web development

Webmaster Level: All

Update on February 2, 2012: The new Google+ badge is now out of preview and available to all users on all sites.
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Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
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Webmaster level: All

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site. Webmaster Tools’ Sitemaps feature gives you feedback on your submitted Sitemaps, such as how many Sitemap URLs have been indexed, or whether your Sitemaps have any errors. Recently, we’ve added even more information! Let’s check it out:
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Welcome to another thrilling installment of your favorite, and only, recurring series on this blog: Better Know a WebDev!

This is a special week, as we’re featuring someone who just moved from web development into a product role with our Add-ons team. Give a big welcome and congratulations to Greg Koberger!

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Webmaster level: All

Starting today, we’re updating our Top Search Queries feature to make it better match expectations about search engine rankings. Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in.

An example Read more

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

One of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form – shopping and registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the goals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like our names and addresses on different sites across the web – a tedious task that causes many to give up and abandon the flow entirely.
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Welcome back to the third epic installment of Better Know a WebDev!

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As promised, today, a bunch of Mozilla Webdevs are on reddit to answer your questions! For more information, check out the announcement.

Click here to get to the Mozilla Webdev “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit.

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Webmaster Level: All

In our ongoing effort to help you find more high-quality websites in search results, today we’re launching an algorithmic change that looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result.
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Welcome back to our Better Know a WebDev series! This week, we’re looking at, well, me!

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Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.

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There are lots of ways to measure the performance of a site. On addons.mozilla.org we measure a few of them: how long it takes to render pages, the cache performance and responsiveness for content delivery networks globally. But with the advent of the navigation timing API in Firefox 7 we’ve been able to add the most important measurement of all – the actual performance in the browser.

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Our group has grown a lot over the past few years, as we’ve taken on new projects and done a whole lot of amazing new things. Naturally, as we’ve grown we’ve become a group of more diverse backgrounds, skills and interests—everything from awesome JavaScript developers to our growing Hadoop expertise.

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Update, Jan 20: The Reddit AMA is going on today! Click here to join us and ask questions!

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For most people who work with computers for a living, holidays are a time for family… and providing endless tech support. As I was huddled over a half working computer, someone asked what an add-on was. I spend most of my time working with and on add-ons — so the concept seems obvious to me. As I found out this past Christmas, it’s not to everyone. My otherwise-fairly-computer-literate family had a hard time understanding where the browser ended and websites such as Facebook or Google started — so explaining the concept of add-ons was not nearly as easy as I thought it would be.

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Webmaster level: Advanced
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Webmaster level: Intermediate

As the team responsible for tens of thousands of Google’s informational web pages, the Webmaster Team is here to offer tips and advice based on their experiences as hands-on webmasters.
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Webmaster level: All

When users come to Google, they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for, but they need help deciding which result might have the information that best suits their needs. So, the challenge for Google is to make it very clear to our users what content exists on a page in both a useful and concise manner. That’s why we have rich snippets.
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I’ve been working on a Django project that is going to be squeezed in as an external application under Pootle which is our tech of choice for the Mozilla Verbatim site which is where all awesome translations happen for Mozilla web projects. (translations for Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. is done by another project which I’ll blog about more in the next couple of weeks).

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Webmaster level: All

With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones. Today we are happy to announce that Googlebot-Mobile now crawls with a smartphone user-agent in addition to its previous feature phone user-agents. This is to increase our coverage of smartphone content and to provide a better search experience for smartphone users.

Here are the main user-agent strings that Googlebot-Mobile now uses:

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