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Coding guidelines for HTML and CSS

May 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Webmaster level: All

Great code has many attributes. It’s effective, efficient, maintainable, elegant. When working on code with many developers and teams and maybe even companies, great code needs to also be consistent and easy to understand. For that purpose there are style guides. We use style guides for a lot of languages, and our newest public style guide is the Google HTML and CSS Style Guide.

Our HTML and CSS Style Guide, just like other Google style guides, deals with a lot of formatting-related matters. It also hints at best practices so to encourage developers to go beyond indentation. Many style guide authors know the underlying motivation from the question whether to describe the code they write—or to prescribe what code they want to write. Not surprisingly then, in our HTML and CSS style guide you’ll find both (as much as you’ll still find a lot of different development styles in our not entirely small code base).

At this time we only want to introduce you to this new style guide. We hope to share more about its design decisions and future updates with you. In the meantime please share your thoughts and experiences, and as with the other style guides, feel free to use our style guide for your own projects, as you see fit.

Written by Jens O. Meiert, Senior Web Architect, Google Webmaster Team


Google Webmaster Central Blog

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Google’s New Ad Metric and Revenue for 2011

May 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Google’s New Adwords Metric

Google has recently announced the first part of “Brand Activate” which aims to change the way online marketers measure online advertising.

Will this make online advertising, such as Google Adowrds, more attractive to small businesses? We will have to wait and see.

Check out the video by Google to learn more:

Google Revenue 2011

The below infographic shows the break down of Google’s revenue for 2011, showing the top 5 advertisers in each industry.

Google 2011 Revenue : The Top 5 Advertisers From Each Category

Google 2011 Revenue : The Top 5 Advertisers From Each Category

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How to move your content to a new location

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Webmaster level: Intermediate

While maintaining a website, webmasters may decide to move the whole website or parts of it to a new location. For example, you might move content from a subdirectory to a subdomain, or to a completely new domain. Changing the location of your content can involve a bit of effort, but it’s worth doing it properly.

To help search engines understand your new site structure better and make your site more user-friendly, make sure to follow these guidelines:

  • It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects. To highlight the relationship between the two locations, make sure that each old URL points to the new URL that hosts similar content. If you’re unable to use 301 redirects, you may want to consider using cross domain canonicals for search engines instead.
  • Check that you have both the new and the old location verified in the same Google Webmaster Tools account.
  • Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Googlebot feature. It’s important to make sure Google can actually access your content in the new location. Also make sure that the old URLs are not blocked by a robots.txt disallow directive, so that the redirect or rel=canonical can be found.
  • If you’re moving your content to an entirely new domain, use the Change of address option under Site configuration in Google Webmaster Tools to let us know about the change.
Change of address option in Google Webmaster Tools
Tell us about moving your content via Google Webmaster Tools
  • If you’ve also changed your site’s URL structure, make sure that it’s possible to navigate it without running into 404 error pages. Google Webmaster Tools may prove useful in investigating potentially broken links. Just look for Diagnostics > Crawl errors for your new site.
  • Check your Sitemap and verify that it’s up to date.
  • Once you’ve set up your 301 redirects, you can keep an eye on users to your 404 error pages to check that users are being redirected to new pages, and not accidentally ending up on broken URLs. When a user comes to a 404 error page on your site, try to identify which URL they were trying to access, why this user was not redirected to the new location of your content, and then make changes to your 301 redirect rules as appropriate.
  • Have a look at the Links to your site in Google Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your new location.
  • If your site’s content is specific to a particular region you may want to double check the geotargeting preferences for your new site structure in Google Webmaster Tools.
  • As a general rule of thumb, try to avoid running two crawlable sites with completely or largely identical content without a 301 redirection or specifying a rel=”canonical”. 
  • Lastly, we recommend not implementing other major changes when you’re moving your content to a new location, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates. Changing too much at once may confuse users and search engines.
We hope you find these suggestions useful. If you happen to have further questions on how to move your content to a new location we’d like to encourage you to drop by our Google Webmaster Help Forum and seek advice from expert webmasters.

