Verification time savers — Analytics included!

Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 1:12 PM

Webmaster Level: All

Nobody likes to duplicate effort. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you're ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They're very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today.

You can now use a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet to verify ownership of your website. If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button.


This only works with the newer asynchronous Analytics JavaScript, so if you haven't migrated yet, now is a great time. If you haven't set up Google Analytics or verified yet, go ahead and set up Google Analytics first, then come verify ownership of your site. It'll save you a little time — who doesn't like that? Just as with all of our other verification methods, the Google Analytics JavaScript needs to stay in place on your site, or your verification will expire. You also need to remain an administrator on the Google Analytics account associated with the JavaScript snippet.

Don't forget that once you've verified ownership, you can add other verified owners quickly and easily through the Verification Details page. There's no need for each owner to manually verify ownership. More effort and time saved!


We've also introduced an improved interface for verification. The new verification page gives you more information about each verification method. In some cases, we can now provide detailed instructions about how to complete verification with your specific domain registrar or provider. If your provider is included, there's no need to dig through their documentation to figure out how to add a verification DNS record — we'll walk you through it.


The time you save using these new verification features might not be enough to let you take up a new hobby, but we hope it makes the verification process a little bit more pleasant. As always, please visit the Webmaster Help Forum if you have any questions.

Written by Sean Harding, Software Engineer

Chrome Extensions for web development

Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM

Webmaster Level: All

The Chrome Developer Tools are great for debugging HTML, JavaScript and CSS in Chrome. If you're writing a webpage or even a web app for the Chrome Web Store, you can inspect elements in the DOM, debug live JavaScript, and edit CSS styles directly in the current page. Extensions can make Google Chrome an even better web development environment by providing additional features that you can easily access in your browser. To help developers like you, we created a page that features extensions for web development. We hope you’ll find them useful in creating applications and sites for the web.

For example, Speed Tracer is an extension to help you identify and fix performance issues in your web applications. With Speed Tracer, you can get a better idea of where time is being spent in your application and troubleshoot problems in JavaScript parsing and execution, CSS style, and more.

Another useful extension is the Resolution Test that changes the size of the browser window, so web developers can preview websites in different screen resolutions. It also includes a list of commonly used resolutions, as well as a custom option to input your own resolution.

With the Web Developer extension, you can access additional developer tools such as validation options, page resizing and a CSS elements viewer; all from an additional button in the toolbar.

Another extension you should check out is the Chrome Editor that allows you to easily code within your browser, so you don’t have to flip between your browser and code editor. You can also save a code reference locally to your computer for later use.

These are just a few of the extensions you can find in our extensions for web development page. You can also look for more in the extensions gallery.

Written by Koh Kim, Google Chrome Team

Do know evil

Tuesday, May 04, 2010 at 8:19 AM

(Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog)

UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com.

We want Googlers to have a firm understanding of the threats our services face, as well as how to help protect against those threats. We work toward these goals in a variety of ways, including security training for new engineers, technical presentations about security, and other types of documentation. We also use codelabs — interactive programming tutorials that walk participants through specific programming tasks.

One codelab in particular teaches developers about common types of web application vulnerabilities. In the spirit of the thinking that "it takes a hacker to catch a hacker," the codelab also demonstrates how an attacker could exploit such vulnerabilities.

We're releasing this codelab, entitled "Web Application Exploits and Defenses," today in coordination with Google Code University and Google Labs to help software developers better recognize, fix, and avoid similar flaws in their own applications. The codelab is built around Gruyere, a small yet full-featured microblogging application designed to contain lots of security bugs. The vulnerabilities covered by the lab include cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and cross-site script inclusion (XSSI), as well as client-state manipulation, path traversal and AJAX and configuration vulnerabilities. It also shows how simple bugs can lead to information disclosure, denial-of-service and remote code execution.

The maxim, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is only true if the eyeballs know what to look for. To that end, the security bugs in Gruyere are real bugs — just like those in many other applications. The Gruyere source code is published under a Creative Commons license and is available for use in whitebox hacking exercises or in computer science classes covering security, software engineering or general software development.

To get started, visit http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/. An instructor's guide for using the codelab is now available on Google Code University.

Posted by Bruce Leban, Software Engineer

Webmasters - configure Google services at your hosting panel

Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 8:34 AM

Webmaster Level: All

Today, as announced on the Official Google Blog, we’ve taken an additional step to improve access to Google webmaster services. Parallels, one of the leading providers of control panel software to hosting companies, has integrated Google Services for Websites into Parallels Plesk Panel, used by millions of website owners globally to manage their websites.

