Archive for the ‘beginner’ Category

Bring your local business online — no website required!

Webmaster Level: Beginner

“Hey, how do I get my business on the web?” Having worked at Google for nine years, if I had a penny for every time someone asked me that question… 🙂 To answer, today we’re releasing a short video series (30 minutes total!), sharing the same advice we’d give to our friends and family. It’s the advice I’d give to my sister, Marnie, who owns a jewelry store, or my cousin, Scott, who works as a realtor. Video spoiler alert: You won’t need to make a website, but you definitely need a way for your local business to reach potential customers using their mobile phones, tablets, or desktop computers.

Video series to help local business owners of all technical levels to get their business found on the web. It focuses on the benefits of creating a Yelp business page, Facebook page, Google+ page, etc.

The great thing about video is that you can pause at any time and work at your own pace. Next time you hear the question: “How do I get my business on Google?”, please share the link and let’s get more local businesses online!

Series: Build an online presence for your local business

Video #1: Introduction and hot topics (3:22)

Meet my sister, Marnie, who owns a jewelry store and my cousin, Scott, who works as a realtor. Follow them as we talk about the big changes in the last decade, such as making sure your business can reach customers at work, home, or on-the-go using their mobile phones.

Video #2: Determine your business’ value-add and online goal (4:08)

With the example of Scott, the realtor, you’ll learn about the marketing funnel, setting an online goal, and highlighting what makes your business special.

Video #3. Find potential customers (7:41)

Marnie and Scott figure out their customers’ most common journeys to reach their business. We’ll use their examples to brainstorm how you can reach customers on review sites, through search engines, maps apps, and social and professional networking sites.

Video #4: Basic implementation and best practices (5:23)

The fundamentals and best practices to take your business from offline to online!

Video #5: Differentiate your business from the competition (5:09)

With Scott’s business as a realtor, see how to demonstrate that your local business is the best choice for customers by adding photos, videos, and getting reviews.

Video #6: Engage customers with a holistic online identity (4:51)

We’ll end the series by showing how Scott makes sure his online presence sends a cohesive message to customers and answers all their common questions. 🙂

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Academy now available in 22 languages

Webmaster level: Beginner

Today, the new Webmaster Academy goes live in 22 languages! New or beginner webmasters speaking a multitude of languages can now learn the fundamentals of making a great site, providing an enjoyable user experience, and ranking well in search results. And if you think you’re already familiar with these topics, take the quizzes at the end of each module to prove it :).

So give Webmaster Academy a read in your preferred language and let us know in the comments or help forum what you think. We’ve gotten such great and helpful feedback after the English version launched this past March so we hope this straightforward and easy-to-read guide can be helpful (and fun!) to everyone.

Let’s get great sites and searchable content up and running around the world.

Posted by Mary Chen, Webmaster Outreach

#NoHacked: a global campaign to spread hacking awareness

Webmaster level: All

This June, we introduced a weeklong social campaign called #NoHacked. The goals for #NoHacked are to bring awareness to hacking attacks and offer tips on how to keep your sites safe from hackers.

We held the campaign in 11 languages on multiple channels including Google+, Twitter and Weibo. About 1 million people viewed our tips and hundreds of users used the hashtag #NoHacked to spread awareness and to share their own tips. Check them out below!

Posts we shared during the campaign:

Some of the many tips shared by users across the globe:

  • Pablo Silvio Esquivel from Brazil recommends users not to use pirated software (source)
  • Rens Blom from the Netherlands suggests using different passwords for your accounts, changing them regularly, and using an extra layer of security such as two-step authentication (source)
  • Дмитрий Комягин from Russia says to regularly monitor traffic sources, search queries and landing pages, and to look out for spikes in traffic (source)
  • 工務店コンサルタント from Japan advises everyone to choose a good hosting company that’s knowledgeable in hacking issues and to set email forwarding in Webmaster Tools (source)
  • Kamil Guzdek from Poland advocates changing the default table prefix in wp-config to a custom one when installing a new WordPress to lower the risk of the database from being hacked (source)

Hacking is still a surprisingly common issue around the world so we highly encourage all webmasters to follow these useful tips. Feel free to continue using the hashtag #NoHacked to share your own tips or experiences around hacking prevention and awareness. Thanks for supporting the #NoHacked campaign!

