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Dominate Google Search Results Pages for a dollar. Automatically post to popular Video, Blog, Social Networking and Podcasting sites to dramatically increase visitors to your products and services. Begin to Dominate Google starting for only one dollar.

What is Google Chrome OS?  
Download Google Chrome

The new browser from Google. Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Browser and Browser Tools

More Operating Systems

Google has announced that it will be releasing its own operating system. The Google Chrome Operating System, named after the company's Google Chrome Web browser, is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. The software architecture consists of Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. Google says that for application developers, the Web is the platform. About   Google takes on Microsoft with operating system     Google OS by 2010    Well it could be true 

More Operating Systems.

Google News Timeline  A web application that organizes information chronologically. Google News Timeline allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline. Google Timeline Tenth Birthday. See how Google has developed over the years.

Google Answers Some Tricky Questions :-

Does the age of a website/domain affect its ranking?
Do 301 redirects carry over PageRank?
Why do pages translated into different languages each have different rankings in their respective engines?
Do backlinks from bad sites negatively affect my PageRank?
How often does your search algorithm change?
Could sharing an IP address with a bad site get my site penalized?
Does Google have a problem with rank-checking software?
Is there PageRank boost from .edu or .gov links?
And More...

Google I/O a developer gathering focused on pushing the boundaries of web applications using Google and open web technologies. Google engineers and web development leaders will lead you through two days full of in-depth breakout sessions on the latest technologies, and informal Q&A at Fireside Chats. For the most current updates from the conference, follow us on the @googleio Twitter account and on the Google Code Blog.
Google Launching SearchWiki You Control Your Listings.

Google is planning on giving searchers unprecedented control over search results with what appears to be the launch SearchWiki . Searchwiki looks to be the final version of a customizable search results trial from earlier this year. The aim is to give users the ability to control how listings appear for certain searches.

The eminent launch comes hot on the heals of Microsoft's release of URank which we blogged about last week. U Rank is a search engine that allows people to organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.

Google's SearchWiki runs on exactly the same principle, the only difference being is that it's incorporated directly into Google's core results page - not a totally independent search engine. 

Within SearchWiki, users are able to move listings up and down the rankings, delete listings they deem irrelevant, add listings they believe should be included and even add comments to listings (which will be visible to other users).  Read more at Justin Hileman.

Video Tutorial: Google for Webmasters (These are a MUST WATCH)

Google's New AdWords Interface (Watch video's from Google about the new AdWords interface)
Getting Started with Google about the new AdWords interface Guide   (PDF)

Google's New AdWords Interface (Watch video's from Google about the new AdWords interface)

How to complete common AdWords tasks in the new interface? "How to" guide

Search a comprehensive set of FAQs in a full Help Centre on the new interface

Website Optimiser. Google’s free website testing and optimisation tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a penny. Using Website Optimiser to test and optimise site content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI, whether you’re new to marketing or an expert. Carry out A/B testing etc...  More Carry out A/B testing etc...

GWO, (Google Website Opimiser in 60 seconds: Pick your test type Google Website Optimizer Tour

Download Google Chrome Browser (BETA) the new browser from Google. Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. More Browsers

Google on Google Chrome - comic book ( Gives a good, insight into Chrome)

Google Chrome is Google's browser project

Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement by Google

Google Personalized Search
Google® can personalize your search results making them more useful and relevant. In this short video we discuss how we personalize your search results and how to turn personalization on or off based on your preference.

More about Google Personalize Search


Google Help Center for more details on personalized search

How we customize results and how you can turn off personalization.

Google Visual Search   Update Google Visual Search
Google Goggles now available for Android

Google Goggles mobile visual search

Google Goggles is geared towards the mobile market and allows anybody with the ability to snap a photo to receive relevant information.

Android and me




Mobile Phone Programming Mobile Code. Programming Phones

Google Labs has launched an experimental audio search which allows one to search text within YouTube videos. Google Audio Indexing

Google Coding Web Pages Speed tips

All About Google Quality Score From Andrew GoodmanGoogle Quality Score has received both positive and negative attention. WebProNews spoke with Andrew Goodman, the Founder and Principal of Page-Zero Media, about Google®s Quality Score. He explains Google®s perspective of the Quality Score, but he also talks about the difficulties people experience with it. Catch the complete story from Reporter Abby Prince, only on WebProNews. Google®s Quality Score relates to Google AdWords® and the number of clicks for PPC use as well as targeted keyword bidding and content for those clicks..

Android mobile phone operating system. Put simply, it's an open source mobile phone platform that lets users create and develop their own applications. In an effort to speed up application development, Google have just released the Android SDK (Software Development Kit) with an explanation video and a $10m reward for users who develop the best new applications. The $10 million dollar reward is part of the Android Developer Challenge which is a two part challenge rewarding creative application development for the android platform. More about WAP, WML, Wireless Markup Language, Wireless links,Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, PixeCode, PDF414, Semacode, Datamatrix, radio. Great Mobile Phones.

More about Android:-

Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it's a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google's AdSense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine. (Custom Search Engine Gadgets). More Widgets and Gadgets. Collaborate on a Google Custom Search Engine? Collaboration is an optional feature for Custom Search Engines. It allows you to let other people whose expertise you trust contribute to your Custom Search Engine. You can either invite people explicitly, or allow anyone to volunteer to collaborate, with your approval. Your Custom Search Engine can benefit not only from your hard work, but also from that of others who collaborate with you. Also read Social bookmarks. Bookmarks. Favicons. Tagvertising.

Google Request a Free Campaign Optimization. If you're interested in improving your campaign performance, one of our AdWords Specialists can provide customized suggestions for one of your campaigns. Simply fill out this request form telling us about your business and advertising goals. We'll review your campaign with your goals in mind and then send you our suggestions within ten business days.

Pay-per-action advertising. Google's Out to Remake the Ad World Again. The search giant is rolling out a broad trial for advertisers, where they pay only if they get what they want. Google (GOOG) is trying to change the advertising game yet again. On Mar. 20, the king of pay-per-click search advertising said it would begin a broad new advertising trial in which marketers will pay only when customers take a specified action, such as completing an online purchase. For marketers focused on turning ads directly into sales, as opposed to creating a brand image, the new service may be something of an answered prayer. For all its measurability, traditional pay-per-click advertising creates waste for some marketers because it forces them to shell out each time someone stumbles upon their ad and hits the mouse button, whether they are truly interested in making a purchase or merely curious.

Google Radio advertising just got easier. AdWords now provides an online interface that allows you to create a high-quality radio ad and launch a radio advertising campaign, in just a few easy steps. You can set your own budget and decide when and where you'd like your ads to air. You can showcase your business to millions of radio listeners - quickly and easily. After your ads actually run, get online reports that tell you exactly when your ad played. You can even hear real-time recordings of how your ads actually sounded on the radio. View Radio Advertising demo.

Google webmaster guidelines Basic Google.  Google Webmaster Guidelines include:-

Webmaster Help Center. Automated queries. Google's Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google. Sending automated queries absorbs resources and includes using any software  to send automated queries to Google to determine how a website or webpage ranks in Google search results for various queries.

Official Google Webmaster Help group

Google Secret Handbook (PDF Format)    More about PDF Format.

Google's SEO Starter Guide

Keyword Estimator Tool Calculator for AdWords Pay-Per-Click calculations.  Google Traffic Estimator Sandbox Estimated traffic and the costs of  Google Adwords®.

Google Search Keyword Tool Helps generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website.

Google Keyword Analysis. Gives you a detailed view of your keyword's Quality Score including how Quality Score impacts your keyword and ad's performance, and how you can improve it. More Trackers, Website statistics, Hit Counters. Page Load Speed Tests and about Keyword and Keyword phrases.

Sitemaps Yahoo and Google announced a collaborative site called Sitemaps.org Watch this Video. A single way to submit sitemaps to both Google and Yahoo. More information about Google Site Map  Yahoo Site Map, Yahoo Site Explorer. Not only are Google and Yahoo collaborating on this project, they've also issued an open invitation to the other search engines willing to join.  Microsoft accepted that invitation and will jointly support Sitemaps.org and its efforts. More about SiteMaps. More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing.

 Validome Validate your Google SiteMap.
Validome Validation Services for your HTML,  XHTML,   WML.

Search Engine Ranking Factors, "a must read" This article contains a large list of the factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Google & AskJeeves) for a particular term or phrase. SEO moz More about Google Page Rank® More about PageRank

Google Webmaster Central Your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you'd like your site to be crawled and indexed:-

How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz?

Webmaster Level: All

Thanks to all of you who took our webmaster quiz and waited patiently to see how well you did! Today, we're pleased to present the Webmaster Quiz answers! We hope this quiz has provided some clarity on common issues users ask about in the Webmaster Help Forum. We'll go over a few of the questions and answers here, but if some of the answers lead you to ask more questions, we encourage you to continue the discussion in the forum!

1) You have moved your site to a new domain name. For users and search engines, the preferred way to permanently redirect traffic is:

Correct answer: a) 301 redirect

Explanation: A 301 redirect is preferred because it tells search engines, "Ok, this is the new domain I want you to show to users from now on," as opposed to something like a 302 redirect, which tells search engines, "Hey, this is only a temporary redirect--so, uh, I might change the URL soon, okay?" In addition to implementing a 301 redirect, the Change of Address feature in Webmaster Tools can help Google find your new site.

2) Your server is going to be moved and unavailable for a day. What should you do?

Correct answer: c) Return "Network Unavailable (503)" with a helpful message to all requests

Explanation: Maybe not as commonly known to webmasters, but very useful if your site is down! This tells crawlers to come back later, rather than crawling and indexing your "Down for maintenance" pages when you respond with 200 rather than 503. Check out the Help Center to learn more about HTTP status codes.

3) Your website is not in the index five days after you've put it online; what should you do?

Correct answer: b) Continue working on the site

Explanation: This one is a bit tricky. There could be a number of reasons why your site is not indexed. For example, a site's robots.txt file may contain a directive to inadvertently block crawlers from searching its contents. But the main take-away from this question is that if your site is pretty new, it may just be a matter of time before it gets indexed. You should continue to focus on improving your site for your users.

6) You need to remove 192 PDF files from the /private-files/ folder which have gotten indexed. What's the fastest way to do this?

Correct answer: d) Disallow the folder in robots.txt and request removal of the whole folder in Webmaster Tools.

Explanation: Before removing a directory that you don't want indexed, you need to include the Disallow directive in your robots.txt file to tell search bots not to crawl it anymore.

9) You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:

Correct answer: c) None of this is necessary. Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Explanation: Some country-coded domains may overlap with international ones, like .tv--which could also be a site from Tuvalu. But these sort of cases are rare and if they do arise, don't be shy to seek out help on the forum.

Great job to everyone who took the quiz and tested their know-how! And last but certainly not least, kudos to the top scorers! Congratulations on a quiz well done!

40/40:
  • ChrisRaimondi
  • theopeek
  • beussery
39/40:
  • Petro
  • pornel
  • Ian Macfarlane
  • g1smd
  • Mattman
  • thinkpragmatic
  • GLV
  • GoalGorilla
  • rssmarketer
38/40:
  • BartVB
  • Kim Minh Kaplan
  • Ippi
  • Erik Dafforn
  • scole01
  • Konstantin
  • John
  • fer.vazquez
  • eMBe
  • Todd Nemet
  • p.jaroszynski
  • ph0b

 

Request visitors' permission before installing software

(Cross-posted on the Google Korea Blog)

Webmaster Level: All

Legitimate websites may require that their visitors install software. These sites often do so to provide their users with additional functionality beyond what's available in standard web browsers, like viewing a special type of document. Please note, however, that if your site requires specific software for your visitors, the implementation of this software installation process is very important. Incorrect implementation can appear as though you're installing malware, triggering our malware detection filters, and resulting in your site being labeled with a 'This site may harm your computer' malware warning in our search results.

If using your site requires a special software install, you need to first inform visitors why they need to install additional software. Here are two bad examples and one good example of how to handle the situation of a new visitor to such a site:

Bad: Install the required software without giving the visitor a chance to choose whether or not they want to install the software.

Bad: Pop up a confirmation dialog box that prompts the visitor to agree to install the software, without providing enough detail for the visitor to make an informed choice. (This includes the standard ActiveX control installation dialog box, since it doesn't contain enough meaningful information for a visitor to make an informed decision about that particular piece of software.)

Good: Redirect the new visitor to an information page which provides thorough details on why a special software installation is required to use the site. From this page the visitor can initiate the installation of the required software if they decide to proceed with installation.

Has your site been labeled with a malware warning in our search results due to a poorly implemented software installation requirement? Updating the installation process to ensure that visitors are fully informed on why the installation is necessary, and giving them a chance to opt out, should resolve this issue. Once you've got this in place, you can go to Webmaster Tools and request a malware review to expedite the process of removing any malware warnings associated with your site in Google's search results.

Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA

Webmaster Level: All

If you allow users to publish content on your website, from leaving comments to creating user profiles, you’ll likely see spammers attempt to take advantage of these mechanisms to generate traffic to their own sites. Having this spammy content on your site isn't fun for anyone. Users may be subjected to annoying advertisements directing them to low-quality or dangerous sites containing scams or malware. And you as a webmaster may be hosting content that violates a search engine's quality guidelines, which can harm your site's standing in search results.

There are ways to handle this abuse, such as moderating comments and reviewing new user accounts, but there is often so much spam created that it can become impossible to keep up with. Spam can easily get to this unmanageable level because most spam isn’t created manually by a human spammer. Instead, spammers use computer programs called “bots” to automatically fill out web forms to create spam, and these bots can generate spam much faster than a human can review it.

To level the playing field, you can take steps to make sure that only humans can interact with potentially spammable features of your website. One way to determine which of your visitors are human is by using a CAPTCHA , which stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." A typical CAPTCHA contains an image of distorted letters which humans can read, but are not easily understood by computers. Here's an example:


You can easily take advantage of this technology on your own site by using reCAPTCHA, a free service owned by Google. One unique aspect of reCAPTCHA is that data collected from the service is used to improve the process of scanning text, such as from books or newspapers. By using reCAPTCHA, you're not only protecting your site from spammers; you're helping to digitize the world's books.

Luis Von Ahn, one reCAPTCHA's co-founders, gives more details about how the service works in the video below:


If you’d like to implement reCAPTCHA for free on your own site, you can sign up here. Plugins are available for easy installation on popular applications and programming environments such as WordPress and PHP.

 

Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events

Webmaster Level: All

Last year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster.

We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Today, we're excited to kick off the new year by adding support for events.

Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. Here's an example of what the new events Rich Snippets will look like:


The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.

If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we've prepared to help you get started. Please note, however, that marking up your content is not a guarantee that Rich Snippets will show for your site. Just as we did for previous formats, we will take a gradual approach to incorporating the new event snippets to ensure a great user experience along the way.

Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!