If you use Plesk for managing your hosting and website services, you can easily configure Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search, Web Elements and AdSense for your website right from within Plesk.

Since Plesk knows what domains you own, it automatically registers your domains to Webmaster Tools and allows you to automatically login to the Webmaster Tools console to verify your sites, as shown below.

We’re always trying to make our tools easier to use and easier to access. Since you’re probably visiting your hosting control panel on a regular basis, we hope that you find this integration convenient. If you have feedback please let us know in the Webmaster Forum.

Posted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Protect your site from spammers with reCAPTCHA

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM

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.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Changes in First Click Free

Tuesday, December 01, 2009 at 9:02 AM

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.)

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

New personalization features in Google Friend Connect

Wednesday, November 04, 2009 at 7:40 AM

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.
Posted by Mussie Shore, Product Manager, Google Friend Connect

Translate your website with Google: Expand your audience globally

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 2:54 PM

(This has been cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.

Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.


After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.


It's easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.


Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate

New tools for Google Services for Websites

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 11:05 AM

Webmaster Level: All
(A nearly duplicate version :) cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Earlier this year, we launched Google Services for Websites, a program that helps partners, e.g., web hoster and access providers, offer useful and powerful tools to their customers. By making services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search and AdSense, easily accessible via the hoster control panel, hosters can easily enable these services for their webmasters. The tools help website owners understand search performance, improve user retention and monetize their content — in other words, run more effective websites.

Since we launched the program, several hosting platforms have enhanced their offerings by integrating with the appropriate APIs. Webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense, all with a few clicks at their hoster control panel. More partners are in the process of implementing these enhancements.

We've just added new tools to the suite:

• Web Elements allows your customers to enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. Webmasters can provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. With the Conversation Element, websites can create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search over your own site (or others you specify) without having to write any code and various options to customize further.
• Page Speed allows webmasters to measure the performance of their websites. Snappier websites help users find things faster; the recommendations from these latency tools allow hosters and webmasters to optimize website speed. These techniques can help hosters reduce resource use and optimize network bandwidth.
• The Tips for Hosters page offers a set of tips for hosters for creating a richer website hosting platform. Hosters can improve the convenience and accessibility of tools, while at the same time saving platform costs and earning referral fees. Tips include the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.

If you're a hoster and would like to participate in the Google Services for Websites program, please apply here. You'll have to integrate with the service APIs before these services can be made available to your customers, so the earlier you start that process, the better.

And if your hosting service doesn't have Google Services for Websites yet, send them to this page. Once they become a partner, you can quickly configure the services you want at your hoster's control panel (without having to come to Google).

As always, we'd love to get feedback on how the program is working for you, and what improvements you'd like to see.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Google Friend Connect - Now in 47 new languages

Monday, July 13, 2009 at 11:05 PM

Have you been holding off on using Google Friend Connect because your site isn't in English? Starting today, Friend Connect is available in 47 new languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Portuguese. Now you can easily add social features that match the language of other content on your site.

Most Google-created gadgets (such as the members, comments, and recommendation gadgets) are now available in these new languages. Some developers have also created gadgets that support additional languages and we hope that there will be more to come in the future. To see a list of gadgets available in your language, visit the gadget gallery.

When you add Friend Connect to a new site, it will default to your primary language. But if your site is in another language, simply select it on the site settings tab and Friend Connect will automatically render the gadgets in that language. And if have multiple sites in different languages, you can select a different language for each of your sites.

To learn more or see the full list of languages, check out the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect

Google Maps gadget: Help customers find their way

Tuesday, July 07, 2009 at 4:30 PM

Webmaster Level: All

With the new directions gadget from Google Maps, any business can offer customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions. Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location.

Last week, I looked up directions to the hotel in Sacramento that I had booked for the 4th of July weekend. As I had never been to that part of the state before, I was puzzled by the limited directions offered by their website - I had no idea whether I was approaching from the North, South, East or West or where the major highways were. What I needed were step-by-step directions from my exact starting point to the hotel that I could easily print and go.

Google has made this process easy for you. By copying and pasting a single line of code, any website can offer customized door-to-door directions powered by Google Maps to their users.

The gadget allows you to pre-fill the "To" field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are able to print their directions with a single click. And for those who prefer not to drive, the gadget also provides walking and public transit directions.

If someone enters a vague starting address, they have the option to specify a more exact address, which will then fly into the "From" field.

Providing directions from Google Maps is very flexible; in addition to run-of-the-mill addresses, you can give your customers directions to everything from a generic ZIP code to a specific set of latitude-longitude coordinates for any of your locations.

Example destinations:
123 River St, Woods, MA
90210
42.06782° N, 71.756963° W

You can also give your address an alias, or a name that everyone will understand. You can do this by putting the alias in parentheses just after the address:

42.06782° N, 71.756963° W (Grandma's House)

Take a look at how Legoland California, Emeril Lagasse, and Harvard University are using the gadget. And then test and create your own directions gadget here. For the many locations outside of the US, the gadget is available in 23 different languages.

Written by Julie Zhou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps

Best practices for Product Search

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 8:27 AM

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:

• Attributes to include in your feed
• FAQs
• Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
• Do product listings expire after 30 days?
• How often should I submit my feed?

More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Friend Connect now available in beta to everyone

Friday, December 05, 2008 at 3:38 AM

If you've been looking for a way to grow traffic and make your site more interactive, check out Google Friend Connect -- now in beta and available to all webmasters. Remember that with Friend Connect, you can easily add social features to your site by just copying and pasting a few snippets of code, no programming necessary! Your visitors will be able to join your site, create or link to a profile, interact with other visitors, and invite friends to visit your site. Best of all, your visitors won't be required to create yet another username and password -- Friend Connect lets them sign in using an existing Google, Yahoo, AOL, or OpenID account. To learn more, watch the video below:

So for any of you who were interested in Friend Connect after our first announcement, and also to all of the newer readers out there, go ahead and give Friend Connect a try.

Written by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

A new look for our Webmaster Help Group

Thursday, December 04, 2008 at 8:15 AM

Googlers strongly believe in dogfooding our own products. We manage our work schedules with Google Calendar, publish our blogs on Blogger, and store scads of documentation on Google Sites. So, ever since we launched our first Webmaster Help Group, we've been using Google Groups to facilitate conversations about Webmaster Tools and web search issues.

Today, however, I'm thrilled to announce that our English and Polish Help Groups are getting a makeover. And the changes are more than just skin-deep. Our new Help Forums should make it easier for you to find answers, share resources with others, and have your participation acknowledged.

You can read more about the changes on the Official Google Blog, and then check it out for yourself: English, Polish.

Q: What will happen to the old English and Polish Help Groups?
A: While our old groups are now closed to new posts, they will still be available in read-only mode in case you want to reference any of your favorite posts from the good old days. Many of the most frequently-asked questions (and answers!) have already been transferred to our new Help Forums.

Q: If I was a member of the old group, will I automatically be a member of the new forum?
A: We won't be "transferring" membership from the old groups to the new, so even if you were a member of our Google Groups forum, you'll still need to join the new forum in order to participate. Nicknames and user profiles are also managed separately, so you're welcome to recreate your Google Groups profile in our new forum, or reinvent yourself.

Q: What about the Webmaster Help Groups in other languages?
A: They'll be moving to the new Help Forum format in 2009. Specific dates will be announced in each of the groups as they get closer to their moving date.

Feel free to post any other questions about the new Help Forums in the comments below.

Written by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Helping you break the language barrier

Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 11:03 AM

When webmasters put content out on the web it's there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world's population.

In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.

Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.

The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.

Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:

Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at mydomain dot com</span>

And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

to the <head> of your page and we won't translate any of the content on that page.

Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:

<meta name="google" content="notranslate">

Thanks to chaoskaizer for pointing this out in the comments. :)

Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.

With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Written by Josh Estelle, Google Translate

Google Trifecta recording now available

Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 3:18 PM

Last Tuesday, Google hosted an online presentation about three free tools to help analyze and improve your sites. Dubbed "The Google Trifecta," this presentation explains the key features of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer, and how you can use them together.

To make the information from this presentation accessible to those who were unable to listen in last week or would like to review it again, we've put a recording of the session on YouTube for your viewing pleasure:



If you have any followup questions about the topics covered in the video, we welcome you to ask! Each of these products has a discussion group available for you to discuss the product with other users and Googlers. Please post in the appropriate group, so your question is seen by the right people:

Google Webmaster Help (Webmaster Tools)
Analytics Help
Website Optimizer Forum

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

A new layer to Google Trends

Friday, June 20, 2008 at 9:13 AM

Written by R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management - Consumer Search Properties

Two years ago, we launched Google Trends, a tool that lets anyone see what the world is searching for, and compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Last year, we added Hot Trends, which shows what people are searching for right now - the fastest rising search queries on Google, updated every hour. And just last week, we introduced normalized search volume numbers available for export in Google Trends.

Today, we add a new layer to Trends with Google Trends for Websites, a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own! It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.

