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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index.

One place for changing your site's settingsYesterday

One of the many useful features of Webmaster Tools is the ability to adjust settings for your site, such as crawl rate or geographic target. We've been steadily adding settings over time and have now gotten to the point where they merit their own page. That's right, Webmaster Tools now provides a single, dedicated page where you can see and adjust all the settings for your site.

The settings that have been moved to the new Settings page are:
1. Geographic Target
2. Preferred domain control
3. Opting in to enhanced image search
4. Crawl rate control





Changing a Setting
Whenever you change a setting, you will be given an option to save or cancel the change.

A new look for our Webmaster Help GroupYesterday

Googlers strongly believe in dogfooding our own products. We manage our work schedules with Google Calendar, publish our blogs on Blogger, and store scads of documentation on Google Sites. So, ever since we launched our first Webmaster Help Group, we've been using Google Groups to facilitate conversations about Webmaster Tools and web search issues.

Today, however, I'm thrilled to announce that our English and Polish Help Groups are getting a makeover. And the changes are more than just skin-deep. Our new Help Forums should make it easier for you to find answers, share resources with others, and have your participation acknowledged.

You can read more about the changes on the Official Google Blog, and then check it out for yourself: English, Polish.

Q: What will happen to the old English and Polish Help Groups?
A: While our old groups are now closed to new posts, they will sti

More control of Googlebot's crawl rateYesterday

We've upgraded the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools so that webmasters experiencing problems with Googlebot can now provide us more specific information. Crawl rate for your site determines the time used by Googlebot to crawl your site on each visit. Our goal is to thoroughly crawl your site (so your pages can be indexed and returned in search results!) without creating a noticeable impact on your server's bandwidth. While most webmasters are fine using the default crawl setting (i.e. no changes needed, more on that below), some webmasters may have more specific needs.

Googlebot employs sophisticated algorithms that determine how much to crawl each site it visits. For a vast majority of sites, it's probably best to choose the "Let Google determine my crawl rate" option, which is the default. However, if you're an advanced user or if you're facing bandwidth issues with your server, you can customize your crawl rate to the speed most optimal for your web server(s). The custom crawl rate option allows you to provide Googlebot insight to the maximum number of requests per second and the number of seconds between requests that you feel are best for your environment.

Date with Googlebot, Part II: HTTP status codes and If-Modified-SinceNovember 27

Our date with Googlebot was so wonderful, but it's hard to tell if we, the websites, said the right thing. We returned 301 permanent redirect, but should we have responded with 302 temporary redirect (so he knows we're playing hard to get)? If we sent a few new 404s, will he ever call our site again? Should we support the header "If-Modified-Since?" These questions can be confusing, just like young love. So without further ado, let's ask the expert, Googlebot, and find out how he judged our response (code).

Supporting the "If-Modified-Since" header and returning 304 can save bandwidth.

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Dearest Googlebot,
  Recently, I did some spring cleaning on my site and deleted a couple of old, orphaned pages. They now return the 404 "Page not found" code. Is this ok, or have I confused you?
Frankie O'Fore

Dear Frankie,
  404s are the standard way of telling me that a page no longer exists. I won't be upset—it's normal that old pages are pruned from websites, or updated to fresher c

Better targeting your indic language siteNovember 13

A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.

‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’

We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.

To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.

<script type="text/javascript" src