And in the unfortunate event that your site gets hacked, we’ll help you toward a speedy and thorough recovery:

Posted by your friendly #NoHacked helpers

HTTPS as a ranking signal

Webmaster level: all

Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it’s only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

Lock

In the coming weeks, we’ll publish detailed best practices (it’s in our help center now) to make TLS adoption easier, and to avoid common mistakes. Here are some basic tips to get started:

  • Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate
  • Use 2048-bit key certificates
  • Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
  • Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
  • Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change your website’s address
  • Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
  • Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid the noindex robots meta tag.

If your website is already serving on HTTPS, you can test its security level and configuration with the Qualys Lab tool. If you are concerned about TLS and your site’s performance, have a look at Is TLS fast yet?. And of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to post in our Webmaster Help Forums.

We hope to see more websites using HTTPS in the future. Let’s all make the web more secure!

Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Introducing the Google News Publisher Center

(Cross-posted on the Google News Blog)

Webmaster level: All

UPDATE: Great News — The Publisher Center is now available for publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Spain as well as in all 21 countries where a Google News edition is available in English.

If you’re a news publisher, your website has probably evolved and changed over time — just like your stories. But in the past, when you made changes to the structure of your site, we might not have discovered your new content. That meant a lost opportunity for your readers, and for you. Unless you regularly checked Webmaster Tools, you might not even have realized that your new content wasn’t showing up in Google News. To prevent this from happening, we are letting you make changes to our record of your news site using the just launched Google News Publisher Center.

With the Publisher Center, your potential readers can be more informed about the articles they’re clicking on and you benefit from better discovery and classification of your news content. After verifying ownership of your site using Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the Publisher Center to directly make the following changes:

  • Update your news site details, including changing your site name and labeling your publication with any relevant source labels (e.g., “Blog”, “Satire” or “Opinion”)
  • Update your section URLs when you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new section such as http://example.com/2014commonwealthgames or http://example.com/elections2014)
  • Label your sections with a specific topic (e.g., “Technology” or “Politics”)

Whenever you make changes to your site, we’d recommend also checking our record of it in the Publisher Center and updating it if necessary.

Try it out, or learn more about how to get started.

At the moment the tool is only available to publishers in the U.S. but we plan to introduce it in other countries soon and add more features.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about what works well and what doesn’t. Ultimately, our goal is to make this a platform where news publishers and Google News can work together to provide readers with the best, most diverse news on the web.

Posted by Eric Weigle, Software Engineer

Rendering pages with Fetch as Google

Webmaster level: all

The Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools provides webmasters with the results of Googlebot attempting to fetch their pages. The server headers and HTML shown are useful to diagnose technical problems and hacking side-effects, but sometimes make double-checking the response hard: Help! What do all of these codes mean? Is this really the same page as I see it in my browser? Where shall we have lunch? We can’t help with that last one, but for the rest, we’ve recently expanded this tool to also show how Googlebot would be able to render the page.

Viewing the rendered page

In order to render the page, Googlebot will try to find all the external files involved, and fetch them as well. Those files frequently include images, CSS and JavaScript files, as well as other files that might be indirectly embedded through the CSS or JavaScript. These are then used to render a preview image that shows Googlebot’s view of the page.

You can find the Fetch as Google feature in the Crawl section of Google Webmaster Tools. After submitting a URL with “Fetch and render,” wait for it to be processed (this might take a moment for some pages). Once it’s ready, just click on the response row to see the results.

Fetch as Google

Handling resources blocked by robots.txt

Googlebot follows the robots.txt directives for all files that it fetches. If you are disallowing crawling of some of these files (or if they are embedded from a third-party server that’s disallowing Googlebot’s crawling of them), we won’t be able to show them to you in the rendered view. Similarly, if the server fails to respond or returns errors, then we won’t be able to use those either (you can find similar issues in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools). If we run across either of these issues, we’ll show them below the preview image.

We recommend making sure Googlebot can access any embedded resource that meaningfully contributes to your site’s visible content, or to its layout. That will make Fetch as Google easier for you to use, and will make it possible for Googlebot to find and index that content as well. Some types of content – such as social media buttons, fonts or website-analytics scripts – tend not to meaningfully contribute to the visible content or layout, and can be left disallowed from crawling. For more information, please see our previous blog post on how Google is working to understand the web better.