Let's take a look at one example, the release of Radiohead's In Rainbows album. As part of our annual Zeitgeist, we post the fastest rising search terms, and this past year, radiohead took the crown as the fastest rising search term in the last quarter of 2007.

Using Google Trends, we can see the search volume for radiohead compared to in rainbows over the last 12 months.

radiohead vs. in rainbows

With Hot Trends, we can see that on October 10th (the release date of In Rainbows), people were most interested in downloading In Rainbows and reviews of the new release.

Now, using Trends for Websites, this story can be viewed from another perspective: we can see how the number of unique visitors that visit radiohead.com and inrainbows.com has changed over the last 12 months, the countries where the sites are most popular, the top related sites and search terms.

radiohead.com vs. inrainbows.com

We can see that in October 2007, radiohead.com (the blue line) saw a huge surge in popularity. The release of In Rainbows clearly drove many people to visit the band's website. The album's website, inrainbows.com (the red line), saw an even more dramatic jump; probably because that is where you could actually download the new album. And, it looks like site traffic to radiohead.com has increased overall, even as inrainbows.com traffic declined.

Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information. For more information, be sure to check out our Website Owners FAQs.

To start using Trends for Websites, head over to Google Trends.

Making harmonious use of Webmaster Tools and Analytics

Monday, March 31, 2008 at 5:28 PM

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality Team

Occasionally in the discussion group, webmasters ask, "Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?" Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools.

1. Make the most of your impressions
One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries. The data from the Top Search Queries allows you to quickly pinpoint what searches your site appears for and which of those searches are resulting in clicks. Let's look at last week's data for www.google.com/webmasters as an example.


As you can see, Google Webmaster Central is receiving a great number of impressions for the query [gadgets] but may not be fully capitalizing on these impressions with user clicks. Click on [gadgets] to see how your site appears in our search results. Does your title and snippet look appealing to users? As my colleague Michael recently wrote, it might be time to do some "housekeeping" on your website -- it's a great, low-to-no-cost way to catch the attention of your users. For example, we could work to improve our snippet from:

To something more readable such as "Use gadgets to easily add cool, dynamic content to your site..." by adding a meta description to the URL.

And what are users doing when they visit your site? Are they browsing your content or bouncing off your site quickly? To find out, Google Analytics will calculate your site's "bounce rate," or the percentage of single-page visits (e.g. someone just visiting your homepage and then leaving). This can be a helpful measure of the quality of your site's landing page and the traffic your site receives. After all, once you've worked hard to get your users to visit your site, you want to keep them there! Check out the Analytics blog for further information about "bounce rate."

2. Perform smart geo-targeting
Let's imagine you have a .com that you want to target at a Japanese market. Webmaster Tools allows you to set a geographic target for your site, where you would probably pick Japan. But, doing so is not an immediate solution. You can confirm the location of your visitors using the map overlay of Analytics, right up to the city level. You can also discover what types of users are accessing your site - including their browser and connection speed. If users cannot access your website due to an incompatible browser or slower connection speeds, you may need to rethink your website's design. Doing so can go a long way toward achieving the level of relevant traffic you would like.

3. Control access to sensitive content
One day, you log into Analytics and look at your "Content by Title" data. You shockingly discover that users are visiting your /privatedata pages. Have no fear! Go into Webmaster Tools and use the URL removal tool to remove those pages from Google's search results. Modifying your robots.txt file will also block Googlebot from crawling that section of your site in the future.

For more tips and tricks on Analytics, check out the Analytics Help Center. If you have any more suggestions, feel free to comment below or in our Webmaster Help Group.

Taking advantage of universal search, part 2

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 at 10:46 AM

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Universal search and personalized search were two of the hot topics at SMX West last month. Many webmasters wanted to know how these evolutions in search influence the way their content appears in search results, and how they can use these features to gain more relevant search traffic. We posted several recommendations on how to take advantage of universal search last year. Here are a few additional tips:

1. Local search: Help nearby searchers find your business.
   Of the various search verticals, local search was the one we heard the most questions about. Here are a few tips to help business owners get the most out of local search:
• Add your business to our Local Business Center
• Make sure your business is listed under the appropriate categories
• Make sure your business name, address and phone number appear on your website, and that they're accessible to search engines
• Add your business hours, images, coupons, or additional information to help searchers determine whether your business meets their needs
2. Video search: Enhance your video results.
   Several site owners asked whether they could specify a preferred thumbnail image for videos when they appear in search results. Good news: our Video Sitemaps protocol lets you suggest a thumbnail for each video.
   
3. Personalized search basics
   A few observations from Googler Phil McDonnell:
• Personalization of search results is usually accomplished through subtle ranking changes, rather than a drastic rearrangement of results. You shouldn't worry about personalization radically altering your site's ranking for a particular query.
  
