Google Webmaster Central is a collection of tools and resources (including an official Google Webmaster Central Blog, a discussion area and help center) designed to help webmasters, marketers and others monitor their web sites on Google.

90% Of Google Webmaster Messages Are Regarding Black Hat Issues

Dec 3, 2012 at 2:27pm ET by Barry Schwartz

In a recent video by Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts said that 90% of the messages sent out via Google Webmaster Tools are related to black hat issues. Whereas only 3% of those messages were specifically about unnatural links. This video response comes in response to many webmasters thinking that of the 700,000 messages Google sent out in the first two months of this year were mostly related to link notifications. However, Matt Cutts said no. He said only 25,000 of the 700,000 were link related but about 600,000 of the 700,000 were black hat related. Here is the video: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Updated: Google Webmaster Tools Security Bug Re-Opens Access To Old Accounts [Now Fixed]

Nov 28, 2012 at 1:14am ET by Matt McGee

A security bug in Google Webmaster Tools has given users access to old accounts and websites that they're no longer supposed to be able to access. The problem was discovered Tuesday and reported on several SEO blogs and news outlets -- including (first, I believe) by Dave Naylor -- and was discussed pretty heavily by search marketers on Twitter. We asked Google late Tuesday afternoon to comment on the bug reports, but have not received a reply. What's happening in some, not all, Webmaster Tools accounts is that users are finding themselves with sudden access to accounts that they once ha [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Filing A Google Reconsideration Request? For Best Results, Use The Same Language As Your Site

Nov 14, 2012 at 9:52am ET by Barry Schwartz

Does Google not support reconsideration requests in Italian or other non-English languages? Yes, it does, and might even give detailed advice. But if you want that, you have to ask in your native language. The situation came up recently in a blog post by Gianluca Fiorelli. It covered how an Italian site owner received a weird response from Google after submitting a couple reconsideration requests. The response said: We’ve found that the majority of your site’s content is in a language we do not currently support. It was strange because we know Google responds to reconsideration r [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

A Trick To See Your Competitors Links Within Google Webmaster Tools?

Nov 14, 2012 at 9:37am ET by Barry Schwartz

Dan Petrovic documented a competitive link hack that can easily been done within Google Webmaster Tools to find all the links pointing to any page on the internet. It is a competitive link hack that seems to work just fine for anyone. The hack takes advantage of the intermediate link feature within webmaster tools. Without getting too technical, you are tricking Google into thinking your page is a duplicate of a competitors page. Then Google is taking the duplicate version and merging it (on some level) with the competitors page. Since they are merged, Google will show you the links pointin [...]

What Google’s Webmaster Tools Tells Us About CTR In European Markets

Nov 13, 2012 at 9:46am ET by Andy Atkins-Krüger

Last time, I was talking about the analysis of click through rates by position based on data from Google's Webmaster Tools and I promised we'd look at a wider range of countries. The chart below shows you exactly that data extracted from a wide range of webmaster data to give some relatively consistent averages. The data covers many tens of thousands of clicks. At first sight, you can see a fairly regular pattern (something we found across most European nations) and since the results are presented in largely similar ways by Google wherever you are, there's a certain inevitability to that. [...]

Study: 39% Of Google Search Referrers Now “Not Provided”

Nov 13, 2012 at 9:00am ET by Barry Schwartz

It is just over a year since Google began encrypting search by default for signed-in users. A new study finds that as a result, 39% search-related traffic from Google to web sites now has search terms withheld. Optify conducted a study over eleven months with 424 web sites, involving 17,143,603 visits and 7,241,093 referring keywords, to see how serious the "not provided" issue is. "Not Provided" is what Google Analytics shows in cases where Google no longer reports a search term due to encryption (other analytics programs may use other phrases). The study found that 39% of terms ar [...]

Google Offers Tips For A Search Engine Friendly Tablet Experience (Not Recommendations)

Nov 12, 2012 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google posted some tips for building a search engine friendly mobile tablet experience for users and search engines. Google is clear to point out these tips are NOT specific "recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites." Google does not have guidelines or official recommendations for tablet-optimized web sites but they did want to offer some tips based off their official smart phone recommendations. The tablet-optimized tips include: (1) Unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartpho [...]

Q&A With Google’s Matt Cutts On How To Use The Link Disavow Tool

Oct 29, 2012 at 9:15am ET by Danny Sullivan

It's been almost two weeks since Google launched its link disavowal tool. Some have been busy diving in and using it, but others have had more detailed questions about it. We've got some answers, from the head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts. Question: How do people know what links they should remove? Answer: When we're taking targeted action on some specific links, the emails that go out now include examples of bad links. We provide example links to guide sites that want to clean up the bad links. At the same time, we don't want to help bad actors learn how to spam better, wh [...]

Happy Birthday “Not Provided” – One Year Since Google Began Withholding Search Terms

Oct 19, 2012 at 2:11pm ET by Danny Sullivan

A year ago (and a day), Google began encrypting searches for signed-in users, so that the terms they searched for were no longer passed to publishers, except for advertisers. The "single digit" withholding predicted by Google at launch has turned into more than 50% of terms being withheld, in some cases. I explore how things have unfolded over the past year in the search marketing column on our Marketing Land sister-site today. It's written for both those new to the concept of how terms began being withheld as well for search marketing vets who are regular Search Engine Land readers. Be su [...]

Google Now Reports “Practically 100%” Of Manual Actions

Oct 18, 2012 at 9:08am ET by Danny Sullivan

Wondering if some human at Google has reviewed your web site and decided it deserves to be penalized in Google's search results? Google's now reporting such cases nearly 100% of the time. "We've actually started to send messages for pretty much every manual action that we do that will directly impact the ranking of your site," said Matt Cutts, the head of Google's web spam team, when speaking at the Pubcon conference this week. "If there's some manual action taken by the manual web spam team that means your web site is going to rank directly lower in the search results, we're telling [...]

