The Google Webmaster Blog announced a new format for Google's Matt Cutts video tutorials. Instead of the short minute or so videos, Matt will also be offering more detailed videos that are longer and more flushed out. Google explained, "instead of only focusing on quick answers to specific questions, we’ve created some longer videos which cover important webmaster-related topics." The first video answers a question on if there is a limit on the number of 301 redirects you can have. Matt explains that there is no limit in the number of 301 redirects from a site to another site. F [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites

This morning, James Breckenridge discovered a loophole within Google's Webmaster Tools that allowed anyone to remove any site from Google. Both James and I sent this information to Google as soon as we heard of it. After several hours, Google has told us, "we're still investigating this report, and to be cautious we disabled all URL removals earlier this morning." So now, if you even own a site, you won't be able to remove the site or pages from the site using Google's URL removal tool. How did this loophole work? Pretty simple as James described. You use the following URL when logged [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Spamming | Top News

Google announced they are now supporting the rel="canonical" attribute within HTTP headers. This enables webmasters to set up a canonical for linking to or from PDF files or other non-HTML based files. One of the examples given by Google is that a "webmaster can signal to Google that the canonical URL for the PDF download is the HTML document by using a rel="canonical" HTTP header when the PDF file is requested." This also comes in handy when you use a CDN (content delivery network) and the content is being served from many different URLs. You can now use the rel="canonical" within t [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | SEO: Tagging

Pierre Far from Google wrote a blog post on how to design mobile friendly websites while considering Google's webmaster guidelines and best practices. I've pulled out the key points from this post in bullet format: Google differentiates between traditional mobile phones and smartphones. Google has two bots: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. Currently only traditional phones are supported with special useragent strings within Googlebot-Mobile, not smartphones (this [...]

Related Topics: Google: Mobile | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | How To: Mobile Marketing | How To: SEO | SEO: Cloaking & Doorway Pages | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Mobile Search | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites | Top News

Here's a weird one. Try a search for the BBC TV series Doctor Who on Google. You'll find the official site, but look closely at the domain name. It's amirgabriel.com, as shown above -- not bbc.co.uk as it should be. What's up with that? Has the BBC undergone a transformation in the way Doctor Who himself undergoes? It's not a case of someone redirecting their domain over to the BBC and somehow "hijacking" the listing, a problem more common a few years ago. That's because the domain doesn't do a redirection, take you from one place over to the BBC. Instead, it "resolves" directly to t [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Duplicate Content | SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites