency when it comes to website quality control.

    Was a website you’re responsible for get caught in the Google Panda crossfire? If so, did it change how you approach the concept of on-site content? Do you understand Google’s motivations for spam purges like Panda? Let us know what you think in the comments.

  • Google Launches New Series of Matt Cutts Webmaster Tutorials

    Google Launches New Series of Matt Cutts Webmaster Tutorials

    Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has been answering webmaster questions in short videos for quite some time now. The videos have often been quite informative, and have tackled numerous issues that common webmasters face on a day-to-day basis.

    Now, Cutts is appearing in some longer more tutorial-driven videos.

    “Over the past couple of years, we’ve released over 375 videos on our YouTube channel, with the majority of them answering direct questions from webmasters,” says Michael Wyszomierski on Google’s Search Quality Team. “Today, we’re starting to release a freshly baked batch of videos, and you might notice that some of these are a little different.”

    “Don’t worry, they still have Matt Cutts in a variety of colored shirts,” he adds. “Instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics.”

    @mattcutts
    Matt Cutts    Woohoo! The next new batch of webmaster videos is ready! The first one is about 301 redirects: http://t.co/WWPUfBr 15 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    Here’s the first one:

    In the video itself, he talks about 301 redirect limits. In this particular video, Cutts answers his own question, which is: “Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site? How about how many redirects I can chain together?”

    The short answer is “no.” There is no cap, though it’s best not to redirect one page to too many redirects. 4 or 5 “hops” are dangerous, he says.

    Good question though. Hopefully the majority of questions will be as thoughtful as Matt’s. Or maybe we’ll see him answer more of his own questions. I guess we’ll just have to stay tuned.

  • Google Page Speed Service Rewrites Your Pages

    Google announced this morning that it’s releasing a new new web performance tool for webmeisters called Page Speed Service. This follows several other offerings from the company in the page speed realm, including a browser extension, the Page Speed Online API, and an Apache module.

    “Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages,” explains engineering manager Ram Ramani. “To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.”

    According to Joshua Bixby, who blogs at Web Peformance Today and runs Strangeloop, a site acceleration solutions provider, you may want to think twice about such a tool if you’re running an enterprise level site.

    “The offering is geared to small sites with little to no complexity, which is very different from enterprise offerings in the market,” he tells WebProNews. “The new Google product will break pages; enterprise web content optimization systems have many systems that ensure this does not happen.”

    “The features are basic and they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to acceleration,” he adds. “It performs a few basic acceleration features, some of which have the capability to slow down pages.”

    “The features don’t today address the most important performance challenges faced by the enterprise,” Bixby continues. “It might speed up individual page but not transactions or flows (i.e., it will probably hurt conversion); enterprise WCO companies look across pages and examine user flows to ensure optimal flows instead of pages. Some of the major performance issues facing pages today not solved by the new product include 3rd party tags, consolidation of images, etc.

    ” It is a very interesting competitive offering to Amazon and some of the small cloud acceleration players like CloudFlare, Blaze, Torbit, and Yotta,” he concludes. “The cloud providers offering basic page based acceleration features targeted at the small- to mid-market will be faced with a formidable competitor.”

    Ramani says Google has seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. They offer a tool here, where you can run tests.

    Google says it will be adding improvements to the service.

    Right now, Page Speed Service is only being offered to a limited set of webmasters for free, but the service won’t be free forever. Google says pricing will be “competitive,” and that details will be made available later. There is an application form here.

    Don’t forget, last year, Google announced that site speed is included as a ranking signal in its search algorithms.

  • Help Google Crawl Your Site More Effectively, But Use Caution

    Google has introduced some changes to Webmaster Tools – in particular, handling of URLs with parameters.

    “URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” explains Kamila Primke, Software Engineer with the Google Webmaster Tools Team. “This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot’s crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you’re sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.”

    Do you use URL parameters in Webmaster Tools? What do you think of the changes? Comment here.

    Google Webmaster Tools - URL Paramter page

    Google is now letting users describe the behavior of parameters. For example, you can let Google know if a parameter changes the actual content of the page.

    “If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value,” says Primke. “Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter.”

    Those would be: let Googlebot decide, every URL, only crawl URLS with value or no URLs.

    Users can tell Google if a parameter sorts, paginates, determines content, or other things that it might do. For each parameter, Google will also “try” to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that it has already crawled that contain a given parameter.

    To bring up the use of caution again, Primke warns about the responsibilities that come with using the No URLs option. “This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the ‘No URLs’ option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to ‘Every URL.’ You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is ‘Only URLs with value=x.’”

