Toluu

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

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

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.

-----------
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

On-Demand Sitemaps for Custom SearchNovember 13

Since we launched enhanced indexing with the Custom Search platform earlier this year, webmasters who submit Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools get special treatment: Custom Search recognizes the submitted Sitemaps and indexes URLs from these Sitemaps into a separate index for higher quality Custom Search results. We analyze your Custom Search Engines (CSEs), pick up the appropriate Sitemaps, and figure out which URLs are relevant for your engines for enhanced indexing. You get the dual benefit of better discovery for Google.com and more comprehensive coverage in your own CSEs.

Today, we're taking another step towards improving your experience with Google webmaster services with the launch of On-Demand Indexing in Custom Search. With On-Demand Indexing, you can now tell us about the pages on your websites that are new, or that are important and have changed, and Custom Search will instantly schedule them for crawl, and index and serve them in your CSEs usually within 24 hours, often much faster.

How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it... provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom

Google's SEO Starter GuideNovember 12

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Wel

Spookier than malwareOctober 31

hotdog
lion king...and infinitely more fun: webmasters and their pets incognito! Happy Halloween, everyone! If you see any costumes that would pass the SafeSearch filter :), feel like sharing a gripe or telling a good story, please join the chat!

Take care, and don't forget to brush your teeth.
 Yours scarily,
  The Webmaster Central Team

Our glasses-wearing, no vampire-teeth vampire (Ryan), zoombie Mur, Holiday Fail (Tiffany Lane), Colbert Hipster (Dan Vanderkam), Rick Astley Cutts, Ho