Written by Fili Wiese (Ad Traffic Quality) & Kaspar Szymanski (Search Quality)


Google Webmaster Central Blog

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1000 Words About Images

April 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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Webmaster level: All

Creativity is an important aspect of our lives and can enrich nearly everything we do. Say I’d like to make my teammate a cup of cool-looking coffee, but my creative batteries are empty; this would be (and is!) one of the many times when I look for inspiration on Google Images.

The images you see in our search results come from publishers of all sizes — bloggers, media outlets, stock photo sites — who have embedded these images in their HTML pages. Google can index image types formatted as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and WebP, as well as SVG.

But how does Google know that the images are about coffee and not about tea? When our algorithms index images, they look at the textual content on the page the image was found on to learn more about the image. We also look at the page’s title and its body; we might also learn more from the image’s filename, anchor text that points to it, and its “alt text;” we may use computer vision to learn more about the image and may also use the caption provided in the Image Sitemap if that text also exists on the page.

 To help us index your images, make sure that:

  • we can crawl both the HTML page the image is embedded in, and the image itself;
  • the image is in one of our supported formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP or SVG.

Additionally, we recommend:

  • that the image filename is related to the image’s content;
  • that the alt attribute of the image describes the image in a human-friendly way;
  • and finally, it also helps if the HTML page’s textual contents as well as the text near the image are related to the image.

Now some answers to questions we’ve seen many times:


Q: Why do I sometimes see Googlebot crawling my images, rather than Googlebot-Image?
A: Generally this happens when it’s not clear that a URL will lead to an image, so we crawl the URL with Googlebot first. If we find the URL leads to an image, we’ll usually revisit with Googlebot-Image. Because of this, it’s generally a good idea to allow crawling of your images and pages by both Googlebot and Googlebot-Image.

Q: Is it true that there’s a maximum file size for the images?
A: We’re happy to index images of any size; there’s no file size restriction.

Q: What happens to the EXIF, XMP and other metadata my images contain?
A: We may use any information we find to help our users find what they’re looking for more easily. Additionally, information like EXIF data may be displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the interstitial page that appears when you click on an image.


Q: Should I really submit an Image Sitemap? What are the benefits?
A: Yes! Image Sitemaps help us learn about your new images and may also help us learn what the images are about.


Q: I’m using a CDN to host my images; how can I still use an Image Sitemap?
A: Cross-domain restrictions apply only to the Sitemaps’ tag. In Image Sitemaps, the tag is allowed to point to a URL on another domain, so using a CDN for your images is fine.
We also encourage you to verify the CDN’s domain name in Webmaster Tools so that we can inform you of any crawl errors that we might find.


Q: Is it a problem if my images can be found on multiple domains or subdomains I own — for example, CDNs or related sites?
A: Generally, the best practice is to have only one copy of any type of content. If you’re duplicating your images across multiple hostnames, our algorithms may pick one copy as the canonical copy of the image, which may not be your preferred version. This can also lead to slower crawling and indexing of your images.


Q: We sometimes see the original source of an image ranked lower than other sources; why is this?
A: Keep in mind that we use the textual content of a page when determining the context of an image. For example, if the original source is a page from an image gallery that has very little text, it can happen that a page with more textual context is chosen to be shown in search. If you feel you’ve identified very bad search results for a particular query, feel free to use the feedback link below the search results or to share your example in our Webmaster Help Forum.

SafeSearch

Our algorithms use a great variety of signals to decide whether an image — or a whole page, if we’re talking about Web Search — should be filtered from the results when the user’s SafeSearch filter is turned on. In the case of images some of these signals are generated using computer vision, but the SafeSearch algorithms also look at simpler things such as where the image was used previously and the context in which the image was used. 

One of the strongest signals, however, is self-marked adult pages. We recommend that webmasters who publish adult content mark up their pages with one of the following meta tags:

<meta name="rating" content="adult" />
<meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />



Many users prefer not to have adult content included in their search results (especially if kids use the same computer). When a webmaster provides one of these meta tags, it helps to provide a better user experience because users don’t see results which they don’t want to or expect to see. 