Google SEO resources for beginners

Webmaster Level: Beginner

Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010:

Step 1: Absorb the basics

  • If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you're on an exercise bike, training for Ironman.
  • Or, if you're more a video watcher, try listening to my "Search Friendly Development" session while you're cleaning your house. Keep in mind that some parts of the presentation are a little more technical.

  • For good measure, and because at some point you'll hear references to them, check out our webmaster guidelines for yourself.

Step 2: Explore details that pique your interest
Are you done with the basics but now you have some questions? Good for you! Try researching a particular topic in our Webmaster Help Center. For example, do you want more information about crawling and indexing or understanding what links are all about?


Step 3: Verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools
It takes a little bit of skill, but we have tons of help for verification. Once you verify ownership of your site (i.e., signal to Google that you're the owner), you can:


A sample message regarding the crawlability of your site


Step 4: Research before you do anything drastic
Usually the basics (e.g., good content/service and a crawlable site with indexable information) are the necessities for SEO. You may hear or read differently, but before you do anything drastic on your site such as robots.txt disallow'ing all of your directories or revamping your entire site architecture, please try:
 

State of the Index 2009

Webmaster Level: All

At PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009, I gave a "State of the Index" talk which covers what Google has done for users, web developers, and webmasters in the last year. I recently recreated it on video for those of you who didn't make it to the conference. You can watch it below:


And here are the slides if you'd like to follow along:


Test your webmaster know-how!

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team
 

Answering your December Grab Bag questions

Webmaster Level: All

You asked and Matt Cutts answered. It's time to answer the latest round of Grab Bag questions! Here's the first answer, complete with Matt's new hairstyle:


We have a lot of videos ready to share, so we're not currently taking new questions for the Grab Bag. If you have a question that you would like answered, your best bet as always is to head to our Webmaster Help Forum, where you'll find plenty of knowledgeable webmasters, including some Bionic Posters!

To be kept up-to-date on our latest video releases, you can follow @googlewmc on Twitter, where we'll announce new videos and blog posts as they're published.

Helping webmasters from user to user

You have to have some kind of super-powers to keep up with all of the issues posted in our Webmaster Help Forum—that's why we call our Top Contributors the "Bionic Posters." They're able to leap through tall questions in a single bound, providing helpful and solid information all around. We're thankful to the Bionics for tackling problems both hard and easy (well, easy if you know how). Our current Bionic Posters are: Webado (Christina), Phil Payne, Red Cardinal (Richard), Shades1 (Louis), Autocrat, Tim Abracadabra, Aaron, Cristina, Robbo, John, Becky Sharpe, Sasch, BbDeath, Beussery (Brian), Chibcha (Terry), Luzie (Herbert), 奥宁 (Andy), Ashley, Kaleh and Redleg!

With thousands of webmasters visiting the English Help Forum every day, some questions naturally pop up more often than others. To help catch these common issues, the Bionic Posters have also helped to create and maintain a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions and their answers. These FAQs cover everything from "Why isn't my site indexed?" to diagnosing difficult issues with the help of Google Webmaster Tools, often referring to our Webmaster Help Center for specific topics. Before you post in the forum, make sure you've read through these resources and do a quick search in the forum; chances are high that your question has been answered there already.

Besides the Bionic Posters, we're lucky to have a number of very active and helpful users in the forum, such as: squibble, Lysis, yasir, Steven Lockey, seo101, RickyD, MartinJ and many more. Thank you all for making this community so captivating and—most of the time—friendly.

Here are just a few (well, a little more than a few) of the many comments that we've seen posted in the forum:

  • "Thank you for this forum... Thank you to those that take the time to answer and care!"
  • "I've only posted one question here, but have received a wealth of knowledge by reading tons of posts and answers. The time you experts put into helping people with their problems is very inspiring and my hat's off to each of you. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that your services aren't going unnoticed and I truly appreciate the lessons."
  • "Thank you very much cristina, what you told me has done the trick. I really appriciate the help as this has been bugging me for a while now and I didn't know what was wrong."
  • "thank you ssssssssssoooo much kaleh. "
  • "OK, Phil Payne big thanks to You! I have made changes and maybe people are starting to find me in G! Thanks to Ashley, I've started to make exclusive and relevant content for people."
  • "If anything, it has helped me reflect on the sites and projects of days gone by so as to see what I could have done better - so that I can deliver that much more and better results going forward. I've learned that some things I had done right, were spot on, and other issues could have been handled differently, as well as a host of technical information that I've stored away for future use. Bottom Line: this forum rocks and is incredibly helpful."
  • "I asked a handful of questions, got GREAT help while doing a whole lot of lurking, and now I've got a site that rocks!! (...) Huge thanks to all the Top Contributors, and a very special mention to WEBADO, who helped me a TON with my .htaccess file."
  • "Over the years of reading (and sometimes contributing) to this forum I think it has helped to remove many false assumptions and doubts over Google's ranking systems. Contrary to what many have said I verily believe Google can benefit small businesses. Keep up the good work. "
  • "The forum members are awesome and are a most impressive bunch. Their contribution is immeasurable as it is huge. Not only have they helped Google in their success as a profitable business entity, but also helped webmasters both aspiring and experienced. There is also an engender(ment) of "family" or "belonging" in the group that has transcended the best and worst of times (Current forum change still TBD :-) ). We can agree, disagree and agree to disagree but remain respectful and civil (Usually :-) )."
  • "Hi Redleg, Thank you very much for all of the information. Without your help, I don't think I would ever have known how to find the problem. "
  • "What an amazing board. Over the last few days I have asked 1 question and recieved a ton of advice mainly from Autocrat. "
  • "A big thank you to the forum and the contributors that helped me get my site on Google . After some hassle with my web hosters and their naff submission service, issues over adding pages Google can see, issues over Sitemaps, I can now say that when I put my site name into the search and when i put in [custom made watch box], for instance, my site now comes up."
  • "Thank you Autocrat! You are MAGNIFICENT! (...) I am your biggest fan today. : ) Imagine Joe Cocker singing With a Little Help from My Friends...that's my theme song today."
  • "I've done a lot of reading since then and I've learned more in the last year than I learned in the previous 10. When I stumbled into this forum I had no idea what I was getting into but finding this forum was a gift from God! Words cannot express the amount of gratitude I feel for the help you have given me and I wish I could repay you some how.... I don't mean to sound so mushy, but I write this with tears in my eyes and I am truly, truly grateful..."

Are you new to the Webmaster Help Forum? Tell us a little bit about yourself and then join us to learn more and help others!

 

Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication

Webmaster level: Intermediate

We've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we're announcing our support of the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element.



Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

  • Choose your preferred domain
    When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves.
  • Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
    Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don't forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.
  • Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element
    There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.


Still have questions?

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine.

Q: For technical reasons I can't include a 1:1 mapping for the URLs on my sites. Can I just point the rel="canonical" at the homepage of my preferred site?
A: No; this could result in problems. A mapping from old URL to new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to use rel="canonical".

Q: I'm offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel="canonical"?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel="canonical", if both parties agree.

Q: My server can't do a 301 (permanent) redirect. Can I use rel="canonical" to move my site?
A: If it's at all possible, you should work with your webhost or web server to do a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that we treat rel="canonical" as a hint, and other search engines may handle it differently. But if a 301 redirect is impossible for some reason, then a rel="canonical" may work for you. For more information, see our guidelines on moving your site.

Q: Should I use a noindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element?
A: No, since those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing - one would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Additionally, it's important that these pages are not disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, otherwise search engine crawlers will not be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

We hope this makes it easier for you to handle duplicate content in a user-friendly way. Are there still places where you feel that duplicate content is causing your sites problems? Let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum!


Your site's performance in Webmaster Tools

Webmaster level: Intermediate

Let's take a quick look at the individual sections in the Google Webmaster Tools' Site Performance feature:

Performance overview



The performance overview shows a graph of the aggregated speed numbers for the website, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated. By using data from Google Toolbar users, you don't have to worry about us testing your site from a location that your users do not use. For example, if your site is in Germany and all your users are in Germany, the chart will reflect the load time as seen in Germany. Similarly, if your users mostly use dial-up connections (or high-speed broadband), that would be reflected in these numbers as well. If only a few visitors of your site use the Google Toolbar, we may not be able to show this data in Webmaster Tools.

The line between the red and the green sections on the chart is the 20th percentile — only 20% of the sites we check are faster than this. This website is pretty close to the 20% mark, which pages would we have to work on first?

Example pages with load times



In this section you can find some example pages along with the average, aggregated load times that users observed while they were on your website. These numbers may differ from what you see as they can come from a variety of different browsers, internet connections and locations. This list can help you to recognize pages which take longer than average to load — pages that slow your users down.

As the page load times are based on actual accesses made by your users, it's possible that it includes pages which are disallowed from crawling. While Googlebot will not be able to crawl disallowed pages, they may be a significant part of your site's user experience.

Keep in mind that you may see occasional spikes here, so it's recommended that you watch the load times over a short period to see what's stable. If you consistently see very large load times, that probably means that most of your users are seeing very slow page loads (whether due to slow connections or otherwise), so it's something you should take seriously.

Page Speed suggestions



These suggestions are based on the Page Speed Firefox / Firebug plugin. In order to find the details for these sample URLs, we fetch the page and all its embedded resources with Googlebot. If we are not able to fetch all of embedded content with Googlebot, we may not be able to provide a complete analysis. Similarly, if the servers return slightly modified content for Googlebot than they would for normal users, this may affect what is shown here. For example, some servers return uncompressed content for Googlebot, similar to what would be served to older browsers that do not support gzip-compressed embedded content (this is currently the case for Google Analytics' "ga.js").

When looking at flagged issues regarding common third-party code such as website analytics scripts, one factor that can also play a role is how wide-spread these scripts are on the web. If they are common across the web, chances are that the average user's browser will have already cached the DNS lookup and the content of the script. While these scripts will still be flagged as separate DNS lookups, in practice they might not play a strong role in the actual load time.

We offer these suggestions as a useful guideline regarding possible first performance improvement steps and recommend using the Page Speed plugin (or a similar tool) directly when working on your website. This allows you to better recognize the blocking issues and makes it easy to see how modifications on the server affect the total load time.


For questions about Webmaster Tools and this new feature, feel free to read the Help Center article, search and post in the Webmaster Help Forums or in the Page Speed discussion group. We hope this information helps you make your website even faster!

 

How fast is your site?

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster.

This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster. Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.

Now we bring data and statistics specifically applicable to your site. On Site Performance, you'll find how fast your pages load, how they've fared over time, how your site's load time compares to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and Page Speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency. Our goal is to bring you specific and actionable speed information backed by data, so stay tuned for more of this in the future.

screenshot of Site Performance

The load time data is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. We only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.

This is a Labs product that is still in development. We hope you find it useful. Please let us know your feedback through the Webmaster Tools Forum.

Update on 12/04/2009: Our team just reconvened to provide you more information on this feature. Check out JohnMu's latest post on Site Performance!

New User Agent for News

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Today we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.

Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.

Here are a few examples for publishers:

Include pages in both Google web search and News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.

For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.

We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.

 

Region Tags in Google Search Results

Webmaster Level: All

Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.

This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:


None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.

Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):



As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.

As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.

We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag.

We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.

Changes in First Click Free

Webmaster level: intermediate

We love helping publishers make their content available to large groups of readers, and working on ways to make the world's information useful and accessible through our search results. At the same time, we're also aware of the fact that creating high-quality content is not easy and, in many cases, expensive. This is one of the reasons why we initially launched First Click Free for Google News and Google Web Search -- to allow publishers to sell access to their content in general while still allowing users to find it through our search results.

While we're happy to see that a number of publishers are already using First Click Free, we've found that some who might try it are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content. As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google's Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!

Questions and answers about First Click Free

Q: Do the rest of the old guidelines still apply?
A: Yes, please check the guidelines for Google News as well as the guidelines for Web Search and the associated blog post for more information.

Q: Can I apply First Click Free to only a section of my site / only for Google News (or only for Web Search)?
A: Sure! Just make sure that both Googlebot and users from the appropriate search results can view the content as required. Keep in mind that showing Googlebot the full content of a page while showing users a registration page would be considered cloaking.

Q: Do I have to sign up to use First Click Free?
A: Please let us know about your decision to use First Click Free if you are using it for Google News. There's no need to inform us of the First Click Free status for Google Web Search.

Q: What is the preferred way to count a user's accesses?
A: Since there are many different site architectures, we believe it's best to leave this up to the publisher to decide.

(Please see our related blog post for more information on First Click Free for Google News.)

 

GENERIC CIALIS on my website? I think my site has been hacked!

How to use "Fetch as Googlebot", part 1
Webmaster level: Intermediate

Has your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results? Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques? Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party "hacks" a website: they penetrate the security of a site and insert undesirable content. Sophisticated attackers can camouflage this spammy or dangerous content so that it doesn't appear for normal users, and appears only to Googlebot, which could negatively impact your site in Google's results.

In such cases it used to be very difficult to detect the problem, because the site would appear normal in the eyes of the user. It may be possible that only requests with a User-agent: of Googlebot and coming from Googlebot's IP could see the hidden content. But that's over: with Fetch as Googlebot, the new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools, you can see exactly what Googlebot is seeing, and avoid any kind of cloaking problems. We'll show you how:

Let's imagine that Bob, the administrator of www.example.com, is searching for his site but he finds this instead:



That's strange, because when he looks at the source code of www.example.com, it looks fine:



With much surprise Bob may receive a notice from Google warning him that his site is not complying with Google's quality guidelines. Fortunately he has his site registered with Webmaster Tools, let's see how he can check what Googlebot sees:

First Bob logs into Webmaster Tools and selects www.example.com. The Fetch as Googlebot feature will be at the bottom of the navigation menu, in the Labs section:



The page will contain a field where you can insert the URL to fetch. It can also be left blank to fetch the homepage.



Bob can simply click Fetch and wait a few seconds. After refreshing the page, he can see the status of the fetch request. If it succeeds, he can click on the "Success" link...



...and that will show the details, with the content of the fetched page:



Aha! There's the spammy content! Now Bob can be certain that www.example.com has been hacked.

Confirming that the website has been hacked (and perhaps is still hacked) is an important step. It is, however, only the beginning. For more information, we strongly suggest getting help from your server administrator or hoster and reading our previous blog posts on the subject of hacked sites:


If you have any questions about how to use the Fetch as Googlebot feature, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum. If you feel that your website might be hacked but are having problems resolving it, you might want to ask the experts in our "Malware and Hacked sites" category.

PS Keep in mind that once you have removed hacked content from your site, it will generally still take time for us to update our search results accordingly. There are a number of factors that affect crawling and indexing of your content so it's impossible to give a time-frame for that.

Hard facts about comment spam

Webmaster Level: Beginner

It has probably happened to you: you're reading articles or watching videos on the web, and you come across some unrelated, gibberish comments. You may wonder what this is all about. Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point back to the poster's site in an attempt to boost their site's ranking. Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like "Nice site!") with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Why is it bad?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people's hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site's organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one's site in the long run.


Promote your site without comment spam

If you want to improve your site's visibility in the search results, spamming comments is definitely not the way to go. Instead, think about whether your site offers what people are looking for, such as useful information and tools.

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you'll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

Moreover, Google provides a list of advice in order to improve the crawlability and indexability of your site. Check out our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

What can I do to avoid spam on my site?

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site's users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.
  • Disallow anonymous posting.
  • Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
  • Turn on comment moderation.
  • Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field.
  • Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
  • Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.
For detailed information about these topics, check out our Help Center document on comment spam.

My site is full of comment spam, what should I do?

It's never too late! Don't let spammers ruin the experience for others. Adopt security measures discussed above to stop the spam activity, then invest some time to clean up the spammy comments and ban the spammers from your site. Depending on you site's system, you may be able to save time by banning spammers and removing their comments all at once, rather than one by one.

If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you've cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

For more information about this topic and to discuss it with others, join us in the Webmaster Help Forum. (But don't leave spammy comments!)

 

'New software version' notifications for your site

Webmaster level: All

One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things. One idea we tried out was to let webmasters know about their potentially hackable websites. The initial effort was successful enough that we thought we would take it one step further by expanding our efforts to cover other types of web applications—for example, more content management systems (CMSs), forum/bulletin-board applications, stat-trackers, and so on.

This time, however, our goal is not just to isolate vulnerable or hackable software packages, but to also notify webmasters about newer versions of the software packages or plugins they're running on their website. For example, there might be a Drupal module or Joomla extension update available but some folks might not have upgraded. There are a few reasons a webmaster might not upgrade to the newer version and one of the reasons could be that they just don't know a new version exists. This is where we think we can help. We hope to let webmasters know about new versions of their software by sending them a message via Webmaster Tools. This way they can make an informed decision about whether or not they would like to upgrade.

One of the ways we identify sites to notify is by parsing source code of web pages that we crawl. For example, WordPress and other CMS applications include a generator meta tag that specifies the version number. This has proven to be tremendously helpful in our efforts to notify webmasters. So if you're a software developer, and would like us to help you notify your users about newer versions of your software, a great way to start would be to include a generator meta tag that tells the version number of your software. If you're a plugin or a widget developer, including a version number in the source you provide to your users is a great way to help too.

We've seen divided opinions over time about whether it's a good security practice to include a version number in source code, because it lets hackers or worm writers know that the website might be vulnerable to a particular type of exploit. But as Matt Mullenweg pointed out, "Where [a worm writer's] 1.0 might have checked for version numbers, 2.0 just tests [a website's] capabilities...". Meanwhile, the advantage of a version number is that it can help alert site owners when they need to update their site. In the end, we tend to think that including a version number can do more good than harm.

We plan to begin sending out the first of these messages soon and hope that webmasters find them useful! If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment here.

Running desktop and mobile versions of your site

(This post was largely translated from our Japanese version of the Webmaster Central Blog )

Recently I introduced several methods to ensure your mobile site is properly indexed by Google. Today I'd like to share information useful for webmasters who manage both desktop and mobile phone versions of a site.

One of the most common problems for webmasters who run both mobile and desktop versions of a site is that the mobile version of the site appears for users on a desktop computer, or that the desktop version of the site appears when someone finds them from a mobile device. In dealing with this scenario, here are two viable options:

Redirect mobile users to the correct version

When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page. Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile searches.

If you redirect users, please make sure that the content on the corresponding mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible. For example, if you run a shopping site and there's an access from a mobile phone to a desktop-version URL, make sure that the user is redirected to the mobile version of the page for the same product, and not to the homepage of the mobile version of the site. We occasionally find sites using this kind of redirect in an attempt to boost their search rankings, but this practice only results in a negative user experience, and so should be avoided at all costs.

On the other hand, when there's an access to a mobile-version URL from a desktop browser or by our web crawler, Googlebot, it's not necessary to redirect them to the desktop-version. For instance, Google doesn't automatically redirect desktop users from their mobile site to their desktop site, instead they include a link on the mobile-version page to the desktop version. These links are especially helpful when a mobile site doesn't provide the full functionality of the desktop version -- users can easily navigate to the desktop-version if they prefer.

Switch content based on User-agent
Some sites have the same URL for both desktop and mobile content, but change their format according to User-agent. In other words, both mobile users and desktop users access the same URL (i.e. no redirects), but the content/format changes slightly according to the User-agent. In this case, the same URL will appear for both mobile search and desktop search, and desktop users can see a desktop version of the content while mobile users can see a mobile version of the content.

However, note that if you fail to configure your site correctly, your site could be considered to be cloaking, which can lead to your site disappearing from our search results. Cloaking refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users. This causes problems such as less relevant results (pages appear in search results even though their content is actually unrelated to what users see/want), so we take cloaking very seriously.

So what does "the page that the user sees" mean if you provide both versions with a URL? As I mentioned in the previous post, Google uses "Googlebot" for web search and "Googlebot-Mobile" for mobile search. To remain within our guidelines, you should serve the same content to Googlebot as a typical desktop user would see, and the same content to Googlebot-Mobile as you would to the browser on a typical mobile device. It's fine if the contents for Googlebot are different from the one for Googlebot-Mobile.

One example of how you could be unintentionally detected for cloaking is if your site returns a message like "Please access from mobile phones" to desktop browsers, but then returns a full mobile version to both crawlers (so Googlebot receives the mobile version). In this case, the page which web search users see (e.g. "Please access from mobile phones") is different from the page which Googlebot crawls (e.g. "Welcome to my site"). Again, we detect cloaking because we want to serve users the same relevant content that Googlebot or Googlebot-Mobile crawled.

Diagram of serving content from your mobile-enabled site


We're working on a daily basis to improve search results and solve problems, but because the relationship between PC and mobile versions of a web site can be nuanced, we appreciate the cooperation of webmasters. Your help will result in more mobile content being indexed by Google, improving the search results provided to users. Thank you for your cooperation in improving the mobile search user experience.

 

Pros and cons of watermarked images

Webmaster Level: All

What's our take on watermarked images for Image Search? It's a complicated topic. I talked with Peter Linsley—my friend at the 'plex, video star, and Product Manager for Image Search—to hear his thoughts.

Maile: So, Peter... "watermarked images". Can you break it down for us?
Peter: It's understandable that webmasters find watermarking images beneficial.
Pros of watermarked images
  • Photographers can claim credit/be recognized for their art.
  • Unknown usage of the image is deterred.
If search traffic is important to a webmaster, then he/she may also want to consider some of our findings:
Findings relevant to watermarked images
  • Users prefer large, high-quality images (high-resolution, in-focus).
  • Users are more likely to click on quality thumbnails in search results. Quality pictures (again, high-res and in-focus) often look better at thumbnail size.
  • Distracting features such as loud watermarks, text over the image, and borders are likely to make the image look cluttered when reduced to thumbnail size.
In summary, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, then searchers may select it less often. Preview your images at thumbnail size to get an idea of how the user might perceive it.
Maile: Ahh, I see: Webmasters concerned with search traffic likely want to balance the positives of watermarking with the preferences of their users -- keeping in mind that sites that use clean images without distracting artifacts tend to be more popular, and that this can also impact rankings. Will Google rank an image differently just because it's watermarked?
Peter: Nope. The presence of a watermark doesn't itself cause an image to be ranked higher or lower.

Do you have questions or opinions on the topic? Let's chat in the webmaster forum.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead
Help Google index your mobile site

(This post was largely translated from our Japanese Webmaster Central Blog.)

It seems the world is going mobile, with many people using mobile phones on a daily basis, and a large user base searching on Google’s mobile search page. However, as a webmaster, running a mobile site and tapping into the mobile search audience isn't easy. Mobile sites not only use a different format from normal desktop site, but the management methods and expertise required are also quite different. This results in a variety of new challenges. As a mobile search engineer, it's clear to me that while many mobile sites were designed with mobile viewing in mind, they weren’t designed to be search friendly. I'd like to help ensure that your mobile site is also available for users of mobile search.

Here are troubleshooting tips to help ensure that your site is properly crawled and indexed:

Verify that your mobile site is indexed by Google

If your web site doesn't show up in the results of a Google mobile search even using the 'site:' operator, it may be that your site has one or both of the following issues:
Googlebot may not be able to find your site
Googlebot, our crawler, must crawl your site before it can be included in our search index. If you just created the site, we may not yet be aware of it. If that's the case, create a Mobile Sitemap and submit it to Google to inform us to the site’s existence. A Mobile Sitemap can be submitted using Google Webmaster Tools, in the same way as with a standard Sitemap.
Googlebot may not be able to access your site
Some mobile sites refuse access to anything but mobile phones, making it impossible for Googlebot to access the site, and therefore making the site unsearchable. Our crawler for mobile sites is "Googlebot-Mobile". If you'd like your site crawled, please allow any User-agent including "Googlebot-Mobile" to access your site. You should also be aware that Google may change its User-agent information at any time without notice, so it is not recommended that you check if the User-agent exactly matches "Googlebot-Mobile" (which is the string used at present). Instead, check whether the User-agent header contains the string "Googlebot-Mobile". You can also use DNS Lookups to verify Googlebot.

Verify that Google can recognize your mobile URLs

Once Googlebot-Mobile crawls your URLs, we then check for whether the URL is viewable on a mobile device. Pages we determine aren't viewable on a mobile phone won't be included in our mobile site index (although they may be included in the regular web index). This determination is based on a variety of factors, one of which is the "DTD (Doc Type Definition)" declaration. Check that your mobile-friendly URLs' DTD declaration is in an appropriate mobile format such as XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML. If it's in a compatible format, the page is eligible for the mobile search index. For more information, see the Mobile Webmaster Guidelines.

If you have any question regarding mobile site, post your question to our Webmaster Help Forum and webmasters around the world as well as we are happy to help you with your problem.

Posted by Jun Mukai, Software Engineer, Mobile Search Team
 

Post-Halloween Treat: New Keywords User Interface!

Our team had an awesome Halloween and we hope you did too. Yes, the picture below is our team; we take our Halloween costumes pretty seriously. :)



As a post-Halloween treat, we're happy to announce a brand new user interface for our Keywords feature. We'll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful of URLs that contain a specific keyword. The significance column compares the frequency of a keyword to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your site. When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword.

This will be really useful when you re-implement your site on a new technology framework, or need to identify which URLs may have been hacked. For example, if you start noticing your site appearing in search results for terms totally unrelated to your website (for example, "Viagra" or "casino"), you can use this feature to find those keywords and identify the pages that contain them. This will enable you to eliminate any hacked content quickly.

New personalization features in Google Friend Connect

Webmaster Level: All

Just a few weeks ago, we made Google Friend Connect a lot easier to use by dramatically simplifying the setup process. Today, we're excited to announce several new features that make it possible for website owners to get to know their users, encourage users to get to know each other, and match their site content (including Google ads) to visitors' interests.

To learn more about these new features, check out the Google Social Web Blog.
 

Get your site ready for the holidays: Webmasters - make your list and check it twice!

Webmaster Level: All

Are the holidays an important season for your website or online business? We think so! And to help make sure you're in good shape, we wanted to invite you to our Holiday Webmaster Webinar.

This Webex will be hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They'll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush!

Topic: Holiday Webmaster Webinar
Date: Friday, November 13, 2009
Time: 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Meeting Number: 574 659 815
Meeting Password: webmaster

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.

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To join the online meeting (Now from iPhones too!)
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1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click "Join Now".

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To join the teleconference only
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Call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf

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For assistance
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1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click "Support".

Using RSS/Atom feeds to discover new URLs

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Google uses numerous sources to find new webpages, from links we find on the web to submitted URLs. We aim to discover new pages quickly so that users can find new content in Google search results soon after they go live. We recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for the discovery of new webpages.

RSS/Atom feeds have been very popular in recent years as a mechanism for content publication. They allow readers to check for new content from publishers. Using feeds for discovery allows us to get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods. We may use many potential sources to access updates from feeds including Reader, notification services, or direct crawls of feeds. Going forward, we might also explore mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub to identify updated items.

In order for us to use your RSS/Atom feeds for discovery, it's important that crawling these files is not disallowed by your robots.txt. To find out if Googlebot can crawl your feeds and find your pages as fast as possible, test your feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools.

 

Google webmaster central Blogspot    Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. Deftly dealing with duplicate content. More Blog Links.

Official Google Blog: Finding easy-to-read web content     Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google's search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they'll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.

Google Help Center Send Google feedback

Google Webmaster Help

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. GWT is used by many products at Google, including Google Wave and Google AdWords. It's open source, completely free, and used by thousands of developers around the world. Productivity for developers, performance for users Version 2.0 with Speed Tracer now available. Productivity for developers, performance for users Version 2.0 with Speed Tracer now available.  A new tool built using modern HTML5 technologies that allows developers to diagnose performance problems in the browser, providing insight that hasn't been available before about low-level operations deep within the browser. Also view Web Master Tools and Utilities

YouTube GoogleWebmasterHelp

Google Accounts Help Covers issues such as Free Google services, including Google Groups, Google Shopping List, Web History, iGoogle, AdWords and Google Checkout and more.

Google AdSense Sandbox Tool This is a handy little utility if you would like to see what sort of Google AdSense ads based on content or keywords. Simply enter the URL or keywords in the box below, and you will see up to 20 sample AdSense ads for the URL or keywords. If you like this tool, try some of our other free search engine/website related tools on the navigation bar to the left. Any questions, comments, feature requests, etc. can be addressed within the search engine tools forum and general AdSense help can be found in the AdSense forum More Forums

Google Hot Trends for Keywords  More about Keywords

Real Time Search  
Google real-time search updates it's SERP, (Search Engine Results Page) e.g., Social bookmark sites, news and articles that scroll in the actual result pages for your query.

Google Research pride themselves on maintaining a culture that fosters significant and rapid innovation. In addition to building the world's most advanced systems, many of us are engaged in the public research community.

Google Export Adviser. Together with partners including UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), HSBC, Royal Mail, Institute of Export (IoE), Applied Language and Alibaba.com, the Google Export Adviser will help your business overcome the major barriers to exporting with useful tools, practical insights and relevant offers to enable your business to reach new markets and grow internationally.

Google Blog Search   More Blog links

Matt Cutts, (A software engineer at Google and currently the head of Google's Webspam team). Reports in Google Info

Google Watchdog A Blog to voice some of my complaints and concerns about Google

Website Optimiser. Google’s free website testing and optimisation tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a penny. Using Website Optimiser to test and optimise site content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI, whether you’re new to marketing or an expert.

Get top 10 rankings on Google & Yahoo!
Just fill-in your first name and primary email where indicated below.
Then click the "Get FREE Instant Access" button to get instant access.

Your first name:
Your primary email address:
 

Google AJAX Feed API.  A service that could be used to create an AJAX-based RSS reader like Google Reader without having to worry about the details of fetching feeds.

