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.

Here’s A New Twist: Directories Now Charging NOT To Link

Jul 20, 2012 at 9:22am ET by Barry Schwartz

For the past year, Google has been sending out link penalty notifications for unnatural links pointing to your web site. Those notifications kicked up a notch earlier this year and since then - especially with the Penguin update, webmasters and SEOs have been obsessed with link removals. Link Removal Fees: With this, there are many out there trying to capitalize on this fear. A reader sent us an example of a directory with a special landing page specifically designed to collect money from webmasters in order to remove links from their site. The site offers you to pay them and in exchange, th [...]

Google Now Shows You Your Most Recent Links

Jul 18, 2012 at 9:39am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has added a new option for downloading your links in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now click on a "download latest links" button. The latest links download option will download your links that Google Webmaster Tools discovered but do so sorted by date. Google will have the link in one column and in the other column list out the date Google discovered the link. Matt Cutts tweeted the feature upgrade last night, saying: You can now download links from Google *sorted by date*. Nice. Look for "Download latest links" in console UI. Pass it on! Googler, John Mueller, shared a screen [...]

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

New Alerts For Crawl Errors Via Google Webmaster Tools

Jul 13, 2012 at 8:54am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they are now sending out Google Webmaster Tools alerts for crawl errors. Google grouped the errors in two buckets. (1) Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems (2) URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues The Site-Wide Problems Alerts Can Include: Your DNS server is down or misconfigured. Your web server itself is firewalled off. Your web server is refusing connections from Googlebot. Your web server is overloaded, or down. Your site’s robots.txt is inaccessible. The URL Error Anomaly Alerts Can Include: Server error Soft [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

SMX Advanced Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On A Disavow-This-Link Tool

Jun 29, 2012 at 2:40pm ET by Matt McGee

All the talk today about Bing's launch of a disavow this link tool is a good reminder that we should go back into our video archives and post the comments that Google's Matt Cutts made about a tool like that during our SMX Advanced event earlier this month. Cutts was speaking with Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan during their annual keynote conversation when the subject turned to "negative SEO" and the possibility that some recent Google updates had made it easier for one website to purposely hurt another site with low-quality links. Here's some of that discussion: You can go back [...]

Not All Bad Links Hurt You, Google Ignores Links Also

Jun 29, 2012 at 1:34pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google doesn't always penalize you for bad links, they sometimes and very often, will ignore links completely that they find to be against their guidelines. Back in 2007, Google started penalizing sites for selling paid links and over the years they have penalized many sites for buying links. Recently, Google has stepped up their notifications of unnatural link warnings and with the Penguin update many webmasters have been obsessed with cleaning up their external link profiles. Ignoring Links But you need to know, not all links that may look bad or even be really bad actually harm your si [...]

SEO In 10 Minutes & Many New Google Webmaster Videos

Jun 26, 2012 at 9:44am ET by Barry Schwartz

Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google, posted a video on the Google Webmaster Blog about how to learn the "essential" SEO techniques for your web site. It is targeted specifically at sites with under 50 pages or so, that want to rank for their company name and related keywords, and want to be "smart about search engines and attracting searchers." Here is that video: Google also published several new videos on the Google Webmaster Academy. Here are those pretty short videos: How malicious parties can spam your site: Using Sitemaps to help Google find content h [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Download To Google Spreadsheets

Jun 20, 2012 at 9:21am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that you can now download many of the "heavy" data directly into a Google Spreadsheet format. Despite Google having a Webmaster Tools API and Python scripts to download your data, webmasters wanted something more basic and quicker to use. The new download options are available in the Crawl errors, Search queries, Links to your site and some other areas. You can click on the download button in those reports and then "Select Download Format" as "CSV" or "Google Docs." Choosing "CSV" initiates a download of the data in CSV format w [...]

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

The Latest On Google’s Hreflang Tag & Other Learnings From International Search Summit @SMX Advanced

Jun 12, 2012 at 9:14am ET by Andy Atkins-Krüger

Google has been moving lots of goal posts for us all recently and the "Hreflang" tag is a case in point. A succession of Google speakers has presented the latest "Hreflang" thinking at International Search Summits @SMX throughout 2012. On each occasion, the presentation and explanation was different from the one before. The bad news is that keeping up with the changes has been tough, but the good news is that Google has actually been listening to the multinational market place for once! But Don't Canonicals & Hreflang Tags Belong Together? Susan Moskwa presented first when Google was [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Cleans Up With Dashboards, New Navigation & More

May 8, 2012 at 9:36am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced on the Webmaster Central blog that they have cleaned up Google Webmaster Tools. The three changes include: (1) Updated Dashboard (2) New Left Hand Navigation (3) Home Compact View Here is a picture of the revised dashboard: The new navigation was changed to be more representative of the content and tools within the portal. Google explained: Configuration: Things you configure and generally don’t change very often. Health: Where you look to make sure things are OK. Traffic: Where you go to understand how your site is doing in Google search, who’s link [...]