As with all algorithms, sometimes it may happen that SafeSearch filters content inadvertently. If you think your images or pages are mistakenly being filtered by SafeSearch, please let us know using the following form. 







If you need more information about how we index images, please check out the section of our Help Center dedicated to images, read our SEO Starter Guide which contains lots of useful information, and if you have more questions please post them in the Webmaster Help Forum. 







Written by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst











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Upcoming changes in Google’s HTTP Referrer

		
		
April 24, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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Webmaster level: all


Protecting users’ privacy is a priority for us and it’s helped drive recent changes. Helping users save time is also very important; it’s explicitly mentioned as a part of our philosophy. Today, we’re happy to announce that Google Web Search will soon be using a new proposal to reduce latency when a user of Google’s SSL-search clicks on a search result with a modern browser such as Chrome. 


Starting in April, for browsers with the appropriate support, we will be using the “referrer” meta tag to automatically simplify the referring URL that is sent by the browser when visiting a page linked from an organic search result. This results in a faster time to result and more streamlined experience for the user.


What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? You may start to see “origin” referrers—Google’s homepages (see the meta referrer specification for further detail)—as a source of organic SSL search traffic. This change will only affect the subset of SSL search referrers which already didn’t include the query terms. Non-HTTPS referrals will continue to behave as they do today. Again, the primary motivation for this change is to remove an unneeded redirect so that signed-in users reach their destination faster.


Website analytics programs can detect these organic search requests by detecting bare Google host names using SSL (like “https://www.google.co.uk/”). Webmasters will continue see the same data in Webmasters Tools—just as before, you’ll receive an aggregated list of the top search queries that drove traffic to their site. 


We will continue to look into further improvements to how search query data is surfaced through Webmaster Tools. If you have questions, feedback or suggestions, please let us know through the Webmaster Tools Help Forum.


Posted by , Webmaster Trends Analyst, Switzerland












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Updates to rich snippets

		
		
April 24, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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Webmaster level:  All




Today we’re announcing two updates to rich snippets.


First, we’re happy to announce that product rich snippets, which previously were only available in a limited set of locales, are supported globally.  Users viewing your site’s results in Google search can now preview information about products available on your website, regardless of where they’re searching from. Here’s an example of a product rich snippet:











A product rich snippet from www.google.fr






Second, we’ve updated the rich snippets testing tool to support HTML input. We heard from many users that they wanted to be able to test their HTML source without having to publish it to a web page. This is now supported by the tool, as shown below.











Preview rich snippets from HTML source






If you have any questions or feedback about these changes, please let us know in our Help Forum. You can find more information about rich snippets in our Help Center and Webmaster Education site.






Posted by Anthony Chavez, Product Manager










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Get Local with AdWords

		
		
April 14, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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Get organized this spring with new location features in AdWords and share your stories


Over the past 30 years, California Closet Company has grown from the brainchild of a college student organizing his dorm room closet to a successful business with more than 77 franchise locations. To reach customers across the U.S. and internationally, the company centered their digital marketing strategy on creating locally relevant campaigns.







It’s no surprise that local campaigns are a focus for many businesses–from finding directions to looking up a phone number, more people are going online to find local information. In fact, more than 20% of searches on Google are related to location, and people often act quickly on local searches. Research shows that using smartphones, 88% of people who search for local information take action within a day.







To help you organize your local ad campaigns this spring, we’re introducing three new features in AdWords to help you create ads that are more relevant to local customers.







Target customers by zip code


If you customize your direct mail, outdoor ads, or newspaper ads at a postal code level, you now can easily do the same in AdWords in the US. We are introducing the ability to target more than 30,000 US ZIP Codes with your AdWords campaigns.







You will be able to add up to 1,000 postal codes at a time to your search ad campaigns with AdWords Location Targeting. Plus, you can get feedback on the performance of your local campaigns by viewing campaign performance statistics at the postal code level.