Google's robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls.

Google Experimental search. Some search ideas Google are trying out.

The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts.

Google Social Graph API. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful. More Social bookmarks. Bookmarks. Favicons. Tagvertising.

Join Google Social Search experiment.  
Google Launches Social Search Experiment Review.

The experimental feature that Marissa Mayer announced last week is becoming available today for everyone to try.  Google Social Search promises to help users "find more relevant public content from your broader social circle."

More Social bookmarks. Bookmarks. Favicons. Tagvertising.

Brands
Google Apps® Online applications provided by Google® Google Apps® combined its e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet and Web authoring applications and administration utilities.

Google Apps Scrip provides the ability to automate a variety spreadsheet actions, such as reading and changing values in cells and ranges, changing formats and formulas, and creating custom functions. It also reaches outside of spreadsheets to allow you to send email or create calendar entries.

Google Apps Script overview.

Watch the example on the left sending email from Google Spreadsheets

Google Apps Group

Google Apps Blog

Google Enterprise blogspot

Adsense for Dummies Google Adsense Tips. Google AdSense® Web site monetization.

AdSense's official blog:-

More webinars coming your way

We've just published a new webinar schedule for the next month. In our live webinars, we'll highlight changes you can make to your ad implementation in order to maximize your AdSense revenue. We're also trying something new with our upcoming webinars: we've set up open Google Moderator discussions, where you can raise questions related to the specific webinar topic or vote on questions from other participants. We'll then answer your questions live in the webinar.

To sign up for our webinars, please visit our Help Center. Even if you're not able to attend the live sessions, we'll make sure to upload each webinar recording within 24 hours of the event.

 

Donate your AdSense earnings to help Haiti

As you may have already seen, Google has made various efforts to contribute to the earthquake relief response in Haiti. We've heard repeatedly from AdSense publishers on forums about wanting to help, and today, we're pleased to let you know how you can do so with your AdSense earnings.

We're currently accepting donations from AdSense publishers with an unpaid account balance through January 31, 2010. To see what your unpaid account balance is, please visit the 'Payment History' page within your account. Your January earnings will post in the next few days, so feel free to refer to your 'Advanced Reports' page for an earnings estimate until those are finalized.



Working with our teammates at Google.org, we've identified Partners In Health (PIH) as the recipient of these funds. Your funds will go to provide medical aid via PIH and their Haiti-based partner organization. Any contribution you can make will help to ensure that PIH can continue their work throughout this time of great need.

Photo courtesy of PIH

You can donate a portion or all of your entire unpaid balance as of the end of January. Whether you have a balance of $0.10 or $100 in your account, we invite you to participate within the next week.

As you may expect, there are certain restrictions to donating, and all our normal policies still apply -- so even if you're donating, please don't ask others to click on your ads in order to increase your earnings. For more information on how to participate, visit our donation form.

Troubleshooting tips part IIa: Ad relevance and targeting

Last week, we took a closer look at implementing your ad code, and today, we'll address some of the common issues related to ad targeting.


If you're seeing irrelevant ads or public service ads (PSAs) on your pages after you've pasted the ad code into your HTML source code and waited the recommended 48 hrs, here are a things to check:

  • Have you placed the AdSense ad code in frames separate from the main content of your website? If so, you may experience ad targeting issues. In order for our crawlers to match the ads to the content of your website, it is important to place the ad code in the same frame as the main content of your webste. If you're familiar with HTML, and your website is talking about several different topics you could also consider implementing section targeting on your site to highlight relevant content.

  • Do you have mostly dynamic content on your site? Our crawlers currently can't derive meaning from these types of files:
    - audio and video files (.wma, .mpeg, .mov)
    - mp3 files (.mp3)
    - images (.jpeg, .bmp)
    - Macromedia Flash movies
    - Java Applets

    To receive more relevant ads, we recommend including plenty of text-based content on your site, including complete sentences and paragraphs.

  • Do your pages use session IDs? A session ID is a piece of data serves as a unique identifier for a session. If your pages use session IDs, you may not receive targeted ads on those pages. Since this session ID - and therefore the URL - changes every time a different user views a page, the URL will not be indexed and will need to be crawled from scratch. Once the URL is crawled, however, the session will most likely have expired. This means that pages seen by the users are rarely in the index. You'll need to remove the session IDs in order to show more targeted ads to your users.
We hope these tips help you resolve any targeting issues you experience with your ads. Next week, we'll take a look at some other reasons why you may see irrelevant ads or PSAs on your site, and how you can best resolve them.

 

Troubleshooting tips part I: Implementing your ad code

Today, we're beginning a troubleshooting series to help you diagnose and solve common issues with your ads, search boxes, and account functionality. We're kicking things off with a look at how to correctly implement your ad code and an explanation of why ads may not appear on your pages at times.

First, the best way to ensure ads are served correctly is to copy and paste the code exactly as it's provided in your account. Changing the code and manipulating ad behavior aren't permitted by our program policies, and in most cases will prevent your ad from appearing at all.

If you've noticed that your ad units aren't showing ads, here are a few things to check for:

  • Did you just add the code to that page? Relevant ads should appear on your pages shortly after you add the code, but sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for ads to show. This is because our crawler has to visit your page and determine its content so we can serve targeted ads.

  • Does the code on your page match the code in your account? Make sure to copy the code exactly as it appears in your account, and paste it within the body tags of your HTML code. Be sure not to make any changes to the linebreaks of the code (e.g. pasting the code all in one line) as this will break the code and prevent ads from showing entirely.

  • Are you using an HTML editor? Publishers often use a design-enhanced HTML editor like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage (aka WYSIWIG, "what you see is what you get" software). If you use such an editor, you may see errors if you paste your ad code into a WYSIWYG view such as the "Design" or "Layout" view. For the ads to function properly, you'll have to copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code of your webpage using the editor's HTML view or HTML insert function. Check for any additional tags inserted by the system or changes in the linebreaks.

  • Are you using a content management system (CMS)? If you have trouble implementing AdSense with a specific content management system, we recommend searching for the name of the CMS (eg. Drupal, WordPress) and 'AdSense implementation'. You can also ask in the forum if other publishers have mastered similar problems, or contact your program provider directly.

  • Are the ads inside nested frames? While you can choose where to position your ads on your pages, be sure to avoid embedding the ad code in excessive div tags or nested frames. Depending on your browser settings, implementing your ad code in this way might prevent ads from appearing correctly.

  • Is JavaScript enabled in your browser? Ensure that you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, as this is necessary to view ads! If you're having trouble seeing the ads, please also check for any conflicting JavaScript on your site that might prevent ads from showing.

  • Is your page dynamically generated? If you'd like to implement AdSense ads on a dynamically generated site -- for example, a site with session IDs or pages behind a login -- you should take a look at this Help Center entry for more information on how to receive targeted ads.
In the next part of this series, we'll provide tips to help you troubleshoot ad relevancy and targeting issues.

An update from AdSense about the response to Haiti Earthquake

We've heard from many of our AdSense publishers about your concern for the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. We wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the efforts Google is making to help the people of Haiti respond to this catastrophe.

Google is donating $1 million to organizations on the ground that are rescuing those still trapped and providing clean water, food, medical care, shelter and support to those affected. For more information on Google's efforts and opportunities to get involved, please visit the Google Blog.

 

AdSense for Domains Expands Use of Keyword Hints

You asked for it, you got it! AdSense for Domains, which launched a year ago to help publishers earn revenue through ads placed on undeveloped domains, now uses optional keyword hints more often. These keywords are suggestions supplied to Google by domain owners about the types of content users are looking for when they arrive on an undeveloped domain. They are used to help our system determine the best ads to place on these domains. For example, with the domain www.rockstarsand.com, a publisher might suggest the keywords "bitumen" and "mining" so that ads may appear from advertisers offering oil extraction products.

Keyword hints remain optional. When keyword hints are provided by the publisher, our ad-matching systems will use them more often. As always, we aim to provide the most relevant ads for the user, the best value for advertisers, and the best returns for publishers. This means in some cases, keyword hints will be ignored when we have evidence that other targeting approaches perform better.

Instructions for setting keyword hints for your domains can be found here.

The AdSense for Domains team is continuing to work on additional product improvements, that we will be announcing in the coming months.

Site maintenance on Saturday, January 9

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PDT. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Istanbul - 8pm Saturday
Sao Paolo - 4pm Saturday
Oslo - 7pm Saturday
Nairobi - 9pm Saturday
Auckland - 7am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

 

Happy New Year

Wishing all our publishers a very Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

We'd like to send our best wishes to all our publishers around the world. Wherever you're spending this holiday season, we hope that it's filled with much love, warmth, and happiness.



Happy Holidays!

 

Webinars - out with the old, in with the new

This year, the AdSense team has brought you a series of live webinars covering a range of topics, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who attended. We hope that you're already profiting from implementing the tips featured in our webinars.

Your feedback to date has been very helpful, and we'll spend the coming weeks developing brand new, interesting content for 2010. If you haven't already done so, we invite you to share with us the topics you'd like to see covered in future webinars.

We've received great reviews from publishers who've attended our webinars, so if you haven't seen one as yet, you can view the recordings of these events whenever it's convenient for you.

Wishing you a happy holiday season and a healthy new year.

Keeping your account secure

We understand how important your AdSense account is to you. You need to sign into your account to generate ad code, manage the appearance of your ads, view your reports and check the status of your payments. However, keep in mind that your AdSense account is actually part of your Google Account. This means that you may have several Google products, such as AdSense, Gmail, AdWords, Blogger, etc, all tied to a single sign-in.

We take account access issues very seriously and would like to take some time to provide a few simple tips to help you protect your Google Account.

If you're having trouble signing in to your Google Account, usually resetting your password will do the trick. To add additional security to your account, you should update your alternate address, choose a strong security question (if you have Gmail), and add a mobile number to your account so Google can text you a recovery code if you ever forget your password. Also, if you have a Gmail address, we recommend providing a current secondary email address where you can receive our password-assistance email. If you don't have any of these set up, it will be difficult for us to verify your identify and reset your password, so please take some time to update your security options.

If resetting your password doesn't work, you can try filling out our account recovery form. We can usually restore access in a few hours if you're able to provide the necessary information to prove ownership.

Here are some additional tips to ensure that only you have access to your account:

  • Create a strong password and security question. Your password shouldn't be something that someone else can easily guess. The same goes for your security question. If someone that knows you can answer your security question, then it's probably not a good question. Review these tips for suggestions.
  • Don't share your account password with anyone. It may be tempting to share your password with your friends or family, but don't do it, especially if it's your personal account. If you need to create an account that is accessed by several people, make sure that the account is not tied to any products that contain personal information.
  • Don't respond to messages asking for your username or password. Google will never send you an email, IM, or any other communication asking for your sign-in information, so don't respond to any messages asking for it.
  • Be cautious of fake sign-in pages. Always look for www.google.com/adsense in the URL. If the URL is different, don't sign in on the page. If you think you may have signed in using a fake sign-in page for AdSense or any other Google product, please reset your password as soon as possible to prevent abuse of your Google services by a third party.
You can find more tips in the Google Accounts Help Center.

 

More Google Web Elements for you

We've posted a few times about Google Web Elements and how they can benefit you as a publisher. Today, we're excited to announce new features for Google Web Elements, including the addition of 3 three new elements for Google Translate, Reader, and Orkut. For publishers, this means 3 new options for engaging your users and making your website more interactive.

To read more about the new features and how to get started, hop on over to the Google Code Blog.

A note about a messaging change in your AdSense account

Today we're changing some messaging in the AdSense interface concerning your earnings, and we wanted to give you some more information on why we're making this change.

In order to be more transparent about how our system calculates earnings, we've added the words "Estimated" and "Finalized" next to "Earnings" throughout your account. Rest assured these terminology changes don't reflect a change to the way your finalized earnings are calculated. It's simply intended to give you a clearer idea of what's our estimation of your earnings and what's finalized.

As you may have noticed in the past, the earnings on the Overview and Advanced Reports pages may sometimes differ from the earnings listed on your Payment History page. This is because earnings on your Overview and Advanced Reports pages reflect initial estimations based on our records. We aren't able to provide finalized earnings on these pages because they still need to be verified for accuracy, a process that takes place a few days after the end of every month. The finalized sum is then posted on your Payment History page by the 10th of the next month.



While we can't say how much these amounts would differ for any one publisher, most publishers will not see a significant difference. Again, please keep in mind that this is only a display change, and that your finalized earnings will continue to be calculated and credited to you in the same way as before.

Updated to include screenshots and Help Center links

 

Search for ads in the Ad Review Center

When we announced the new AdSense interface a few weeks ago, we mentioned how we've been working on building more functionality into the Ad Review Center to make it easier for you to find and manage your ads. Today, we'd like to let you know that we're introducing the ability to search for ads in the Ad Review Center. This option is currently available to a limited number of publishers using the new AdSense interface, but we're working on rolling this out more widely as we invite more publishers to test the new interface.

The search feature has been designed to improve your efficiency when finding ads to review. You'll be able to search for ads by keyword, display URL, or destination URL. For example, you can now search for all ads that have been placement targeted to your site with the destination URL of one of your competitors' websites. In addition, you can search across multiple AdSense products, like AdSense for mobile content and AdSense for feeds, and also specify whether you'd like to view allowed, blocked, or new ads.



Although we aren't able to add more publishers to the test at this time, we wanted to give you a glimpse into one of the ways we're working to make the Ad Review Center easier to use. We'll be collecting feedback from the first group of publishers testing this feature, and plan to improve it and then expand to additional publishers in the coming months.

Connect with AdSense via online webinars

We often hear publishers ask for more information about using AdSense most effectively, and so in response, we've initiated a number of free, online webinars. If you haven't yet participated in a webinar, they focus on specific topics such as increasing your revenue with the AdSense program and taking advantage of new features. At the end of each webinar, you can also ask your questions live to our AdSense specialists.

There are still a number of upcoming webinars in 2009, and we encourage you to sign up soon. We've also created a short video about webinars featuring a few members of our Dublin-based team.



 

A deeper look at channels: Targetable channels (Part III of III)

During the past 2 weeks, we walked you through the basics of URL and custom channels. In the final episode, Laurence Moore talks about the two ways in which advertisers can target your website: contextual and placement targeting. You'll also learn how to make your channels targetable by advertisers and label them with information such as size, location, and audience so the advertiser can easily find your channels and make an informed decision when choosing to target your site.



Thank you for watching the videos in our channels series, we hope you found them useful. If you'd like to watch more videos from the AdSense team, visit our official channel on YouTube.

Category filtering for French, German, and Spanish ads

We recently expanded category filtering to publishers in additional English-speaking countries, and we're happy to announce that the feature is now available for ads in French, German, and Spanish. With category filtering, you can prevent ads from up to 8 specific categories from appearing on your pages. Ads in these categories will be filtered if they're in any of the four supported languages, regardless of how they've been targeted to your pages. 