    She runs through some examples in this blog post, and there is more related information in Google’s Webmaster Help forum.

    @mattcutts
    Matt Cutts    Webmasters & SEOs: here’s *tons* of great info on our improved tool to handle url parameters better: http://t.co/TtBs8tp 2 minutes ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

    Be Careful About Selling the Same Stuff From Multiple Domains

    As long as we’re discussing webmaster issues for Google, I’ll also point to the latest Webmaster Help video from Matt Cutts, who discusses selling products on multiple domains. The user question he sought to answer was:

    “I manage 3 websites that sell the same products across 3 domains. Each site has a different selling approach, price structure, target audience, etc. Does Google see this as spumy or black hat?”

    Cutts says, “On one hand, if the domains are radically different lay-out, different selling approach, different structure – like, essentially completely different, and especially the fact that you said it’s only 3 domains, that might not be so bad. Clearly if it were 300 domains or 3,000 domains – you can quickly get to a fairly large number of domains that can be crowding up the search results and creating a bad user experience…by the time you get to a relatively medium-sized number of sites.”

    “The thing that was interesting about the question is that you said it’s the same products, as in identical. So it’s a little weird if you’re selling identical products across 3 domains. If you were selling like men’s sweaters on one, and women’s sweaters on another, and shoes on a third….I’ve said before, there’s no problem with having different domains for each product, and a small number of domains (2, 3, or 4) for very normally separable reasons can make perfect sense, but it is a little strange to sell the same products, so if they’re really identical, that starts to look a little bit strange – especially if you start to get more than 3 domains.”

    “Definitely, I have found that if you have one domain, you’ve got the time to build it up – to build the reputation for that domain…in my experience, when someone has 50 or 100 domains, they tend not to put as much work – as much love into each individual domain, and whether they intend to or not, that tends to show after a while. People have the temptation to auto-generate content or they just try to syndicate a bunch of feeds, and then you land on one domain vs. another domain, and it really looks incredibly cookie cutter – comparing the two domains, and that’s when users start to complain.

    Do you think Google takes the right approach to sites selling products from multiple domains? Share your thoughts here.

  • Are You Sure You’re Not Getting More Twitter Traffic Than You Realize?

    Are You Sure You’re Not Getting More Twitter Traffic Than You Realize?

    Social media analytics firm awe.sm has a very interesting post explaining why webmasters might be getting a lot more traffic from Twitter than they realize. This has sparked some interesting discussion around the tech blogosophere, and quite frankly, it might make you care a little bit more about your Twitter presence.

    Do you think Twitter’s an important tool for driving traffic? Comment here.

    To make a long story short, the report indicates that your analytics software is not counting all of your Twitter referrals as Twitter referrals, largely because Twitter itself is accessible through so many different channels via its API. This includes third-party clients, and other sites that serve tweets.

    After looking at its own data for six months, spanning links to over 33,000 sites, awe.sm found that :

    • only 24.4% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer;
    • 62.6% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all (i.e. they would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics);
    • and 13.0% of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (e.g. facebook.com, linkedin.com).

    That last 13% would account for sites that post tweets. For example, people tying their Twitter account to their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so that tweets appear there automatically – a fairly common practice. While technically, traffic from these would still be coming from Facebook or LinkedIn in a sense, they are also the result of a link originally being tweeted.

    awe.sm Twitter stats

    As VC and entrepreneur Mark Suster notes, “Many Tweets are now being sent to LinkedIn and then the publisher assumes that the source of the referral is LinkedIn. In some ways it is because that’s where your user engaged the content. But get rid of the Tweet and you get rid of the referral traffic…”

    “When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket,” explains awe.sm’s Jonathan Strauss, the author of the report. “The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is — if a visit didn’t come from another webpage (i.e. no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.”

    “If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile,” he adds. “And since 2/3 of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients*, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.”

    One area where Twitter won’t help you, at least currently, is Google’s realtime search. The two company’s don’t currently have their previous deal in place. It remains to be seen whether the two will come to terms again. If Google+ gets big enough, Google may decide it can simply do without the Twitter firehose. Likewise, Twitter might want to withhold it for competitive reasons. Some people are already spending less time using Twitter, as a result of Google+‘s emergence.

    There are ways you can optimize for Twitter traffic. For example, as we’ve referenced in the past, Shéa Bennett at Twittercism, came up with an equation for retweet optimization. The concept is basically: consider Twitter’s 140-character limit, consider your user name, and consider how many characters you need to leave free for the person retweeting it.

