Sharing advice from our London site clinic

Webmaster level: Beginner - Intermediate

We recently hosted our second site clinic, this time at TechHub in London, UK. Like last year, here’s our summary of the topics that came up.

• Title tags and meta description tags are easy ways to improve your site's visibility in Google search results, yet we still see webmasters not fully utilizing their potential. We have a bit of help available about writing good page titles and descriptions which you can read to brush up on the subject. That said, you can ignore the meta keywords, at least as far as Google is concerned.
• One way Google's algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the page’s headings. The way semantic markup is used throughout a site, including h1, h2, and h3 tags, helps us to understand the priorities of a site’s content. One should not fret, though, about every single H tag. Using common sense is the way to go.
• Just as we recommend you structuring pages logically, it is similarly important to structure the whole website, particularly by linking to related documents within your site as necessary. This helps both users and search engine bots explore all the content you provide. To augment this, be sure to provide a regularly updated Sitemap, which can be conveniently linked to from your site’s robots.txt file for automatic discovery by Google and other search engines.
• Duplicate content and canonicalization issues were discussed for many websites reviewed at the site clinic. Duplicate content within a website is generally not a problem, but can make it more difficult for search engines to properly index your content and serve the right version to users. There are two common ways to signal what your preferred versions of your content are: By using 301 redirects to point to your preferred versions, or by using the rel="canonical" link element. If you’re concerned about setting your preferred domain in terms of whether to use www or non-www, we recommend you check out the related feature for setting the preferred domain feature in Webmaster Tools.
• Another commonly seen issue is that some sites have error pages which do not return an error HTTP result code, but instead return the HTTP success code 200. Only documents that are actually available should reply with the HTTP success result code 200. When a page no longer exists, it should return a 404 (Not found) response. Header responses of any URL can be checked using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools or using third party tools such as the Live HTTP Headers Firefox addon or web-sniffer.net.
• Ranking for misspelled queries, e.g. local business names including typos, seems to be an area of concern. In some cases, Google’s automatic spelling correction gets the job done for users by suggesting the correct spelling. It isn’t a wise idea to stuff a site's content with every typo imaginable. It’s also not advisable to hide this or any other type of content using JavaScript, CSS or similar techniques. These methods are in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and we may take appropriate action against a site that employs them. If you’re not sure how Googlebot “sees” your pages, e.g. when using lots of JavaScript, you can get a better idea by looking at the text-only version of the cached copy in Google web search results.
• Users love fast websites. That’s why webpage loading speed is an important consideration for your users. We offer a wide range of tools and recommendations to help webmasters understand the performance of their websites and how to improve them. The easiest way to get started is to use Page Speed Online, which is the web-based version of our popular Page Speed Chrome extension. Our Let's make the web faster page has great list of resources from Google and elsewhere for improving website speed, which we recommend you to read.

We’d like to thank the TechHub team, who helped us facilitate the event, and give a big thank you to all participants. We hope you found the presentation and Q&A session interesting. We've embedded the presentation below.

And as we mentioned in the site clinic, sign up at the Google Webmaster Help Forum to discuss any further questions you might have and keep an eye on our Webmaster Central Blog.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski, Pierre Far, Sven Naumann

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Easier URL removals for site owners

Webmaster Level: All

We recently made a change to the Remove URL tool in Webmaster Tools to eliminate the requirement that the webpage's URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google's search results. Because you've already verified ownership of the site, we can eliminate this requirement to make it easier for you, as the site owner, to remove unwanted pages (e.g. pages accidentally made public) from Google's search results.

Removals persist for at least 90 days
When a page’s URL is requested for removal, the request is temporary and persists for at least 90 days. We may continue to crawl the page during the 90-day period but we will not display it in the search results. You can still revoke the removal request at any time during those 90 days. After the 90-day period, the page can reappear in our search results, assuming you haven’t made any other changes that could impact the page’s availability.

Permanent removal
In order to permanently remove a URL, you must ensure that one of the following page blocking methods is implemented for the URL of the page that you want removed:

• indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 HTTP status code
• block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
• block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag

This will ensure that the page is permanently removed from Google's search results for as long as the page is blocked. If at any time in the future you remove the previously implemented page blocking method, we may potentially re-crawl and index the page. For immediate and permanent removal, you can request that a page be removed using the Remove URL tool and then permanently block the page’s URL before the 90-day expiration of the removal request.