To set up category filtering, sign in to your AdSense account and visit your Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. Once you click 'change', you'll be able to view the full list of categories you can filter. In addition, we'll show you the percentage of revenue and ad impressions you've been receiving from each category in the last 30 days, which can help you understand the impact that applying filters might have.

For more information about category filtering, feel free to visit our Help Center. We're still working towards making this feature available in more languages, and we'll be sure to let you know about any updates.

 

The AdSense Product Ideas page: Now accepting your submissions and votes

This past year, we've been working on building features based on your feedback, and we'd like to offer you the opportunity to tell us what's on your AdSense wishlist for 2010. What features or product updates would you like to see? Whether it's an idea for a brand new feature or just a small tweak that would simplify your workflow, we'd like to hear it. 

With that in mind, we've created a Product Ideas page just for AdSense, and invite you to sign in with your Google Account and submit your suggestions during the next two weeks. You can also look through all submitted ideas and vote on the ones you like.

While we aren't able to guarantee that all the ideas on this page will be implemented, we can guarantee that we'll take the top ideas (as voted by you), and bring them to the AdSense Product Management team for review. By submitting an idea, you agree that Google may use the idea to develop and enhance Google's products and services.

This Ideas page will be open until December 15th, so be sure to add your ideas and vote soon!

Update your tax forms this holiday weekend

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Here in the U.S., we on the AdSense Team are spending the Friday after Thanksgiving enjoying holiday shopping, American football, and leftovers.

On this vacation day, we'd like you to remind you that tax season is approaching quickly, so you may wish to take a moment to review your address information and even re-submit your tax information to make sure it reflects your most current tax standing.

If you haven't entered tax information before, you can choose a form directly or follow our handy tax wizard within your account. If you're updating your tax information, feel free to click the 'change your tax information' link.

In addition, now would be the perfect time for our publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to verify their bank accounts for Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payments. If you're eligible for a payment at the end of December, you have until December 15, 2009 to select your bank account for payment, so we hope you give it a try!

 

Happy Thanksgiving

We'd like to wish all our U.S. publishers a very Happy Thanksgiving. As always, we'd like to give thanks to our Inside AdSense readers for your participation and support. If you're traveling, we hope your journey is safe, and wish you a fun holiday weekend with your family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving!

A deeper look at channels: Custom channels (Part II of III)

In the second part of our channels series, we'll focus on custom channels. Boyar Naito will walk you through how to set up custom channels to track the performance of specific ad units. You'll learn about the three pieces of information that are most important to us: ad size, ad location, and page content, and how to analyze this information to figure out what ad formats work best for your website.



You can find more information about custom channels in our Help Center. Catch the last part of this series next week, when we'll cover targetable channels.

 

A deeper look at channels: URL channels (Part I of III)

As many of you know, channels are a great tool for tracking the clicks and impressions on your ad units, as well as figuring out which ad placements, sizes, and colors generate the most revenue. With that in mind, three of our very own Mountain View-based AdSense optimization specialists have created videos showcasing best practices for setting up channels within your AdSense account.

In the first episode, Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo talks about URL channels which can help you track revenue on a specific URL or domain. You'll learn how to set up a channel within your AdSense account, what metrics you can track using channels, and how to use that data to increase your earnings by generating more clicks on your ads.



You can find more information about URL channels in our Help Center. Check back next week, when we'll cover custom channels.

Google Ad Planner Publisher Center: Take advantage of new ways to reach advertisers

Earlier this year, we introduced the Google Ad Planner Publisher Center to help you showcase your site to advertisers. Now we've enhanced the Publisher Center to give you even more ways to promote and manage your Ad Planner site profile. As a reminder, any publisher can use the Publisher Center, but the user interface is currently only available in English.

Claim your subdomains
You can now claim subdomains, such as myblog.blogspot.com, in Google Ad Planner. Your site's subdomains can also appear in Google Ad Planner to give advertisers a more detailed view of your site for their media planning. Learn how to claim your sites in Google Ad Planner.

Share more Google Analytics metrics
We've expanded the type of Google Analytics data you can share with Google Ad Planner. You can opt-in your page views, unique visitors (cookies), total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on site, which ensures potential advertisers see the most accurate information for your site. Learn how to share your Google Analytics data.

Delegate site ownership
Managing your website profile in Ad Planner has just gotten easier. You can now invite additional users to edit and maintain your Google Ad Planner site profile.

Display an Ad Planner badge
Highlight your Google Ad Planner profile by displaying our new badge on your site. Advertisers who click your badge will be brought directly to your Google Ad Planner site profile, where they'll find your traffic, demographics, and advertising information.

Choose from four Ad Planner badges:



Tell us what you think
We invite you to sign in to Google Ad Planner now to try these new features, then send us your feedback and ideas so we can continue improving Google Ad Planner for you. In addition, don't forget to register for our upcoming Ad Planner webinar on November 24th, where you'll learn more about how to use the tool and how it can benefit your site.

 

Site maintenance on Saturday, November 14

This Saturday, our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance from 10am to 2pm PST. You'll be unable to log in to your AdSense and Ad Manager accounts during this time, but we'll continue serving ads to your pages and tracking your clicks, impressions, and earnings as usual. In addition, your ad targeting won't be affected.

We've converted the maintenance start time for a few cities around the world:

Toronto - 1pm Saturday
Buenos Aires - 3pm Saturday
Cape Town - 8pm Saturday
Moscow - 9pm Saturday
New Delhi -11:30pm Saturday
Melbourne - 5am Sunday

If you'd like to learn more about what goes on during these maintenance periods, check out this Inside AdSense post.

Western Union launched in new countries

We're excited to announce the launch of Western Union payments in the following new countries:

Puerto Rico
Jamaica
Virgin Islands (British)
Ecuador
Costa Rica
Paraguay

Western Union Quick Cash payments will reach you much faster than checks, and they're free of charge. A couple things to note: we can only send Western Union payments to publishers that have an Individual account at this time, and the payee name on your account must exactly match the government issued ID card that you'll use while picking up your payments.

For more information on how to sign up to receive Western Union payments, and instructions on how to pick up your payments please visit our Help Center.

 

AdSense optimization tips

AdSense case studies

Google Heat map. Red colour's show the areas of Google Page which get the Clicks. Blue area get less clicks. Did-it, Enquiro, and Eyetools uncover Search's Golden Triangle: New EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through.

A look inside Google AdSense. Get site-targeted with quality, placement and size Where and how you place AdSence® links on your website may effect your income.

Google AdSense Charts and Graphs. Now that AdSense allows for reporting per channel, I figured it would be useful to chart the data in a multidimensional line chart. So this free tool allows you to do just that. Currently it offers eight different types of charts for your data.

   Google Trends See what the world is searching for. Tip: Single words may return more results.  Or you can compare searches by separating with commas.

Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Start your search by entering your own keyword phrases or a specific URL. You can then add new keywords to the green box on the right. Learn more.  More about Keyword and Keyword phrases

Google Zeitgeist. Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google

AdSense Help Center

Tips for Success. With Google AdWords, it's all about results. Optimization means taking steps to get the results you want by improving the quality and performance of your account without raising costs. We've designed these optimization strategies to help you achieve success with your advertising campaigns.

Google AdSense Group Forum 

Google Local Business Referrals program. Earn money helping put local businesses on Google Maps.  Are you a skilled, enthusiastic communicator? If you love the Internet and have access to a computer and a digital camera, we invite you to apply to become a Google Business Referral Representative. Google Business Referral Representatives are active Google users who help local businesses attract more customers online.   Making Money from the Internet

Google Friends newsletter

Google Librarian Central blogspot An Official source of Google Tips, News and updates. More Blog Links

Google Code - Google APIs,  (now version 3 no API key required), Google Code. Search this site: Google APIs ... to access a user's Google account without handling the user's ... by Google data APIs include: Blogger, Google Base and Google Calendar ...

Google Summer of Code A program brought together 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors across 90 countries to contribute to over 130 different open source software projects.

Google X-Prize by building lunar missions complete with robotic rovers capable of roaming the surface of the moon for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and other data back to Earth, according to a statement from the X Prize Foundation.  Google Lunar X Prize  More Robots and Robotics. Computer Control. Computer Engineering.

Google Print. Newspaper advertising made easy. You probably already know that Google can help you connect with customers online. Now, with Google Print Ads, we can help you reach newspaper readers, too. Google Print Ads is an online marketplace that makes it easy for advertisers and agencies of all sizes to run ads in newspapers across the U.S. whether you're buying space in one paper or a hundred. Running newspaper ads with Google Print Ads is easy you use a simple online interface to select newspapers and place bids for ad space in them. The papers you've selected approve or decline these bids (and give you direct feedback about their decisions). After your ad runs, you can see electronic copies of them on the page.

Google Docs. Create and share your work online. Create, edit and upload quickly. Import your existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, or create new ones from scratch. Access and edit from anywhere. All you need is a Web browser. Your documents are stored securely online. Share changes in real time. Invite people to your documents and make changes together, at the same time. It's free -- you don't pay a nickel.

Google Apps. Give your organization Google tools like Gmail, (email software), on your custom domain (jsmith@example.com), Calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets. You and your colleagues can check email, schedule meetings, chat in real time, collaborate on documents, and more. Google Apps is accessible via the web, so you can connect with others in your organization 24/7, no matter where you are. And it's all hosted by Google® there's no hardware or software to install or maintain so you can get up and running quickly.

More Programming Applications (VBA). Using Applications

Free Monitor for Google is an easy to use web site promotion aid for webmasters. It allows you to find and track your position in the Google search engine results for specified keywords. You can keep track of multiple sites and also keep the result statistics, allowing you to see when your position drops. The program offers two modes, one for quick checking, which also displays the found results and a second mode for long term tracking and multiple keywords.

Google Web History. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages that you have visited, etc...

Google Notebook. Clip and collect information as you browse the web.

Google for Nonprofits

Google.org, the philanthropic wing of Google. Since its inception, Google.org has been involved in a variety of initiatives covering such global issues as health and disease, climate change, poverty and alternative energy.

Google Privacy Center. Google Privacy Policy. Privacy FAQ  Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple Video's

Google System Blogspot

Google Bog News Channel

Google Official Video Channel  More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing

Google Video Help Center.  More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing

Breeze Google Video Training Center

Google AJAX Search API Blog spot  More AJAX Links. More Blog Links.

Google Enterprise Labs. Google Search Appliance or Google Mini.

Submission to Google search engine:-

Google COM

Google UK

Google Information for Webmasters

Google Base

Web site promotion

Why are sites blocked from the Google index

There is a handy little too at Google for checking the recent history on domains which is well worth using when link building (link exchanges, link drops) as well as checking websites you may be linking out to within your content or blog posts, (Just does provides basic report on the website):-

Request reinclusion of a site that has violated the webmaster guidelines. IMPORTANT: Please complete this form ONLY if one of the following is true:

Google's URL Removal Tool, how To Google has just added some new functionality to its Webmaster Tools at Webmaster Central that allows you to remove certain URLs from Google's search results.

Google URL Console use to remove an outdated link/s.

Google Site Map may now display Keywords as well as improve Google's ability to find websites links

Google Sitemap Generator and Editor Creates Google Site Maps, RSS and HTML sitemaps etc... Also Google Sitemap Generator and Editor Check your site on Google Data Centers    Google SERP, Search Engine Results Page, How well does your URL rank for your Keywords?

Google Sitemaps Pal Google Site Map Pal. Google Site Map Generator

Google Sitemaps Help: Using the Sitemap Generato

Google Sitemaps Blogspot Inside Google Sitemaps.

Google Blog Spot    More Blogs

Add Buttons to Your Google Toolbar  More ToolBars

Google Website Optimizer: Take action to convert visitors to customers. Website Optimizer: Free multivariate testing. Website Optimizer is a free and self-service tool. Without extensive experience or resources, you can run multivariate experiments on landing page content, including headlines, promotional copy, and images. Complete the steps below and sign-up to participate in our beta test. We can only invite a small number of advertisers at this time, but hope to open the tool to all Advertisers over the coming months.

Google AdWords Optimization Tips Google AdWords® Help Centre. Know that you can change keyword matching options to better target ads. Tips for Success. With Google AdWords, it's all about results. Optimization means taking steps to get the results you want by improving the quality and performance of your account without raising costs. We've designed these optimization strategies to help you achieve success with your advertising campaigns.

AdWords Preview Tool. This page is a tool for AdWords advertisers to test their AdWords.

Google Traffic Estimator. Get quick traffic estimates for new keywords without adding them to an account or using the AdWords sign-up wizard.

Google SERP, Search Engine Results Page

Google. Help Centre. How can I improve my site's ranking?

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index. How to verify Googlebot. From Google webmaster central Blog Spot More Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Video Blogs. Vlogs. Video Blogs More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing,

Orkut is a Google online community designed to make your social life more active and stimulating.

Orkut's social network can help you maintain existing relationships with pictures and messages and establish new ones by reaching out to people that you have never met before.  More Social Networks links.

A Computer Portal Site Map XML    More information about Site Maps and Google Site Maps Ranking Thumbshots

GooglePreview screenshot

GooglePreview, by Edward Ackroyd For use with FireFox

Inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages.
More Google Previews

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story; keeping current on a competitor or industry; getting the latest on a celebrity or event; keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams, etc...

Google Webmaster Guidelines If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the Google index. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request Google reinclusion.

Google Analytics Tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors. More website statistics tools.

Google Web Toolkit 

Google Widgets and Panels  More Widgets and Gadgets. Small free-standing applications that reside on your computer.

Google Gears. is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using JavaScript APIs

Create Google Gadgets. The Google Gadgets API is a simple way to create little applications that run on multiple sites, including Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, and thousands of sites all over the web that use Google Gadgets For Your Page. Google Gadgets reach tens of millions of users every week; even better, Google provides free hosting, free bandwidth and an easy way to submit your gadgets to the official directory, where users from all around the world come to find them.  More Widgets and Gadgets. Small free-standing applications that reside on your computer.

Google Desktop.   How Google Desktop works

Google Desktop SDK - Write plug-ins to search more file types with Google Desktop.

Google Mashup Editor - Quickly write code for simple web applications and mashups. (A mashup of two, (or more), different types of web search tools that could find the useful information and re-process this to provide more useful information for the user.)

Google Calendar Data API - Read and write Google Calendar data using a simple, standard protocol.

Google Checkout API - Offer a simple checkout flow and securely process online transactions. More Online Payment, Shopping Carts, etc links.

Here's some Google Widgets that you may add to your website.  More Widgets and Gadgets. Small free-standing applications that reside on your computer.

Google Web Search Help Center, (Send feedback to Google)

Google PageRank - PR10 Liste - PR 10 list (German site). Translation, foreign language translation.