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

Discover Links Using Google Analytics New Backlink URL Report

May 3, 2012 at 5:09pm ET by Daniel Waisberg

Today the Google Analytics team announced that we will start seeing backlink URLs in their newly released Social Reports. According to the announcement post, written by Ilya Grigorik, Software Engineering Manager, Google Analytics (and PostRank Founder): "These reports provide another layer of social insight showing which of your content attracts links, and enables you to keep track of conversations across other sites that link to your content. Most website and blog owners had no easy mechanism to do this in the past, but we see it as another important feature for holistic social media repo [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Expands Query Data to 90 Days

Apr 26, 2012 at 5:19pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000). This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else and when looking at trends, the more information, the better. Google has made a few other minor adjustments to this data recently. So if you use Google webmaster tools query data, see below for all the details of how these reports work. What's In the Top Search Queries Report First, a refresher on [...]

Site Performance, Subscriber Stats & Robots.txt Tool Removed From Google Webmaster Tools

Apr 25, 2012 at 9:33am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced they are removing three features from Google Webmaster Tools. Google made the announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog saying the three features going away include the site performance report, the subscriber stats and the robots.txt creation tool. Google placed reversed the order of these features when they wrote about it, trying to mitigate the importance of removing some of these features. Site Performance going away is going to be frustrating for a lot of Google Webmaster Tools users. Subscriber stats is not as important and robots.txt is really not a big dea [...]

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

Google Sent 20,000+ Hacked Notification Messages To Webmasters Today

Apr 16, 2012 at 1:30pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google's head of the webspam team, Matt Cutts, announced on Twitter that they have sent out new message notifications to 20,000 web sites that are hacked. Specifically, Google sent these messages to sites doing "weird redirects." I've personally seen a spike in the number of sites redirecting from their web site to a non-authorized site recently. The webmaster is typically unaware of this redirect because the redirects only occur when someone clicks from Google's search results to the web site. Typically the site owner doesn't go to Google to find his web site; the site owner goes direct [...]

Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

Apr 5, 2012 at 2:28pm ET by Barry Schwartz

There's speculation going around that Google is using data from the comment spam filter Akismet to penalize web sites. Those rumors are untrue, Google says. "We don't use Akismet to flag spam," a Google spokesperson told us, after talking with Google's spam team. One oddity in the speculation was this: She stated that Google had left a client of hers the dreaded unnatural linking notice in GWT, with example urls of pages it found unnatural links on. This part is nothing new really, but until now we had no idea how Google was deciding this... Google's warning notices, such as those th [...]

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

Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links

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

Have you recently gotten a warning from Google about having "artificial" or "unnatural" links pointing at your site? Google says this isn’t a fresh crackdown on link networks but rather a change from bad links being "silently distrusted" to being more vocal about this type of penalty. Warnings Issued Many people have reported getting messages from Google regarding link violations. If you scan the Google Webmaster Help forums, for instance, you will see many examples of these being posted. Here is how one reads: Dear site owner or webmaster of .... We've detected that some of your s [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors: How To Get Detailed Data From the API

Mar 17, 2012 at 2:38pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Earlier this week, I wrote about my disappointment that granular data (the number of URLs reported, the specifics of the errors...) was removed from Google webmaster tools. However, as I've been talking with Google, I've discovered that much of this detail is still available via the GData API. That this detail was available through the API wasn't at all obvious to me from reading their blog post about the changes. The post included the following: "For those who worry that 1000 error details plus a total aggregate count will not be enough, we’re considering adding programmatic access (an API [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Revamps Crawl Errors, But Is It For The Better?

Mar 12, 2012 at 10:04pm ET by Vanessa Fox

Google has just revamped the crawl errors data available in webmaster tools. Crawl errors are issues Googlebot encountered while crawling your site, so useful stuff! I originally started this article by writing that in most cases, these changes are for the better and in only a few (really maddening) cases, useful functionality has been removed. But now that I've gone through the changes, I unfortunately need to revise my summary. This update is mostly about removing super useful data, masked by a few user interface changes. (And I hate to write that, because webmaster tools is near and dear to [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Finally Adds User Administration

Mar 6, 2012 at 9:24am ET by Barry Schwartz

One of the most sought after features in Google Webmaster Tools was to easily give third-party people access to your Google Webmaster Tools account without giving over your own username and password and without giving them full control of your site. Google has finally satisfied this request by adding user administration to Google Webmaster Tools. Now, site owners, who are defined as an owner if they go through the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools, can add access for others without making them go through the verification process. The access granted is either "owner," "full" [...]

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

Google Sent Over 700,000 Messages Via Webmaster Tools In Past Two Months

Mar 5, 2012 at 4:03pm ET by Barry Schwartz

At SMX West last week Tiffany Oberoi from Google shared that Google has sent over 700,000 messages to webmasters via Google Webmaster Tools in January and February 2012. That is more than the total number of messages Google sent in 2011 and almost more than what Google has sent since launching Google Webmaster Tools message center. Google told us, this number includes both manual and automated messages but does not include messages such as malware notifications, responses to generic reconsideration requests, or generic responses to the more feedback form. As you can see from the chart be [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

Google Recommending New Video Schema.org Markup

Feb 22, 2012 at 10:13am ET by Barry Schwartz

Google announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog that they are now adding video support for schema.org. They are doing this in combination with Microsoft Bing and Yahoo Search as a "joint effort." Google says using the schema.org video markup is the "recommended way to describe videos on the web." Google added that they still recommend you continue with your other video XML formats, such as Video Sitemaps and mRSS feeds, if you use them. The new schema.org video markup won't impact the Video Sitemaps and mRSS feeds. The technical details on video markup can be found on schema.org an [...]

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