    “When sharing links and content, I always ensure I leave a minimum of 12 characters at the end of each and every tweet,” he wrote. “This is a great habit to adopt. Otherwise, those wanting to retweet you are forced to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because of this extra work, many times, they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all.”

    Of course promoting your Twitter account on your various web presences, and including prominent tweet buttons on your content can help as well.

    Are you getting significant traffic from Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google on Duplicate Content Concerns Regarding Blog Posts on the Home Page

    As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts often posts videos on the company’s Webmaster Help YouTube channel, answering user questions. He linked to one today about duplicate content concerns and having blog posts on your home page.

    The question was, “Hi, I’m noticing more people are using the API for their blog to pull the latest X posts up to the front page of their website. This gives a refreshing feel to the home page, but is this considered duplicate?”

    Cutts responded by saying, “If you do something like this, my main advice would be not to put the entire blog post on the home page, but for example, if you have a paragraph – you know, something that’s sort of teaser – and then a link to the actual location of your article, that’s a pretty good way to do it.”

    “If you go to the front page of my blog, I’ll have a whole bunch of different stuff there, but then there are always links that go to the original article for where it’s located on my blog,” he says.

    Cutts does actually appear to generally show the entire posts on the main page of his blog, though you have to click the link to see all of the comments and everything.

    “So, as long as you don’t have a completely duplicate blog post, where the whole things is completely there, it shouldn’t be an issue, but even then, Google for the most part, is able to disambiguate and say, ‘oh, this is a page that’s refreshing pretty often,’ and we have a pretty good idea that the actual content is linked to on these following pages,” says Cutts.

    “It is very common for people to have their main blog, and have the full text of their posts right there on the main page, and that works completely fine. So those are very similar situations, and in general, people haven’t reported huge problems with that. So I think that’s perfectly fine to do.”

    Long story short, as long as your posts link to the actual post pages, you’ll probably be fine.

  • Google Adds HTTP Header Support to rel= “canonical”

    Google is now supporting link rel=”canonical” relationships specified in HTTP headers. Evidently this was heavily requested, as the feature is in response to webmaster feedback.

    The syntax can be found in this document. Google Webmaster Trends analyst Pierre Far outlines an example on the Webmaster Central Blog:

    To see the rel=”canonical” HTTP header in action, let’s look at the scenario of a website offering a white paper both as an HTML page and as a downloadable PDF alternative, under these two URLs:
    http://www.example.com/white-paper.html
    http://www.example.com/white-paper.pdf
    In this case, the webmaster can signal to Google that the canonical URL for the PDF download is the HTML document by using a rel=”canonical” HTTP header when the PDF file is requested; for example:
    GET /white-paper.pdf HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.example.com
    (…rest of HTTP request headers…)

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: application/pdf
    Link: ; rel=”canonical”
    Content-Length: 785710
    (… rest of HTTP response headers…)

    Far also notes that the canonical tag in HTTP headers might help when a site serves the same file from multiple URLs, such as a content distribution network, when the webmaster wants to let Google know the preferred URL.

    The support is for web search only.

    Last month, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed some reasons (which are few and far between) why Google might skip your canonical tags:

    If you’re unfamiliar with rel=”canonical” altogether, watch our interview with Cutts from when it was first launched:

  • Matt Cutts Explains Porn Sites and PageRank

    A Google Webmaster video released today aims to answer the burning question surrounding porn sites’ lower PageRank.

    The question asked of Google’s Matt Cutts was as follows:

    What are the technical reasons porn sites have such low PageRank? None go over PR6. A lack of links from trusted sites? Rampant link exchanges with low quality sites? Penalties for affiliate links? Or is there a general penalty on the industry? Studio 3X, New York

    Matt Cutts says that his best guess is that it has to do with popularity vs. links. Google doesn’t have some sort of anti-porn rule, its just that PageRank looks at the number of links and the quality of those links to a site, not really the popularity of the site.

    He says, “People very rarely link to porn sites, even though a lot of people visit a lot of porn sites.” If PageRank equaled popularity, then porn sites’ PageRank would be right at the top.

    Watch the whole webmaster video below:

  • Reasons Google Might Skip Your Canonical Tag

    Reasons Google Might Skip Your Canonical Tag

    This week, Google’s Matt Cutts has been discussing rel=canonical, providing some info that webmasters might find pretty helpful. “A user submitted a question to Matt, which said, “It takes longer for Google to find the rel=canonical pages but 301 redirects seem to lose impact (link juice) over time. Is there similar churn with rel=canonical?”