For more information about URL removals, see our “URL removal explained” blog series covering this topic. If you still have questions about this change or about URL removal requests in general, please post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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Add +1 to help your site stand out

Webmaster level: Intermediate



When we introduced the +1 button in March, Google search took a small step in an important direction. Search results can be more helpful, and more personal, when recommendations from the people you trust are there to guide your way.



The +1 button can help publishers, too. As potential visitors see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your Google search results, you could see more, and better qualified, traffic coming from Google.



Since we announced +1, we’ve gotten lots of requests from Google search users and webmasters alike for +1 buttons in more places than just search results. That’s why today we’re making the +1 button available to sites across the web. Sometimes you want to recommend a web page after you’ve visited it. After all, how do you know you want to suggest that great article on Spanish tapas if you haven’t read it yet?



We’ve partnered with a few sites where you’ll see +1 buttons over the coming days:

You'll also start to see +1 buttons on other Google properties such as Android Market, Blogger, Product Search and YouTube.



Adding +1 buttons to your pages is a great way to help your content stand out in Google search. By giving your visitors more chances to +1 your pages, your search results and search ads could show up with +1 annotations more often, helping users see when your pages are most likely to be useful.

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central. You’ll be able to configure a small snippet of JavaScript and add it to the pages where you want +1 buttons to appear. You can pick from a few different button sizes and styles, so choose the +1 button that best matches your site’s layout.

In the common case, a press of the button +1’s the URL of the page it’s on. We recommend some easy ways to ensure this maps as often as possible to the pages appearing in Google search results.



If your site primarily caters to users outside of the US and Canada, you can install the +1 button code now; the +1 button is already supported in 44 languages. However, keep in mind that +1 annotations currently only appear for English search results on Google.com. We’re working on releasing +1 to searchers worldwide in the future.



If you have users who love your content (and we bet you do), encourage them to spread the word! Add the +1 button to help your site stand out with a personal recommendation right at the moment of decision, on Google search.



To stay current on updates to the +1 button large and small, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site. Finally, if you have any questions about using the +1 button on your websites, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum.



Written by Evan Gilbert, Software Engineer, +1 Button

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Artists Can Share Unreleased Tracks With Fans Via New Site

Swift.fm is a newly relaunched social network/platform that focuses on unreleased music — it no longer needs to languish in oblivion. Swift.fm has been live for 18 months and was, in the past, focused on Twitter, but emerged this week with more tools and tricks.

“There’s a huge opportunity around unreleased music,” says Edward Aten, founder and CEO, “The site provides daily, weekly communication with fans in the way bands do it best — through music.”

Swift.fm is something between a consumer and a back-end product. When artists join, they can connect the site to all of their social accounts — MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm — and upload tracks to share across all of those verticals. Still, it’s not just a back-end tool for blasting music out to one’s networks, it’s also a place for fans to check out bands.

Consumers can also create accounts, and, once they plug in their social networks, check out a stream composed of tracks shared by people in those networks. They can also follow musicians directly from the site and listen to artist streams via their pages. (The site says it’s DMCA compliant, but we can see how it could be used to upload and share tracks that belong to the users.)

If all this sounds a little familiar — i.e. like Soundcloud and some others — Aten says to take a closer look. “We are huge fans of Soundcloud, they are our number-one competitor,” says Aten. “But Soundcloud is more like a Flickr for music, and we are more of an Instagram. We’re totally focused on the social side of music distribution — getting music out to fans as quickly as possible.”

In essence, the site is most like “Hootsuite for bands” Bln.kr, except that Bln.kr is more of a back-end, distribution-focused tool than a social network. Still, with the current influx of such social networks — likely a reaction to the fall of Myspace — we imagine that it will still be difficult for Swift.fm to distinguish itself among the masses.

To kick off the relaunch, Swift.fm will be featuring unreleased tracks from a couple of heavy hitters in the hip-hop field — Questlove and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest, to name a few.

Questlove started using the service last year, posting 30-second clips of what he was doing in the studio to the site.

Unfortunately, the site lacks a “buy” option at present (it’s streaming-only now), but soon bands will be able to sell music through iTunes, Amazon and eMusic.

Image courtesy of Flickr, hell*yeah

More About: MARKETING, music, swift.fm

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