• Targeting a niche, or filling a very specific need, may be a good way to stand out in personalized results. For example, rather than creating a site about "music," you could create a site about the musical history of Haiti. Or about musicians who recorded with Elton John between 1969-1979.
• Some personalization is based on the geographic location of the searcher; for example, a user searching for [needle] in Seattle is more likely to get search results about the Space Needle than, say, a searcher in Florida. Take advantage of features like Local Business Center and geographic targeting to let us know whether your website is especially relevant to searchers in a particular location.
  
• As always, create interesting, unique and compelling content or tools.
4. Image search: Increase your visibility.
   One panelist presented a case study in which a client's images were being filtered out of search results by SafeSearch because they had been classified as explicit. If you find yourself in this situation and believe your site should not be filtered by SafeSearch, use this contact form to let us know. Select the Report a problem > Inappropriate or irrelevant search results option and describe your situation.
   

Feel free to leave a comment if you have other tips to share!

FYI on Google Toolbar's latest features

Friday, December 14, 2007 at 7:05 AM

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

The latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer (beta) just added a neat feature to help users arrive at your website, or at least see your content, even when things go awry.

It's frustrating for your users to mistype your URL and receive a generic "404 - Not Found" or try to access a part of your site that might be down.

Regardless of your site being useful and information-rich, when these issues arise, most users just move on to something else.  The latest release of Google Toolbar, however, helps users by detecting site issues and providing alternatives.


Website Optimizer or Website Optimiser? The Toolbar can help you find it even if you try "google.cmo" instead of "google.com".

3 site issues detected by Google Toolbar

1. 404 errors with default error pages
   When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.
   
   If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed.
   
   
2. DNS errors
   When a URL contains a non-existent domain name (like www.google.cmo), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate, similar looking URL with a valid domain name. 
   
   
3. Connection failures
   When your server is unreachable, the Google Toolbar will automatically display a link to the cached version of your page. This feature is only available when Google is not explicitly forbidden from caching your pages through use of a robots meta tag or crawling is blocked on the page through the robots.txt file. If your server is regularly unreachable, you will probably want to fix that first; but it may also be a good idea to check the Google cache for your pages by looking at the search results for your site.
   

Suggestions provided by the Google Toolbar

When one of the above situations is found, the Toolbar will try to find the most helpful links for the user. That may include:

• A link to the corrected URL
  When the Toolbar can find the most probable, active URL to match the user's input (or link they clicked on), it will display it right on top as a suggestion. The correction can be somewhere in the domain name, the path or the file name (the Toolbar does not look at any parameters in the URL).
  
  
• A link to the cached version of the URL
  When Toolbar recognizes the URL in the Google cache, it will display a link to the cached version. This is particularly useful when the user can't access your pages for some reason. As mentioned above, Google may cache your URLs provided you're not explicitly forbidding this through use of a robots meta tag or the robots.txt file.
  
  
• A link to the homepage or HTML site map of your site
  Sometimes going to the homepage or a site map page is the best way to find the page that a user is really looking for. Site map pages (these are not XML Sitemap files) are generally recognized based on the file name; if the Toolbar can find something called "sitemap.html" or similar, this page will probably be recognized as the site map page. Don't worry if your site map page is called something else; if a user decides to go to your homepage, they'll probably find it right away even if the Toolbar doesn't spot it.
  
  
• A link to a higher level folder
  Sometimes the homepage or site map page is too far out and the user would be better off just going one step up in the hierarchy. When the Toolbar can recognize that your site's structure is based on folders and sub-folders, it may suggest a page one step back.
  
  
• A search within your site for keywords found in the URL
  It's a good practice to use descriptive URLs. If the Toolbar can recognize keywords within the URL which the user tried to access, it will link to a site-search with those keywords. Even if the URL has changed significantly in the meantime, the search may be able to find similar content based on those keywords. For instance, if the URL was http://example.com/party-gifts/holidays/ it will suggest a search for the words "party", "gifts" and "holidays" within the site example.com.
  
  
• An open Google search box
  If all else fails, there's always a chance that similar content already exists elsewhere on the web. The Google web search can help your users to find it - the Toolbar will help you by adding the keywords found in the URL to the search box.

Are you curious already? Download the Google Toolbar for your browser and give it a try on your site!

To discuss how this feature can help visitors to your site, jump in to our Google Webmaster Help Group; or for general Google Toolbar questions, try the Toolbar group for Internet Explorer or the Toolbar group for Firefox.