    He addressed this in the above video. Cutts’ response was to say that some people ask how much PageRank/link juice if they lose if they use a 301 redirect, and that they lose just a “tiny, little bit” or “not very much at all”.

    “If you don’t lose any, then there’d be some temptation for people to use 301 redirects for all the stuff on their site rather than links, since some amount of PageRank always sort of evaporates or disappears whenever you follow a link – people would say, ‘Oh, why use links and not just use 301 redirects for everything?’” he says.

    In regards to 301 redirects vs. rel=canonical, he says in general, he would use 301 redirects if you can, because they’re more widely supported, everyone knows about how to follow them, and any new search engine is going to have to handle those. Also, if you can have it work within your own CMS, he says, then the user’s browser gets carried along with the redirect.

    Cutts also took to his personal blog to discuss rel=canonical a bit more, and said that Google actually doesn’t use it all cases. “Okay, I sometimes get a question about whether Google will always use the url from rel=canonical as the preferred url. The answer is that we take rel=canonical urls as a strong hint, but in some cases we won’t use them,” he says.

    This applies to cases where Google thinks you’re “shooting yourself in the foot by accident,” like pointing it to a non-existent/404 page, or if they think your site has been hacked and the hacker added a malicious rel=canonical.

    Google will also not use rel=canonical if it is in the HTML body or if it sees “weird stuff” in the HEAD section of the HTML. “For example, if you start to insert regular text or other tags that we normally only see in the BODY of HTML into the HEAD of a document, we may assume that someone just forgot to close the HEAD section,” he says, suggesting that you make rel=canonical one of the first things (if not THE first thing) in your HEAD section.

    Here’s what Cutts had to say about the canonical tag when it was announced and WebProNews interviewed him about it a couple years ago:

  • Google’s Page Speed Online Launched

    Over at the Google Webmaster Central blog, they’ve announced “Page Speed Online,” which allows users to check out the performance of any page on the internet, at any time.  Users will receive a page performance score calculated out of 100 and will be given prioritized suggestions upon which to improve.

    When you run a test for a particular page, you will receive a score.

    That score will be accompanied on the left hand side by suggestions for improving the page.
    Google ranks these suggestions either high, medium or low priority.  The high priority suggestions are the ones that will give you the most improvement for the most minimal effort.  The medium priority suggestion will not give you as much improvement and may require much more work.  The low priority suggestions are to be concerned with only when you take care of the higher priority ones.

    As you can see above, on the bottom right of where you see the number score, there is an option for a mobile analysis.  Google has added support for mobile pages to this new tool:

    Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop.

    The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.

    Google also notes that Page Speed Online is powered in the same way as many Chrome and Firefox extensions as well as webpagetest.org.

  • Facebook Lets Site-Owners Target Content Based on Individual “Likes”

    Did you know you can publish content directly to people that click the "like" button on any piece of content on your site?

    A recent post on the Facebook Developer blog discusses just that. "As part of Operation Developer Love, we are are continuing to update our documentation," said Facebook’s Ankur Pansari. "Recently, I was talking with some developers in New York, and they were surprised to learn that they could publish updates to people who have liked their Open Graph Pages."

    "You can publish stories to people who like your Open Graph Page the same way you write a Facebook post from your own wall. The stories appear in the News Feeds of people who have clicked the Like button on the Open Graph Page," he added. "You can also publish using our API. If you associate your Open Graph Page with a Facebook app using the fb:app_id meta tag, you can publish updates to the users who have liked your pages via the Graph API."

    Do more with the Facebook like button A tip of the hat goes to Josh Constine at InsideFacebook for pointing this out, as well as raising a good point that publishers should consider: "For instance, retailer Urban Outfitters has Like buttons on every product in their website’s ecommerce store. It sells a wide variety of products, from clothing to bikes. If the Urban Outfitters Facebook Page posted an updated about a new line of bikes it was carrying, only a small part of their audience would find it interesting, while a large portion of their audiences would find the update irrelevant or even spammy, leading them to click the Unlike button."

    "Instead, Urban Outfitters could publish the update about bikes to only those users who’ve clicked Like buttons on their bikes," he adds. "By sending product-specific updates to those who Like that type of product, Urban Outfitters can send higher relevancy updates more frequently but to less people, increasing click through rates and driving more traffic to their website without spamming all 600,000 fans of the Facebook Page."

    Basically, this has the potential to be a very powerful tool for anyone using "like" buttons on their sites, but like any other powerful tool, handle with care.

  • 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.