We hope this update makes it easier for you to diagnose these kinds of issues, and to discover content that’s accidentally blocked from crawling. If you have any comments or questions, let us know here or drop by in the webmaster help forum.

Posted by Shimi Salant, Webmaster Tools team

Making your site more mobile-friendly with PageSpeed Insights

Webmaster level: all

To help developers and webmasters make their pages mobile-friendly, we recently updated PageSpeed Insights with additional recommendations on mobile usability.


Poor usability can diminish the benefits of a fast page load. We know the average mobile page takes more than 7 seconds to load, and by using the PageSpeed Insights tool and following its speed recommendations, you can make your page load much faster. But suppose your fast mobile site loads in just 2 seconds instead of 7 seconds. If mobile users still have to spend another 5 seconds once the page loads to pinch-zoom and scroll the screen before they can start reading the text and interacting with the page, then that site isn’t really fast to use after all. PageSpeed Insights’ new User Experience rules can help you find and fix these usability issues.

These new recommendations currently cover the following areas:

  • Configure the viewport: Without a meta-viewport tag, modern mobile browsers will assume your page is not mobile-friendly, and will fall back to a desktop viewport and possibly apply font-boosting, interfering with your intended page layout. Configuring the viewport to width=device-width should be your first step in mobilizing your site.

  • Size content to the viewport: Users expect mobile sites to scroll vertically, not horizontally. Once you’ve configured your viewport, make sure your page content fits the width of that viewport, keeping in mind that not all mobile devices are the same width.

  • Use legible font sizes: If users have to zoom in just to be able read your article text on their smartphone screen, then your site isn’t mobile-friendly. PageSpeed Insights checks that your site’s text is large enough for most users to read comfortably.
  • Size tap targets appropriately: Nothing’s more frustrating than trying to tap a button or link on a phone or tablet touchscreen, and accidentally hitting the wrong one because your finger pad is much bigger than a desktop mouse cursor. Make sure that your mobile site’s touchscreen tap targets are large enough to press easily.
  • Avoid plugins: Most smartphones don’t support Flash or other browser plugins, so make sure your mobile site doesn’t rely on plugins.

These rules are described in more detail in our help pages. When you’re ready, you can test your pages and the improvements you make using the PageSpeed Insights tool. We’ve also updated PageSpeed Insights to use a mobile friendly design, and we’ve translated our documents into additional languages.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please post in our discussion group.

Posted by Matthew Steele and Doantam Phan, PageSpeed Insights team

Webmaster Guidelines for sneaky redirects updated

Webmaster Level: AllRedirects are often used by webmasters to help forward visitors from one page to another. They are a normal part of how the web operates, and are very valuable when well used. However, some redirects are designed to manipulate or de…

Introducing our global Google+ page for webmasters

Webmaster Level: All

We’ve recently launched our global Google Webmasters Google+ page. Have you checked it out yet? Our page covers a plethora of topics:

Follow us at google.com/+GoogleWebmasters and let us know in the comments what else you’d like to see on our page! If you speak Italian, Japanese, Russian or Spanish, be sure to also join one of our webmaster communities to stay up-to-date on language and region-specific news.

Google Webmasters from around the world
Hello from around the world!
Posted by Mary Chen and Andrey Lipattsev, Webmaster Outreach Team

Introducing the new Webmaster Academy

Webmaster level: Beginner

Webmaster Academy logo

Our Webmaster Academy is now available with new and targeted content!

Two years ago, Webmaster Academy launched to teach new and beginner webmasters how to make great websites. In addition to adding new content, we’ve now expanded and improved information on three important topics:

  • Making a great site that’s valuable to your audience (Module 1)
  • Learning how Google sees and understands your site (Module 2)
  • Communicating with Google about your site (Module 3)
If you often find yourself overwhelmed by the depth or breadth of our resources, Webmaster Academy will help you understand the basics of creating a website and having it found in Google Search. If you’re an experienced webmaster, you might learn something new too.

Enjoy, learn, and share your feedback!

Posted by Mary Chen, Webmaster Outreach Team