“Location targeting within AdWords helped us double lead volume and cut the cost to acquire new customers in half,” said Lois Erbay, Director of Marketing, California Closet Company. “We plan on building on that success by using ZIP Code targeting to create even more locally relevant campaigns for our customers.”














More locally relevant ads in less time


To help you easily create a custom ad title, text, display URL, and/or destination URL for all of your locations at scale, we’ve developed location insertion for location extensions. You’ll no longer need to create multiple ads for multiple locations–this new feature automatically inserts the city, phone number, or zip code of your local business into your ad text.







For example, if your ad text says: “Find a {lb.city:Local} Store or Shop Online,” a user viewing your ad in Chicago would see: “Find a Chicago Store or Shop Online.” This new feature cuts out all the work to building out ad text featuring local information for all your locations.









Ad with location insertion in the text and display URL







“We’ve had amazing success manually customizing our creative with local information for our top markets, which shows us that customers want locally-relevant results when it comes to a service like storage,” said Chris Laczi, Advertising Director, Uncle Bob’s Self Storage. “That’s why we’re very excited about location insertion. It will simplify the task of creating locally customized ads for our 400+ locations, and we expect it will greatly enhance conversion rate of our ads.”







You must have location extensions set up and running in order to enable location insertion. Location insertion will work even if your location extensions don’t show because of other extensions. We detect location based on where your customer is physically located or by the geographic locations she may have shown interest in.













Better clarity and control


When we launched advanced location targeting in March 2011, we provided you with more control over how you geographically target your ads. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re implementing four additional enhancements that will make location targeting options clearer and more powerful. Read more about these enhancements in the Help Center and in this blog post.







There is significant opportunity for businesses to reach local customers online and win moments that matter by delivering the right ad in the right context. Stay tuned for more information on how ZIP Code targeting can help you grow your business.







We want to hear from you about your success in getting local with AdWords–share your story here and we might reach out to you to participate in our upcoming blog posts.


Posted by Richard Holden, Product Management Director (cross-posted from the Inside AdWords blog)








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Five common SEO mistakes (and six good ideas!)

		
		
April 3, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate


To help you avoid common mistakes webmasters face with regard to search engine optimization (SEO), I filmed a video outlining five common mistakes I’ve noticed in the SEO industry. Almost four years ago, we also gathered information from all of you (our readers) about your SEO recommendations and updated our related Help Center article given your feedback. Much of the same advice from 2008 still holds true today — here’s to more years ahead building a great site!







If you’re short on time, here’s the gist:


Avoid these common mistakes


1. Having no value proposition: Try not to assume that a site should rank #1 without knowing why it’s helpful to searchers (and better than the competition :) 


2. Segmented approach: Be wary of setting SEO-related goals without making sure they’re aligned with your company’s overall objectives and the goals of other departments. For example, in tandem with your work optimizing product pages (and the full user experience once they come to your site), also contribute your expertise to your Marketing team’s upcoming campaign. So if Marketing is launching new videos or a more interactive site, be sure that searchers can find their content, too.


3. Time-consuming workarounds: Avoid implementing a hack rather than researching new features or best practices that could simplify development (e.g., changing the timestamp on an updated URL so it’s crawled more quickly instead of easily submitting the URL through Fetch as Googlebot).


4. Caught in SEO trends: Consider spending less time obsessing about the latest “trick” to boost your rankings and instead focus on the fundamental tasks/efforts that will bring lasting visitors.


5. Slow iteration: Aim to be agile rather than promote an environment where the infrastructure and/or processes make improving your site, or even testing possible improvements, difficult.


Six fundamental SEO tips


1. Do something cool: Make sure your site stands out from the competition — in a good way!


2. Include relevant words in your copy: Try to put yourself in the shoes of searchers. What would they query to find you? Your name/business name, location, products, etc., are important. It’s also helpful to use the same terms in your site that your users might type (e.g., you might be a trained “flower designer” but most searchers might type [florist]), and to answer the questions they might have (e.g., store hours, product specs, reviews). It helps to know your customers.


