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Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index.
Updated: 2 hours 34 min ago

More Options for Google+ Badges

Fri, 2012-02-03 00:15
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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Categories: web development

GET, POST, and safely surfacing more of the web

Tue, 2012-01-31 06:50
Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced
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Categories: web development

What’s new with Sitemaps

Mon, 2012-01-30 19:48
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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Categories: web development

Update to Top Search Queries data

Wed, 2012-01-25 22:00
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
Categories: web development

Making form-filling faster, easier and smarter

Wed, 2012-01-25 18:00
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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Categories: web development

Page layout algorithm improvement

Thu, 2012-01-19 23:00
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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Categories: web development

Better page titles in search results

Thu, 2012-01-12 11:59

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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Categories: web development

Download search queries data using Python

Thu, 2011-12-22 19:09
Webmaster level: Advanced
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Categories: web development

Website user research and testing on the cheap

Wed, 2011-12-21 19:24
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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Categories: web development

Rich Snippets Instructional Videos

Fri, 2011-12-16 17:59
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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Categories: web development

Introducing smartphone Googlebot-Mobile

Thu, 2011-12-15 15:20

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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Categories: web development

Clicks and impressions for authors

Wed, 2011-12-14 23:37
Webmaster Level: All
(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)
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Categories: web development