  • New Facebook Registration Tool For Site Owners Aimed at Increasing Conversions

    Facebook is launching a new registration tool for site owners, which utilizes a single line of code. "For users it means quicker ways to sign up for new sites with Facebook, while seeing what information they’re sharing, and which friends have already connected," a representative for Facebook tells WebProNews.

    The company  refers to it as an alternative to Facebook Login (which is the current name for Facebook Connect), when you want to provide an option for users without Facebook accounts, your site needs additional info that Facebook doesn’t provide, or a traditional HTML form suits your site more. 

    "For users who are logged into Facebook, the registration tool will pre-populate fields with information they’ve already entered on Facebook, saving them time and specifically showing what information the website is requesting," the rep explains. "Nothing will be shared with the website until the user decides to connect and click ‘Register’."

    Facebook Registrations

     "Website owners can also customize the fields to ask for additional information, which the user can enter without sharing any information back to Facebook," she adds. "Once an account is created, the site will become customized for that person, filtering content based on the actions of their friends, such as comments, reviews and likes."

    The tool actually has the potential to increase conversion rates (possibly e-commerce sales). 

    "By minimizing the friction associated with signing up for a new account and making it easy for people to bring their friends with them, we’ve seen that people are more likely to complete the sign up process, stay on sites longer, share more content and come back more often," says Facebook’s Paul Tarjan. "For example, in beta tests with FriendFeed, Facebook sign ups increased 300%."

    This will no doubt be an attractive offering for a lot of site owners, considering how important the Facebook-hosted social graph is becoming to the web. If it can increase conversions and it only requires a single line of code, lots of sites will likely jump on board.

  • Optimizing Your Website For Google

    Optimizing Your Website For Google

    Coverage of SES Chicago will continue.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes from the event this week.

    Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google, offered advice on how to optimize your site in a Q&A session keynote.

    Ask yourself if your website is helping your customers and users. Do you have relevant content?

    Reviews and user-generated content is an opportunity for your site to rank in Google.

    When it comes to links, optimize your site for your users first and then focus on links. There is nothing you can do about old links. “If users find links valuable, then search engines will too,” said Ohye.

    Maile Ohye

    Is it better to be an older website? It’s good to have an established business, but if you have buzz and links you can build on that. It does help to have age because your website is more established.

    Google does not have a “trust rank” so don’t be obsessed with it. If your site has a value add you can compete.

    Google Caffeine has nothing to do with ranking, it was a major infrastructure change that allowed Google to process more documents. It led to a 50% fresher index.

    Webmaster Central is where you can go to get questions answered about your website.

    Look at conversions and rankings for items you want to sell. Sign up for site alerts. Google will message you about any problems about your site – hacking, malware etc.

    To sell more or convert look at your site and search query data. Look at what your site ranks for and focus on that for SEO. Look at terms and where they rank. You may run into duplicate content issues.  Look at your search results to see where you rank.

    Keywords. See where they rank in webmaster tools. And shift or adjust from there.

  • Google Now Indexes SVG Files

    Google Now Indexes SVG Files

    Google is now indexing SVG files. SVG, which stands for scalable vector graphics, is a widely-deployed, royalty-free,  XML-based format for vector graphics and support for interactivity. The format was developed and is maintained by the W3C SVG Working Group.

    "We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step," a joint post from software engineers Bogdan Stanescu and John Sarapata on the Google Webmaster Central Blog says.

    "We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML," the pair add. "The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results."

    Google Indexes SVGs

    Google says that if you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from search results, you can use the "X-Robots-Tag: noindex" directive in the HTTP header. More info about robots exclusion protocol can be found here.

    Google has a full list of the file-types it indexes here.

  • Facebook Makes Improvements to the Like Button

    Facebook announced today that it is releasing some new features for the Like button social plug-in. There is now commenting for the iFrame version, publishing to connected users via the Graph API, and "more robust" analytics.

    "Now, when a user adds a comment to the iFrame version of the Like button, a larger, more prominent story will be shared with the user’s friends. In the past, we’ve seen comments result in increased distribution and referral traffic," says Facebook Platform product manager Austin Haugen.

    Like Button gets comments feature

    "We encourage websites with objects that people may want to more permanently connect with, such as a brand or product, to publish relevant updates to its connected users," says Haugen. "For example, publish a special offer to users who have liked a specific product. Simply add a few Open Graph tags to your Web page and click on the Admin Link (only visible to admins) to use the Publisher."

    Documentation on how to use the Open Graph API to publish to multiple Open Graph pages can be found here.

    As far as analytics, Facebook has added parameters to help you test and optimize Like button performance on your site. With these, you will be able A/B test different types and placements of the button.

    More info on all of these new features is available here.