3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Create unique title tags and meta descriptions; include Rich Snippets markup from schema.org where appropriate. Have intuitive navigation and good internal links.


4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools: Help us communicate with you, especially when we notice something awry with your site.


5. Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows… In every business there’s something compelling, interesting, entertaining, or surprising that you can offer or share with your users. Provide a helpful service, tell fun stories, paint a vivid picture and users will share and reshare your content.


6. Stay fresh and relevant: Keep content up-to-date and consider options such as building a social media presence (if that’s where a potential audience exists) or creating an ideal mobile experience if your users are often on-the-go.


Good luck to everyone!


Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead










Google Webmaster Central Blog

		

		
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A better way to buy display

		
		
March 23, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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Display advertising has undergone a bit of a fairytale-like transformation over the past several years, from the medium of “Click Here!” banner ads, to one that can be smart and sexy and help bring big ideas (even those from advertising’s past) to life. Now that display has had its “Cinderella moment,” we figured the “carriage” could use an upgrade as well. So today, we’re unveiling some changes designed to simplify the way you buy and run display through AdWords.


Display’s New Home in AdWords


For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search. This is like trying to run in glass slippers — it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords. Rolling out over the next few weeks, the new Display Network Tab is an interface built from the ground up to run display campaigns, and will enable you to bid, target and optimize display campaigns all from a single place. Click the image below to see the different Display Network Tab targeting options.


Display Network Tab





A Revved-Up Contextual Engine


The contextual engine, which matches ads to pages based on keywords, is at the heart of display-buying through AdWords. We’ve been hard at work behind-the-scenes to give this engine its biggest enhancement ever, the ability to combine the reach of display with the precision of search, using Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. This means that you can fine-tune the performance of your contextual campaigns down to individual keyword level, which will help you take the performance of your marketing campaign to a completely new level. It’s now easier for you to extend search campaigns to display and more efficient to run the two types of campaigns together.


For example, let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword “Turks and Caicos vacations” is 4 times more profitable than the keyword “caribbean vacations”. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on “caribbean vacations”.


Giving a Visual Edge


And like the writers of the best fairytales know, sometimes pictures communicate better than words (or numbers). Along with the new Display Network Tab and contextual engine, we’re introducing a way to visualize the reach of your campaigns, and see how that reach is impacted by combining multiple targeting types, such as keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing.




These changes are some of our biggest steps to date towards bringing together the science of search advertising with the art of display. We hope they give you some powerful new tools to connect with their customers and deliver engaging and relevant display ads.


Learn More


We’re rolling out the new Display Network Tab to all advertisers in the upcoming coming weeks.


For more information on what’s new on the Display Network Tab visit our help center article.


Please join Google in our upcoming webinar on May 15th to learn more about optimizing your targeting strategies for campaigns using the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting. Check out our new webinar page to register.


Watch Brad Bender, Director of Product Management for Display talk about the new Display Network Tab and the Next-Gen Keyword Contextual Targeting.




Posted by Alok Goel, Product Manager Next Gen-Keyword Contextual Targeting, Rebecca Illowsky, Product Manager Display Network Tab, and Claire Cui, Principal Engineer








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Diagnose ads faster with new status insights icon

		
		
March 21, 2012  By  Leave a Comment 
		

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This week we’re introducing a status insights icon in the Ads tab that provides visibility into the approval status and potential policy limitations for each individual ad creative. The new icon will be particularly valuable if you’re advertising products or services that are restricted by our advertising policies to show only in specific countries or with certain keywords.


To use the new status icon, simply hover over the speech bubble in the Status column of the Ads tab next to the ad of interest:




We’ll tell you if the individual ad is showing for the default keyword and location displayed in the hover. If you would like to re-diagnose the ad with with a different targeted location or keyword, you can edit the parameters from right within the hover:




This new icon complements the existing ad diagnosis tools, which include the status hover on the Keywords tab, a batch option to diagnose many keywords at once, and the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool.


Posted by Katie Miller, Inside AdWords crew






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