Google’s Matt Cutts On “Will Search Spam Go On Forever”

Oct 15, 2012 at 9:30am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of search spam, answered some questions in the Power Searching with Google Hangout on Air #2 on October 2nd. In that video, he was asked by fellow Googler, Dan Russell a Search research scientist at Google, will search spam go on forever? This question was asked about 36 minutes into the video, where Matt basically said he's team has done a great job but search spam will go on forever. Here is the video and the transcript (I did my best transcribing): Dan: There is this constant Spy vs Spy kind of thing… Matt: Yes. Dan: And you're the good spies and then there [...]

Tracking Changes To Google’s 50 Webmaster Guidelines Pages

Oct 10, 2012 at 4:41pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Shaun Anderson created a tool to keep track of changes made to 50 of the top Google webmaster guidelines. The tool shows you how recently a specific Google webmaster guidelines document was updated. SEOs and webmasters must stay on top of these changes and this tool helps them do just that. The tool is run automatically, where it will highlight any documents with changes in the past month or so in green. It does not highlight the specific changes but it does highlight which documents were updated and when. Shaun said he built it using Google Docs and a simple import xml function. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

Google Updates Their Webmaster Guidelines To Include Details On Rich Snippet Abuse

Oct 3, 2012 at 8:55am ET by Vanessa Fox

Google has published "information for webmasters" as least as far back as 2001. The original information included "do's and don'ts" and "fact and fiction". In 2003, Google expanded this information to include a specific set of "webmaster guidelines": In 2006, www.google.com/webmasters became Google Webmaster Central, and the information for webmasters became a complete help center with lots of details and explanations. Google has continued to refine and evolve their information for site owners over the years, both to provide information about what's new and to provide further [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Google Upgrades Their Rich Snippets Testing Tool To Better Reflect Display In Search Results

Sep 20, 2012 at 5:44pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Google has renamed its rich snippets testing tool in webmaster tools to Structured Data, improved it to better reflect what the search result will actually look like and has expanded the types of structured data supported. Google first launched rich snippets -- enhanced markup of search results -- in 2009 and has been adding the types of support markup ever since. In 2011, in conjunction with Microsoft and Yahoo, they launched schema.org, which expanded the types of markup available, although not every type of results is in the enhanced display (yet). Implementing structured data that r [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Breaks Down Site Errors

Aug 30, 2012 at 9:10am ET by Barry Schwartz

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced that the Site Errors report now is a lot more detailed and useful for webmasters. Now, the errors are broken down by each category into more specific errors. For example, if your site is not accessible to GoogleBot, Google will try to say it is because of a DNS issue or server is down or maybe a robots.txt file preventing access. Google will also display statistics for each of your site-wide crawl errors from the past 90 days. And the report will show the failure rates for any category-specific errors that it finds for your web site. Here is an [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Clarity to Traffic Alerts: What To Do If You Receive One

Aug 21, 2012 at 4:47pm ET by Vanessa Fox

For some time (since at least March), Google webmaster tools has been sending messages to site owners about substantial traffic changes (increases or decreases) to pages of a site. Some site owners found these messages perplexing as they weren't sure exactly what was actionable about the messages. Were the messages just informational, intended to help those who didn't look at their analytics every day? Did they imply something specific about what Google knew about how the site? For instance, some people thought perhaps this was a warning message about a new penalty on the site or a penalty bei [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Structured Data Dashboard & CNAME Verification

Aug 2, 2012 at 9:11am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google added two features to Google Webmaster Tools this week; a structured data dashboard and CNAME record verification. Structured Data Dashboard Structured data is a big part of Google's search results and discovery process and to make it easier for webmasters to understand what structured data Google has indexed from your web site, Google introduced a new section under the "Optimization" section of Google Webmaster Tools named "Structured Data." Structured data will show you all the rich snippets markup and other structured data markups Google discovered for your site. Google breaks d [...]

Google Explains New Link Warnings, Says Don’t Panic But Don’t Ignore

Jul 30, 2012 at 11:44am ET by Danny Sullivan

Confused by the latest link warnings that Google has been sending out? As we covered before, it's all been pretty confusing. That's why Google has posted more information meant to calm some worries, though it's still likely that even after this, some are going to panic. The "Old" Link Warnings: Entire Site Impacted Google's post starts with some history, explaining just as we've done how earlier this year, it began sending out link warnings: Let's talk about the original link messages that we've been sending out for months. When we see unnatural links pointing to a site, there are d [...]

Google “Reveals Index Secrets”: Charts Indexing of Your Site Over Time

Jul 25, 2012 at 1:43pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Yesterday, Google webmaster tools launched Index Status (available under Health) that charts the number of indexed pages for your site over the last year. Total Indexed Count Google says that this count is accurate (unlike the site: search operator) and is post-canonicalization. In other words, if your site includes a lot of duplicate URLs (due to things like tracking parameters) and the pages include the canonical attribute or Google has otherwise identified and clustered those duplicate URLs, this count only includes that canonical version and not the duplicates. You can also get this [...]

Google Updates Link Warnings To (Sort Of) Clarify They Can Be Ignored (Maybe)

Jul 23, 2012 at 5:40pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Dear Google. Please don't send out any further link warnings to publishers. Your latest round yesterday, intended to clarify the confusion sparked by ones sent last week, is likely going to make things worse, not better. No more warnings, not until you get some fundamental clarity in place. Dear Publishers. Here's our latest news on the crazy link warnings that have gone out and our best attempt at figuring out whether you should be concerned or not. How We Got Here Earlier this year, Google began sending out warnings to some publishers, alerting them that they were involved with "art [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | Top News

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