Google Translation Widget Add this widget to your webpage to make it instantly available in other languages. More Translation services. More Widgets and Gadgets

Page Rank. Website Review, Ratings and URL listing tests

  Google Code Search is now live -- it gives programmers a single place to search publicly accessible source code. It includes: 

Google Code Search Support for precise searches using regular expressions, Google Pages. Restricts by language, license, or filename with advanced operators. A search index that includes billions of lines of code.   More Regular Expressions (Regex, regexp, RE, re)

Google Fight : Make a fight with stick figures Compare the number of results for two competing keywords. See which wins, good fun way to find the higher keywords.

Google. Corporate Information, Goggle Philosophy.

Google's 411 service is free, fast and easy to use. Find and connect with local businesses for free. Telephone for businesses that Google has about local business for the item you are seeking. It's like a Google directory service of local, (to you), businesses. More great Business Support Links.

Analytics Help Center     Analytics YouTube Channel     Analytics Help Forum

GA in 60 Seconds: Linking AdWords & Analytics Google Analytics Annotations Optimizing AdWords with Google Analytics

Google Analytics New Features Webinar Google Analytics Interface Tutorial Google Analytics - Optimal AdWords Campaigns

Introduction to reCAPTCHA     Google® Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA  more CAPTCHA Information.
500,000 hours lost every day by users typing in Captchas, so reCaptcha uses this time to correct OCR read in old books.
                              
 

 
Google Hacks 2.0 - video powered by Metacafe  Also see Diagnostics and Security

More Regular Expressions (Regex, regexp, RE, re)

Use Google Video to showcase your products  and Click-to-play video ads for AdWords  from  Adwords blogspot 

Google. How can I optimise my video information?

Own Google: Dominate Google Search Results

Also view Videos to Watch and Video PublishingGraphics, Graphics file formats and Images and  Three Dimensional Graphics VRML, (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), and Stereo Graphic Images

More Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Video Blogs. Vlogs. Video Blogs

  AutoMapIt is a complete sitemap creation service that covers more than just Google site maps! We offer a completely automated, membership-based service to keep all 6 of your site map formats up to date. Our spider never forgets to update them. Now, we have a site search that allows visitors to your website to locate the information they want, fast!

Google Sitemap Generator

How to Make Use of Google SiteMaps. Everything you need to know about Google Sitemaps.

Google Rankings More Page Ranking Tools.

Great Google Toolbar Buttons More Toolbars

Google's Super Bowl Ad

Google's search engine didn't become popular because of advertising. Many people liked that it returned relevant results, it was fast and had a simple interface, so they told their friends to try it.

Google rarely used traditional advertising to promote its products, but that started to change in 2007, when Google used billboards to promote GOOG-411. Last year, Google aggressively promoted Chrome using flashy ads.

Despite the noticeable cultural shift, it's still surprising to see that Google decided to promote its search engine at the Super Bowl.

"If you watched the Super Bowl this evening you'll have seen a video from Google called "Parisian Love". In fact you might have watched it before, because it's been on YouTube for over three months. We didn't set out to do a Super Bowl ad, or even a TV ad for search. Our goal was simply to create a series of short online videos about our products and our users, and how they interact. But we liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that we decided to share it with a wider audience," explains Eric Schmidt.

Google's CEO mentioned in a Twitter message that someone told him: "Hell has indeed frozen over." This is Google's first Super Bowl ad:


 

Google Chrome Safe Mode

Firefox has an option that lets you temporarily disable themes and extensions, so you can still use your browser even if one of your add-ons is buggy. It's called safe mode and it's "a special Firefox execution mode that can be used to troubleshoot issues in Firefox. In Safe Mode, you can reset some settings or disable add-ons that might be the source of the issue. By comparing Firefox behavior in normal mode to its behavior in Safe Mode with various items disabled, you may be able to diagnose issues."

Google Chrome doesn't have this feature, but you can open an incognito window to temporarily disable extensions.


If you want to create a shortcut that opens Chrome in incognito mode, duplicate an existing Chrome shortcut, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties" and append this flag to the target value: --incognito (don't forget to add a space to separate the flag).


Chrome OS Tablet Mockups

Hot on the heels of the Apple iPad announcement, Google released some mockups for Chrome OS tablets.

"On tablets, the UI would be adjusted to handle larger touch targets. Initial explorations have maintained the same basic chrome layout, but enlarged the controls. Icons could be placed above tabs to provide larger, square targets. Panels would be placed along the bottom edge and could be opened with upward dragging motions," explains Google.



Even if Chrome OS was initially designed for netbooks, Google hopes to create an operating system that works on tablets, laptops and desktop computers. "Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power".


Chrome OS has the advantage of a simple interface optimized for web applications. This may seem too restrictive, but Chrome, Safari, Firefox and other browsers are quickly evolving and many popular apps are migrating to the web.

{ via TechCrunch }


 

Better Google Search Integration in Gmail

One of the few great Hotmail features is the web search integration. When you compose a message, Hotmail lets you add maps, movie listings, local search results, images from the web without opening a new page.

Google's AJAX Search API lets you add similar features to any application, so it was surprising to see that Gmail didn't include a gadget that integrates with Google search. Last year, Gmail Labs added a Google Search gadget, but it only displayed web search results.

The Gmail Labs feature has been improved and you can now find images, maps, news articles, simple facts, weather information, definitions and even use Google Calculator from Gmail. Depending on your query, the gadget shows web search results or results from specialized search engines. Sometimes you'll see information that's usually displayed in an OneBox.



The main problem is that the gadget displays a small number of images, news articles or local search results, but there's no option to see more results from the same category. Another issue is that the specialized results are displayed only if Google finds that they're appropriate for your query.

{ via Gmail Blog }


Star Google News Stories

Google News added a new feature that lets you star news stories. If you click on a star next to a Google News cluster, you'll add it to the Starred section and Google will notify you when it finds related articles.

"When you star a story in Google News, it's one way to let us know that you're interested in that subject. When there are significant updates, we will alert you by putting the headline in bold so you can get more information," mentions Google News blog.

For some reason, Google doesn't add the starred news stories to Google Bookmarks and there's no option to star a news cluster after you open it. Another issue is that the Starred section only includes the most recent 20 starred stories.

I don't know if this is best way to use this feature, but you could star news stories to read them later. If you don't already use Instapaper or Read It Later, starring Google News clusters is a great way to save them for later.


 

Google's False Advertising

Google claims that you can store "up to 8,192,000 photos from a 5MP camera" if you buy 16 TB of storage. There's also a promotion that offers a free Eye-Fi card if you buy $50 or more of storage.


Apparently, you can't store 8,192,000 photos, at least not in Picasa Web Albums. Google's photo service has some strange limitations: a photo album can include up to 1,000 photos and a Picasa Web account can only have 1,000 albums. That means you'll be able to upload less than 1,000,000 photos, especially if you think that not all albums will include 1,000 photos.

Dave, a reader of this blog, is concerned: "Many people are upset that they purchased additional storage capacity from Google only to learn later that although they have plenty of free space, they have easily maxed out the 1000 files allowed by Google. Here is one of several threads on the Picasa help forum that discusses this issue. As someone who is/was considering purchasing extra storage space from Google in order to upload more pictures to Picasa Web Albums, I am a little concerned about this."

Of course, Google might say that the photos can also be stored using Google Docs or Gmail. Picasa Web Albums has to remove the limitations, improve photo uploading and the way you organize photos. Why do you have to upload photos to an album when Gmail and Google Docs use labels to organize messages and files?

{ Thanks, Dave. }


Google Video Finds Playlists

Google's video search engine started to index playlists from YouTube and other video sites. Playlists are mixed with standard video search results, but you'll probably find them on the first search results pages if they're relevant.

It's interesting to note that Google's algorithms detect groups of videos even if they aren't called playlists.


"Our intent is to represent the video content of the internet fairly and accurately. We don't give special ranking preference to videos hosted by YouTube or Google Video, nor do we manipulate search results in any way. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the Web to determine the inclusion and ranking of videos in our search results. After determining the content of the video using our spidering technology, Google then combines sophisticated text-matching techniques to find videos that are both important and relevant to your search. Our technology examines dozens of aspects of the video's content (including number of hits and rating) to determine if it's a good match for your query," explains Google.


 

Google Translate Adds Haitian Creole

Google's translation service added support for Haitian Creole, the most popular language in Haiti. "Haitian Creole language, often called simply Creole or Kreyòl, is a language spoken in Haiti by about eight million people, which is about 80% of the entire population, and via emigration, by about one million speakers residing in the Bahamas, Cuba, Canada, Cayman Islands, Dominican Republic, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Belize, Puerto Rico, and United States," mentions Wikipedia.

It's an early release labeled as "alpha", so the translation quality isn't very high.


A week ago, Microsoft Translator added support for Haitian Creole. "In the current crisis in Haiti there are a number of initiatives to rapidly build software to assist in humanitarian aid. Responding to community requests for a machine translation (MT) system to translate between English and Haitian Creole, our team has been hard at work over the last few days. I am glad to announce that an experimental Haitian Creole MT system is now publicly available via several services and APIs powered by Microsoft Translator technologies. We will continue working on improving the system, but we hope meanwhile that in spite of the experimental nature – it will be of use in the relief efforts."

I used both Microsoft Translator and Google Translate to translate an article from VOA News. Google's translation (on the right) is much better:


Google Chrome's Content Filtering

A recent Chromium build added some new options that let you filter content from web pages. A new dialog titled "Content Settings" adds new features for managing cookies, JavaScript content, images, plug-ins and pop-ups.

For example, you can enable an option that clears cookies when you close the browser, a feature that's available in many other browsers. Other features let you disable images, JavaScript or plug-ins for a list of sites. If these settings are exposed via an API, developers will be able to build extensions like NoScript.



I tried to enable some of the new features, but they didn't work in the most recent Chromium build (revision 37221).


 

Offline Installer for Google Earth

Downloading Google Earth is more complicated than it should be. At least if you want to download only Google Earth and save the installer for a future use. By default, Google downloads a small setup file that installs Google Earth, Google Chrome and Google Updater. Even if you disable the option "Include Google Chrome, a fast new browser for Windows and Mac", you'll still download a Web installer.

Here's how to download the standalone installer for Google Earth:

1. Go to Google Earth's homepage and click on "Download Google Earth".

2. At the bottom of the page, there's a small message: "Customize your installation with advanced setup." Click on "advanced setup".


3. Disable this option: "Allow Google Earth to automatically install recommended updates."


4. Click on "Agree and download" and you'll get the offline installer. The direct download link for the Windows version is: http://dl.google.com/earth/client/advanced/current/GoogleEarthWin.exe.

The advanced setup page offers two other interesting options: installing Google Earth for all user accounts and the full setup for Google Earth 5.0.

Google Chrome should add a similar page that lets you download the standalone installer and a version that installs the software for all user accounts. This page still offers the standalone setup, but it's an old version. Right now, Google Pack is the only option to install Chrome for multiple user accounts.

{ Thanks, Brian. }


Google Docs Grid View

Now that you can use Google Docs to store files, you'll upload a lot of files from your computer and treat Google Docs as an online version of Windows Explorer (or any other file manager). Unlike Windows Explorer, Google Docs had a single view for displaying files: the details view.

If you don't like to see the date when a file was last modified or the number of collaborators, you can switch to the new thumbnail view. Google Docs generates thumbnails for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos and PDF files, while showing standard icons for other file types.


"We recently finished rolling out the upload and store any file feature, so everyone should now be able to upload, store, and share any file in Google Docs. We also increased the maximum file size based on your feedback, so you can now uploads files up to 1 GB in size," mentions Google Docs Blog.

Of course, there are many other improvements that would make Google Docs more useful: increasing the free quota to at least 10 GB, adding support for any file type to the API and making it easier to access your files by mapping Google Docs as a network drive.

Tip: you can use the new grid view for shared folders by adding &layout=grid to the URL. Here's an example.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }


 

10 Must-Have Google Chrome Extensions

The Windows version of Google Chrome 4 is out of beta and you can finally try the features that were previously available in Chrome's beta and dev channels. Google will automatically update the browser to the latest version (4.0.249.78), but you can also click on the wrench button, select "About" and manually update the browser.

The most important feature released in Google Chrome 4 is the support for extensions. Chrome extensions are easier to create than Firefox extensions because they're nothing more than web pages that use Chrome's APIs. That's why you can install or disable extensions without having to restart the browser, that's why extensions use separate processes and this is one of the reasons why Chrome extensions are more limited and don't have a consistent interface.

Google Chrome has built-in support for user scripts, so you don't need to install an extension like Greasemonkey. Chrome can convert user scripts into extensions, so many Chrome extensions are just glorified Greasemonkey scripts.

To install an extension, visit Google Chrome's extension gallery and pick one of the 1,861 extensions that are currently available. Here are some of the most useful extensions that add missing features to Google Chrome:

1. RSS Subscription Extension. Detecting and previewing feeds is a standard feature in most browser, but not in Google Chrome. This extension shows an orange icon in the Omnibox when it detects feeds and lets you subscribe to one of the feeds using your favorite feed reader. You can select one of the popular feed reader that are available by default (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) or you can add another feed reader.



2. Email this page. Firefox's contextual menu has an option called "send link" that lets you send a link to the current page using your favorite mail client. This extension has a similar functionality, but it only lets you pick the default mail client and Gmail.

3. Google Dictionary shows the definition of a word when you double-click on it. It only support monolingual dictionaries and a small number of languages, but it's useful if you want to find the definition of a word without opening a new page.



4. Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer - a simple extension that detects the links to PDF, PPT and TIFF files and opens the files in Google Docs, so you can view them without installing additional software.

5. Slideshow - a great way to view the images from sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, and Google Images in a slideshow.



6. Empty New Tab Page - a simple extension that replaces Chrome's new tab page with a blank page.

7. FlashBlock disables Flash content for all web pages and replaces it with a placeholder. Click on the placeholder and you'll enable the Flash element. This way, you'll no longer see Flash ads, annoying Flash animations and other unnecessary objects that slow down your browser.

8. AdBlock hides ads using frequently-updated filter lists. You can whitelist domains and subdomains using Ctrl+Shift+L.

9. Secure Login Helper redirects you to the HTTPS login pages for sites like Twitter, Facebook and Twitter.

10. Smooth gestures - use mouse gesture to perform actions like going back one page, going to the top of a page or opening the last close tab. Mouse gestures are intuitive and you can customize them.




If you found other great Chrome extensions, mention them in a comment.


Track Page Changes Using Google Reader

Not all web pages offer feeds and sometimes it's useful to monitor web pages and find the latest information. A great service that offer this feature is Page2Rss, which provides a feed for each monitored web page.

A similar feature is now available in Google Reader and it's cleverly integrated: click on "Add subscription", type the address of a web page and Google Reader will automatically generate a feed if it can't detect one.


"We provide short snippets of page changes to help you quickly decide if the page is worth revisiting and we're working on improving the quality of these snippets," says Brian Shih.

"Reader may not always detect updates to your content. Currently, only English-language content in HTML format is supported. In addition, updates to content in frames are not detected; nor are updates to content that requires sign-in to view," mentions a help center article, which also informs that webmasters can prevent Google from monitoring web pages by using the features that block Googlebot from crawling or caching web pages. This suggests that Google Reader's page monitoring uses data from Google's search index and the changes may not be detected quickly if the web page is not popular or it doesn't change often.

Since I rarely visit Google's homepage, generating a feed for google.com or for other international Google homepages is a great way to track all the doodles and the promotional messages.


For now, Page2RSS offers more features (posts have better titles, you can view a cached version of the page), but Google Reader is more reliable. For example, Page2RSS doesn't show the latest changes for google.com.

Tip: to find the URL of the feed generated by Google, click on "show details" and you'll find a URL like:

http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/11009120664050806769


 

YouTube Music Discovery

YouTube's Labs added an interesting service with a very long name: YouTube Music Discovery Project and Playlist Creation Tool. Let's just call it YouTube Music Discovery.

Type the name of an artist and YouTube generates a playlist that includes music from the artist you've entered and from similar artists. For example, I entered "Bjork" and YouTube added music from Radiohead, Air, Massive Attack and Aphex Twin. After the playlist is generated, you can remove some of the songs, add new songs, save the playlist or watch all the videos.


Playlists are far from perfect: there are too many songs from the same artists, there are few obscure songs and the transition between songs is not always smooth. YouTube Music Discovery Project won't replace Pandora or Last.fm radios, but it's a simple way to find music from your favorite artists and to discover similar artists.

"A search for Pearl Jam results in a playlist stocked with Eddie Vedder & Co., plus videos by fellow Seattle grunge all-stars like Nirvana and Soundgarden and ’90s rockers like Smashing Pumpkins and Black Crowes. Not much for discovery as the vast majority of Pearl Jam fans are already well aware of these other bands, but the Pearl Jam list might introduce fans to the handful of obscure Screaming Trees music videos that YouTube suggests," notices Rolling Stone.

A similar feature is available for the existing YouTube playlists: click on "Recommend videos based on this playlist" and YouTube suggests 8 related videos.


Blogger Static Pages

Blogger in Draft, Blogger's version that includes experimental features, added a frequently-requested feature: static pages. "Blogger Pages lets you to publish static information on stand-alone pages linked from your blog. For example, you can use Pages to create an About This Blog page that discusses the evolution of your blog, or a Contact Me page that provides directions, a phone number, and a map to your location."

You can create up to 10 static pages and they're automatically added to the blog's sidebar. Blogger uses the same editor for editing posts and pages, but pages have a different URL format and they're displayed in a separate list.





I tried to create a static page for this blog, but it uses a custom template and I couldn't find the "Edit Pages" section. Even when I manually entered the URL: http://draft.blogger.com/pages.g?blogID=<BLOG_ID> and tried to create a page, Blogger returned an error message and couldn't create the page.


 

YouTube's HTML5 Player

Now that at least 3 important browsers support HTML5's video tag, YouTube added an experimental feature that lets you replace the Flash player with a native player. The main benefit is that your browser plays videos without using Adobe's Flash plug-in, which might slow down your computer and even crash your browser. Another benefit is that videos are treated like images and can be customized using standard CSS features.

For now, YouTube uses the h.264 video codec, so the only browsers that support YouTube's HTML5 player are Safari 4 and Google Chrome. Firefox only supports the Ogg Theora format, which is an open format.

"Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn't support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video," explains YouTube.



YouTube also updated the Flash player and made it easier to switch to a different version of the video.


{ Thanks, Wulf. }


Highlight Google Search Keywords

If you like Google Toolbar's highlighter, but you don't want to install the add-on or the toolbar doesn't support your browser, try the Word Highlight Greasemonkey script. After performing a Google search, the script highlights the keywords and lets you quickly find their occurrences. Click on the arrows displayed next to each keyword to find the next match and use the map to visualize the distribution of the keywords.


My favorite feature is that you can use the word highlighter even when you're not searching the web. Press Ctrl+/, type the keywords and the script will highlight them.

The script can be installed in Firefox (it requires Greasemonkey), Chrome 4 Beta, Opera, Safari (it requires GreaseKit).


 

Avast Added to Google Pack

Google added a new antivirus software to Google Pack and this time the program doesn't try to convince you to buy a paid version. Google Pack added the free version of the Avast antivirus, but only for the following languages: French, German, Italian, Czech, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and Polish. I installed the software using the Italian interface, but both Google Pack and Avast were installed in English.

For some reason, the English version of Google Pack lets you install a different security software: Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus, which replaced Norton Security Scan. Both Spyware Doctor and Norton Security Scan offered limited or no real-time protection and Spyware Doctor used an outdated signature database.



"The Avast Free Antivirus included in the Google Pack is the same as our regular Avast Free Antivirus. Following the philosophy of Google and Avast, the product is fully featured and does not constantly try to up-sell users to a premium product," explains Vincent Steckler.

The most recent tests from AV-Comparatives.org show that Avast, Avira and Microsoft Security Essentials are the best free antivirus software. "This year, avast! showed big improvements in its detection rates (esp. in the second half of 2009) and reduced its number of false alarms. Its on-demand scanning speed is one of the fastest. The recently released avast! v5 includes further enhancements (like a new graphical user interface) and new protection features."

In December, Avast's blog announced that the software will offer users the option to install Google Chrome. Some may call it software bundling, but it's not as disingenuous as the Google Earth promotion. "Starting in mid-November, we will be giving our new users an option to install Google Chrome when installing Avast. We are not forcing Chrome on users. It is entirely up to the user–to download/install and nothing is hidden."


Google Stops Censoring Search Results in China

Four years after launching a censored version of Google's search engine in China, Google decided to stop censoring search results. The explanation from Google's blog is not very convincing:

In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. (...) We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. (...) As part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.



In 2006, Google admitted that censoring search results in China compromises its mission, but failing to offer a service to a fifth of the world's population seemed to be a worse idea. "We ultimately reached our decision by asking ourselves which course would most effectively further Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. Or, put simply: how can we provide the greatest access to information to the greatest number of people?"

In four years, Google's Chinese search engine doubled its market share and launched many local services, including a music search engine and a Pinyin input method.

"According to three different sources close to Baidu, the Chinese company had never felt the real pressure from Google until the end of 2008, when Baidu found that the workload of its manual optimization of irrelevant search results was exploding. Apart from improved quality of its products, Google's gain in market share was also the result of the search boxes in more and more associated sites," reported Michael Liang Zhang and Yan Luo.

In September 2009, Kai-Fu Lee, president of Google China, resigned and left Google. "In announcing Mr. Lee's departure, Google said it was nearly doubling the size of its sales force in China in response to strong growth."

"Last year, the state-owned national broadcaster CCTV's primetime news programme accused Google of spreading pornography, and a senior police official made a speech warning of "hostile forces" on the internet and vowing to stop the spread of dissenting political views online. The last year has also seen interference by China internet censors – often called the Great Firewall, or GFW – in Google services not hosted on Chinese servers, such as Google Docs and Gmail," reports The Guardian.

After four years of growth, Google's decision to stop censoring search results and to consider closing its offices from China seems strange. Google compromised its principles to improve the access to information in China, but failed to make some significant progress. Closing google.cn is a blow to the Chinese government, but it won't influence the freedom of speech and information in China.

Tom Krazit offers a plausible explanation: "Google has justified its presence in China as part of its lofty mission; this is a company that really does think it's engaged in business to better the world. But doing business in China while maintaining the moral high ground could well be more difficult than digitizing all the world's information."


 

Gmail's HTTPS Access Is Enabled by Default

Unlike other popular webmail services, Gmail allows you to read your messages using a secure connection by visiting https://mail.google.com. In 2008, Gmail added an option that redirected you to the https version and now this option is enabled by default.

"Using https helps protect data from being snooped by third parties, such as in public wifi hotspots. We initially left the choice of using it up to you because there's a downside: https can make your mail slower since encrypted data doesn't travel across the web as quickly as unencrypted data. Over the last few months, we've been researching the security/latency tradeoff and decided that turning https on for everyone was the right thing to do," explains Gmail's blog.

To disable this feature, go to Gmail's settings page, select "Don't always use https" and click on "Save changes". If you can't use Gmail offline when this feature is enabled, try this workaround.


Even if this feature is restricted to Gmail, there's an interesting side-effect: if you open Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Reader by clicking on Gmail's navigational links, you'll use the https versions of those services.


Google Groups Create and join groups to discuss topics, Setup mailing lists to stay in touch. Search and access over 1 billion posts. Send newsletters and plan group events. Bookmark your favorite discussions.

google-gtags Server-based tags serving for large codebases. Clients in python and for emacs and vim. This is an extension to GNU Emacs and X-Emacs TAGS functionality, with a server-side component that narrows down the view of a potentially large TAGS file and serves the narrowed view over the wire for better performance. An Emacs Lisp client, a python client, and vim extensions are supplied.

SEO Tool for Firefox Pulls useful market research data right into Google's and Yahoo!'s search results, including the following data near each search result. (e.g. Google Page Rank, number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and much more) In addition to pulling in this valuable marketing data this tool links to the resources where the data was pulled from, so it makes it easy for you to verify the data and further analyze it by citing the source. You can click on any of the data points to dig deeper.

Google Web Toolkit - Build AJAX apps in the Java language.  Download Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this  is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatibilities' between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. GWT lets you avoid many of these headaches while offering your users the same dynamic, standards-compliant experience. You write your front end in the Java programming language, and the GWT compiler converts your Java classes to browser-compliant JavaScript' and HTML. Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript' and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web services applicationsAjax: A New Approach to Web Applications. Ajax is said not to be an acronym. GWT Class Reference. These packages contain reference information about the main GWT user interface and utility classes. For higher-level explanations of how to take advantage of all this stuff, check out the Developer Guide. Among other things, there's a handy widget gallery and an explanation of how remote procedure calls work. Google AJAX Search API is a Javascript library that allows you to embed Google Search in your web pages and other web applications. To use the API, you will first need to sign up for an API key

SOFTplus GSiteCrawler Downloads (Google XML Sitemap generator)

Google Tutor & Advisor

Google Pack A free collection of essential software

Google labs showcases a few of our favorite ideas that aren't quite ready for prime time.

GoogleFun is a simple portal to various websites which use Google as the basis for some kind of game or amusement.

Google Code Enhance your web site (API, Application Programming Interface and SDK, Software Development Kit.)

Google Groups Forums, discuss, help with API, Application Programming Interface and SDK, Software Development Kit, etc... Also other non-connected issues.

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we'll make searchable on Google (if your content isn't online yet, we'll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items' relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.

Google Page Creator. Create your own web pages, quickly and easily. Google Page Creator is a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.

Google Guy Says Google Ranking Information. This web site tracks the words of a Google employee known as GoogleGuy. GoogleGuy is a Google employee who is very helpful in responding to questions and providing information to webmasters about changes at Google. More info.

Google Heat map. Red colour's show the areas of Google Page which get the Clicks. Blue area get less clicks. Did-it, Enquiro, and Eyetools uncover Search's Golden Triangle: New EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through.

A look inside Google AdSense. Get site-targeted with quality, placement and size Where and how you place AdSence links on your website may effect your income.

Manage Google AdWords from your desktop. AdWords Editor is Google's free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns.

Google section targeting and how do I implement it? Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you'd like us to emphasise or downplay when matching ads to your site's content. By providing us with your suggestions, you can assist us in improving your ad targeting. We recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

Google and the Open Source Developer Recognizing the vital role that open source software plays at Google, we of the Open Source Programs Office are tasked with maintaining a healthy relationship with the open source software development community. We do this by releasing Google-created code, providing vital infrastructure and by creating new open source software developers through programs like the Google Summer of Code. Explore the different ways we serve the open source community through these sites on Google Code.

Develop Your Own Applications Using Google. With the Google SOAP Search API service, software developers can query billions of web pages directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET. Also read Site Search using Google API and PHP by Dan Karran    code Google SOAP API page.   Note: From December 5, 2006, Google are no longer issuing new API keys for the SOAP Search API. Developers with existing SOAP Search API keys will not be affected. Depending on your application, the AJAX Search API may be a better choice for you instead. It tends to be better suited for search-based web applications and supports additional features like Video, News, Maps, and Blog search results.  More AJAX links.  More SOAP Links at Web Services. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). WSDL (Web Services Description Language). SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

GooGle Datacenter Check from My Page Rank

Google Management. Co-founders Larry Page, president of Products, and Sergey Brin, president of Technology, brought Google to life in September 1998. Since then, the company has grown to more than 5,000 employees worldwide, with a management team that represents some of the most experienced technology professionals in the industry. 

AdWords Wrapper is a free time saving tool that wraps keyword phrases in "quotation marks" (phrase match) and [square brackets] (exact match) for use in Google AdWords campaigns. Keywords entered in Google AdWords Wrapper and Negative Keywords Maker are systematically changed to lowercase, with duplicates removed, and sorted in character code order.

The Googlecomm Fable from Search Engine Honesty

Alternate URL If your website has Google Ads and  it is displaying unpaid public service announcements, (these are used when Google has no paying text ads to show), you could be losing money. You could be making more money by adding an Alternate URL. Add an Alternate URL and earn money instead of showing unpaid public service announcements. Take advantage of an Alternate URL. Earn revenue from your default ads. If you use Google AdSense or any another ad program to earn money from your website, now you can increase the amount of revenue you make automatically. Most online ad programs, including Google, will sometimes show default ads, or public service announcements (PSAs) when they have no paying ads to show. This can happen for many reasons, especially when their ad code crawls your pages. Alternate URL lets you replace those ads with paying ads. Just use the code we provide to replace your ad program's default ads. Or use with Google, FastClick and many other ad programs. Or you can use Alternate URL as your primary ad program.

A look inside Google AdSense. Ad Rank explained! Ever wonder what determines the order in which ads appear on your site? Then you've wondered about the Google AdWords ad ranking system. AdWords is the advertising platform thousands of advertisers use to place their ads on the Google network. Once an ad is in the AdWords system, it competes against other ads to appear on relevant pages in the AdSense® network. It's through this real-time dynamic auction system that ads are ranked. Those ads with the highest Ad Rank at any given moment are displayed on your site.

Google's DMCA policy Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It is our policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. This page describes the information that should be present in these notices. It is designed to make submitting notices of alleged infringement to Google as straightforward as possible while reducing the number of notices that we receive that are fraudulent or difficult to understand or verify. The form of notice specified below is consistent with the form suggested by the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office Web Site, but we will respond to notices of this form from other jurisdictions as well. Regardless of whether we may be liable for such infringement under local country law or United States law, our response to these notices may include removing or disabling access to material claimed to be the subject of infringing activity and/or terminating subscribers. If we remove or disable access in response to such a notice, we will make a good-faith attempt to contact the owner or administrator of the affected site or content so that they may make a counter notification. We may also document notices of alleged infringement on which we act. As with all legal notices, a copy of the notice may be sent to one or more third parties who may make it available to the public. More Web Master Law. Legal issues for Web Masters

  Google URL Links Test  (Is the URL listed, Similar to/Related to, Links to, Sites contain Terms) Enter the full URL or Keyword to test and click the Submit button.


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Ogle Earth Ton's of Google Earth and Google Maps Links.  Links, tools and Utility's, conversion to KML links. Help, tips and advice, etc...

Google KML documentation KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Google Earth browser, such as Google Maps, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard.

Google Maps Mania Blog Spot More Maps and Travel. Route Planners. How to get there. Bus times, Train Times, Ferry times. Aeroplane Times, more Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Video Blogs. Vlogs

FME Support for Google Earth & Google Maps Read and Write data to Google Earth (KML) from over 150 popular GIS, CAD and Database formats.

Google Earth KML Creator. Use this simple Google Earth KML Creator to create a KML file from latitude/longitude or address/zip combinations. You can also choose the name, description, icon to display as well as other settings.

My Maps Plus is a site that lets you embed maps created using Google Maps into any blog or website.

Google guide

Googspy

Google 20 years of Usenet

Serverfiles

Googlism will find out what Google.com thinks of you, your friends or anything! Search for your name here or for a good laugh check out some of the popular Googlisms.

Simple Submit 130 Google Related and Other Search Engines for FREE!!

Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program whose few simple tools enable you to create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects even space ships. You can add details, textures and glass to your models, design with dimensional accuracy, and place your finished models in Google Earth, share them with others by posting them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp (free) is a great way to discover if 3D modeling is right for you.

Doodle 4 Google (Good Luck, sic) Design competition for Britain's 10 million school children. Design a Google Logo.

GoogleMapBuilder, a spreadsheet-to-map utility. The first DIY tool on the web that allows you to create an interactive Google Map on your website with "point-and-click" ease.

Google Note Pad Websites related to Google, e.g. Google Desktop, Google Talk, etc...

Google Guide

Click-to-play video ads for AdWords    Adwords blogspot    Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Video Blogs. Vlogs. Video Blogs. More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing,

April Fool's joke form Google : Google Romance romance, uploading your profile. Note: those who generally favor the throw enough stuff at the wall approach to online dating might find it useful to employ our Batch Profile Uploading option. Carryout a Soulmate Search, your deeply personal and potentially life-altering search results are produced solely by computer algorithm, without human intervention of any kind. Take a trip down Google's April Fool's memory lane, here or here or here or here. Enjoy. Google MentalPlex® FAQ.  Google Jokes, Sometimes...

GoogleEnhancer. Enhances Google results by adding favicons, keyword highlighting, consecutive numbering as well as by addition of 'search by date', 'search by language' and 'search by file-type' options.

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser Graphical view of links from a URL, helps the reach of a website.

Google vs Yahoo Image map of Compare Bargains "Yahoo! seems to limit the number of requests in a certain timeframe. If nothing is found, just try again later."

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Google) Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

The Unofficial Google Fan Club

A Computer Portal SiteMap XML    More information about Site Maps and Google Site Maps

Google Microsoft Search

Google Apple Macintosh Search

Google Linux Search

Google BSD operating system Search

Google University

Google U.S. Government

The Google Pack will now install
  • Google Earth
  • Google Toolbar for IE
  • Ad-Aware SE Personal
  • And More...
  • Google Desktop
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  • Picasa
  • Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
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Google Invalid Clicks Information Help Centre Also view Click Fraud notes 

Manage Google AdWords from your desktop. AdWords Editor is Google's free, downloadable account management application for your computer. Download your AdWords account to your computer, make your changes, then upload your revised campaigns.

Google Inside AdWords Blog  More about Blogs. Blogging. BLOG. Video Blogs. Vlogs. Video Blogs.

Use Google Video to showcase your products    Google Video Player More Videos to Watch and Video Publishing,

Google Coop: Google Co-op is a platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information. This is a work in progress. You can expect to see evolution in both the Co-op's structure and the platform's features. Today, you can: Create Search Topics: You can create specialized search for your Topic. You can specify web pages/sites that you consider authoritative for your topic, suggest appropriate query refinements, etc. See an example of this in action. Learn more. You can see whether errors were detected in your XML file by going to the feed URL submission page. This page displays a message giving the last set of parse errors that were detected. When you fix errors, it's often a good idea to go to this page, reenter the feed URL that had the errors, and click "Add feed" again (even if your feed URL has not changed) to let us know that we should try to parse it again soon. View RSS, Really Simple Syndication. (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary) Page

The technology behind Google's great results. (Joke). As a Google user, you're familiar with the speed and accuracy of a Google search. How exactly does Google manage to find the right results for every query as quickly as it does? The heart of Google's search technology is PigeonRank®, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Google)

Cleverstat. Accurate Monitor for Search Engines. Free Monitor for Google. AdWords® Clever Wizard. Site Content Analyzer

Google Web Accelerator works with your browser to help web pages show up in a snap. (Some users report this makes page load slower),  Learn more.

Google Creating and submitting Video Sitemaps files   More about Google Site Map

Anonymizing RFI Attacks Through Google It his claimed that Google can be used to utilized to hack into websites - actively exploiting them (not information gathering by the use of Google hacking , although that is how most of the sites vulnerable to RFI attacks are found).

Help Google maintain the quality of Google search results. Report Spamming websites. Google work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users'best interests at heart. Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone. (DO NOT ABUSE THIS LINK - make false reports etc...)

Googlewhack. A Googlewhack  is a Google search query consisting of two words using a search without quotes, that returns a single result. More about Googlewhack

Google Site Maps Information

Creating spreadsheets With Google. Create basic spreadsheets from scratch. You can start from scratch and do all the basics, including changing the number format, sorting by columns, and adding formulas.

Google Logos. Holiday Logos and Events. A variety of logos commemorating holidays and events. Online museum for your amusement. Please do not use them elsewhere. And please, don't feed the kangaroo. If you would like to include a link to Google on your site, please use one of our official logo stickers. Who's behind the oodles of doodles Google doodles for you? Find out...  Keep up with the latest from Google. Sign up for the Google Friends newsletterFan of Google have also created some Logos

How Google Engineers Spend Their Time:-

More Tech support videos at 5min.com

IP Location Lookup This is not an SEO tool, but is very useful in determining the geographic location of an IP address, Check and IP address e.g. 203.113.20.70, (hit Enter after entering your IP address on the page), using a bit of AJAX and Google Maps.

How can I remove old content from Google's index?

Making Money from the Internet

Back to top ® © ™ are owned by respective authors and websites. There may be a charge for some software.  Google® is a trademark of Google Inc


Other links

Yahoo Knowledge. Yahoo Information.

MSN Knowledge. MSN Information

Compare bargains on Webmaster

Dominate Google Search Results Pages for a dollar. Automatically post to popular Video, Blog, Social Networking and Podcasting sites to dramatically increase visitors to your products and services. Begin to Dominate Google starting for only one dollar.

TrafficSeeker. Packed with TONS of new features to get your site better rankings in the search engines. The Pro version submits your site to over 200,000 engines and the Platinum to over 1 Million engines including Google, Yahoo, HotBot, Dmoz and many more! PLUS lot's of other places >>>> Program details of how to Automatically achieve this while you sleep... Includes many powerful features to help drive traffic to your website! With more than 20 critical tools included in TrafficSeeker for optimal promotion of your website. Here are just a few:  Submit Your website to more than 1.2 Million Search Engines, Directories and Link pages.  Link Popularity Tracking Tool. Keyword Builder - find and use the best keywords to drive traffic to your site. HTML Validator - make sure your site is ready for search engine indexing. Website Ranking Utility. Create, Manage, Add and Edit your own search engine databases. And tons more!! Click here for more information on TrafficSeeker.

Alexa Top 500 Sites

Making money from the internet

Cleverstat. Accurate Monitor for Search Engines. Free Monitor for Google. AdWords® Clever Wizard. Site Content Analyzer.

Alexa Top 500 Sites

NicheBOT.com - Find what people search for. NicheBOT offers free keyword research services, innovative web site software, search engine ranking tools, and more.

IBP Win Award Axandra IBP. Internet Business Promoter. The all-in-one web site promotion tool for your web site success. IBP is the award-winning web site promotion and search engine submission software tool that helps you to get more revenue with high search engine rankings in Google, the new Yahoo and all other major search engines. IBP helps you with all important aspects of web site promotion.
Axandra ARELIS More customers, higher search engine rankings and new business contacts! ARELIS is a top rated software program that helps you to build a powerful business network quickly and easily. You'll benefit from highly targeted free traffic to your web site, new business contacts, a higher link popularity, higher search engine rankings and more sales.

Making Money from the Internet

A Great Portal, Great links to great web sites. Special offers and bargains, cutting edge technology, useful business links, career links, humour, fun, sports. Computing, Freeware, Programming. Free website promotion. Lifestyle, Film, Music, Games, Entertainment, Art, Theatre, Concerts, Literature, Leisure, Days Out, Tourism, Travel and Holidays. A crazy dancing sheep and other jokes. Relaxation and stress information. Lots of various and interesting subjects. Multi-search and news headlines search. Teenager pages. Jigsaw puzzles and much more.

Advertise on A Great Portal. Paid Inclusion Targeted Traffic Listing lots of Targeted Searchable Keywords and Static Page links. Sponsored searchable links: Specific links relating to the subject matter of the site. Your details will be displayed and users will be able to search on Keywords in the Title, icons, description, specialties, extra keywords, contact details and URL you provide. We will provide you with Lots of Searchable Keywords plus Static Page links. Individually targeted for Employment, Business, Science and Technology, Computing both hardware and software Entertainment or Sport. More Website promotion.  Internet advertising . DOT Solutions.  Digitally Orientated Technologies.  Helping people and smaller businesses increase their brand image. Low budget providers of Web & WAP (Wireless Applications Protocol) solutions. Methods of Internet adverting free tips.

DOT Solutions  Helping people and smaller businesses increase their brand image. Low budget providers of Web & WAP (Wireless Applications Protocol) solutions.  Also web & WAP sites promotion.

WEB items from Amazon

Advertising Methods FREE TIPS Advertising Methods. How to advertise online and offline. Methods of internet advertising and promotion. Here are some advertising methods that you may have considered to promote websites. Covers on-line and off-line adverting methods. The advantages and disadvantages of advertising methods and recommended ways to advertise. Don't get caught in a Mousetraps. Should you use Pixecode (Pixel Encoding), what is Pixecode (Pixel Encoding)? I've heard about Blogging, tell me more. Worried about Hidden Expenses, what are they, find out now. How about  Video and Multimedia, how do I go about it and is it  recommended? Lot's more FREE How much does the information cost me? It's FREE, I don't even ask for your email so don't worry about being added to Spam list and no need to register to get this FREE information. information, tips and advice.

 Enter the Bargain to search for. (Not the full list yet. I hope to add more bargains soon)
And Search    Or Search    Exact Search      Ascending Prices    Descending Prices.    All currencies    USA Dollars    UK Pounds
 Price range.  From Prices     To Prices     Search Help for Compare Bargains.

Compare Bargains Computer Software links Computer software, software company, software download, cheap computer software. Compare Bargains Computer Hardware and Peripherals links. Modding, Computer hardware, computer networking, computer parts, computer monitor, case modding, computer peripherals, printers.

Bargain Internet, Web tools, Traffic, Hosting, etc... Compare Bargains Internet, Web tools, Traffic, Hosting links. Internet, internet directory, internet provider, internet marketing, internet service, cheap internet, internet service provider, broadband internet, web tool, web master tool, web design tool, web site tool, web site management tool, traffic, web site traffic,  increase traffic, hosting, web site hosting, web page hosting, cheap web hosting, unix hosting, ftp hosting, domain hosting, domain hosting, web hosting services, seo company, internet marketing, web site marketing, web marketing, advertise online.

Compare Bargains Inkjet Cartridges, Laser Toner links. Inkjet cartridge, inkjet printer, inkjet, Epson inkjet cartridge, inkjet refill, inkjet ink, universal inkjet, cheap inkjet cartridge, inkjet cartridge, ink cartridge, printer cartridge, toner cartridge, cartridge, Epson ink cartridge, color laser printer, laser printer, laser printer toner, cartridge toner, cartridge, laser toner, printer toner, toner refill, copier toner, laser printer, toner cartridge, laser toner cartridge, toner refill, refill, refill ink cartridge, inkjet refill kit, printer ink refill, inkjet cartridge refill, ink refill kit, ink jet refill, cartridge refill, printer cartridge refill, cartridge refill kit, printer refill, toner refill kit, universal inkjet refill kit, printer refill kit, refill kit, Epson ink refill, ink jet refill kit, toner cartridge refill, ink cartridge refill kit. This site has lots of advertising links to sites which indicate special offers, discounts and bargains and therefore allows you to choose from and compare any special deals.

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Rate Me At 321Webmaster.com

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More similar tools  Page Rank. Website Review, Ratings and URL listing tests

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Be aware of the possible of Google Slap

Top websites. Domains Top Address. Find or sell domain names. Want to sell a Domain Name? Want to make money from a unused domain name you own?  Only pay on a sale. Need to find a domain name for your business? Search now!

Web site promotion and traffic boosting     Big list of Submission sites

Also view our Page Rank, Website Review/Ratings section and the Web site promotion and traffic boosting section.

Computer Hardware and Peripherals Bargains Computer Software and Programs Bargains Inkjet Cartridges, Laser Toner Bargains Internet, Web tools, Traffic, Hosting Bargains 

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Benefit from IT Web and PC design and development.

Forums. Computing Forums. Webmaster Forums, Programming Forums

Hosting Question you should ask

Content Management Systems

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.htaccess Files and .htaccess Help. How use to .htaccess

CRON scheduler running of programs. CRONTABS

Search engines. Online Dictionary, Thesaurus. Acronym or abbreviation finder, etc..

Scams and hoaxes. Fraud warnings. Virus Attacks

FireWall's

SpyWare Removal

Diagnostics and Security (Phishing information)

Backup/File Compression Data Recovery

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Disaster Recovery Planning. (Also Undelete Files) So how good is your Disaster Recovery Planning?

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Programming Applications (VBA). Using Applications.

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DOT Solutions.  Digitally Orientated Technologies bring you Targeted Traffic for your site.   Helping people and smaller businesses increase their brand image.  Using low budget methods.  Able to provide step by step WAP (mobile phone) and WEB advertising solutions.  This method is ideal for people or businesses with smaller budgets.

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Web Masters. Click Here Now to start making money. A Great opportunity to make some money. Receive 50% by offering your users Ton's of Keywords on A Great Portal websites. Our Affiliate Program Pays you 50% on Level 1 of Every Sale of our Text Link both searchable and static Text Link!

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