Official Web Master Blog

Webmaster level: All

To help webmasters manage the verified owners for their websites in Webmaster Tools, we’ve recently introduced three new features:

• Verification details view: You can now see the methods used to verify an owner for your site. In the Manage owners page for your site, you can now find the new Verification details link. This screenshot shows the verification details of a user who is verified using both an HTML file uploaded to the site and a meta tag:

  

  Where appropriate, the Verification details will have links to the correct URL on your site where the verification can be found to help you find it faster.

• Requiring the verification method be removed from the site before unverifying an owner: You now need to remove the verification method from your site before unverifying an owner from Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools now checks the method that the owner used to verify ownership of the site, and will show an error message if the verification is still found. For example, this is the error message shown when an unverification was attempted while the DNS CNAME verification method was still found on the DNS records of the domain:

  

• Shorter CNAME verification string: We’ve slightly modified the CNAME verification string to make it shorter to support a larger number of DNS providers. Some systems limit the number of characters that can be used in DNS records, which meant that some users were not able to use the CNAME verification method. We’ve now made the CNAME verification method have a fewer number of characters. Existing CNAME verifications will continue to be valid.

We hope this changes make it easier for you to use Webmaster Tools. As always, please post in our Verification forum if you have any questions or feedback.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

• Impressions
• Average position (only the top-ranking URL for the user’s query is factored in our calculation)
• Click
• CTR

1. Prepare by understanding your website’s goals and your target audience (then using Search Queries “filters” to support your knowledge)
2. Sort by clicks in Top queries to understand the top queries bringing searchers to your site (for the given time period)
3. Sort by CTR to notice any missed opportunities
4. Categorize queries into logical buckets that simplify tracking your progress and staying in touch with users’ needs
5. Sort Top pages by clicks to find the URLs on your site most visited by searchers (for the given time period)
6. Sort Top pages by impressions to find valuable pages that can be used to help feature your related, high-quality, but lower-ranking pages

• The method that you choose for verification is up to you, and may depend on your CMS & hosting providers. If you want to be sure that changes on your side don’t result in an accidental loss of the verification status, you may even want to consider using two methods in parallel.
• Back in 2009, we updated the format of the verification meta tag and file. If you’re still using the old format, we recommend moving to the newer version. The newer meta tag is called “google-site-verification, and the newer file format contains just one line with the file name. While we’re currently supporting ye olde format, using the newer one ensures that you’re good to go in the future.
• When removing users’ access in Webmaster Tools, remember to remove any active associated verification tokens (file, meta tag, etc.). Leaving them on your server means that these users would be able to gain access again at any time. You can view the site owners list in Webmaster Tools under Configuration / Users.
• If multiple people need to access the site, we recommend using the “add users” functionality in Webmaster Tools. This makes it easier for you to maintain the access control list without having to modify files or settings on your servers.
• Also, if multiple people from your organization need to use Webmaster Tools, it can be a good policy to only allow users with email addresses from your domain. By doing that, you can verify at a glance that only users from your company have access. Additionally, when employees leave, access to Webmaster Tools is automatically taken care of when that account is disabled.
• Consider using “restricted” (read-only) access where possible. Settings generally don’t need to be changed on a daily basis, and when they do need to be changed, it can be easier to document them if they have to go through a central account.

Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools.

At Google we're making more and more use of structured data to provide enhanced search results, such as rich snippets and event calendars, that help users find your content. Until now, marking up your site's HTML code has been the only way to indicate structured data to Google. However, we recognize that markup may be hard for some websites to deploy.

Today, we're offering webmasters a simpler alternative: Data Highlighter. At initial launch, it's available in English only and for structured data about events, such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals. We'll make Data Highlighter available for more languages and data types in the months ahead. Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools.

Data Highlighter is a point-and-click tool that can be used by anyone authorized for your site in Google Webmaster Tools. No changes to HTML code are required. Instead, you just use your mouse to highlight and "tag" each key piece of data on a typical event page of your website:

If your page lists multiple events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will "learn" that format as you apply tags, and help speed your work by automatically suggesting additional tags. Likewise, if you have many pages of events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will walk you through a process of tagging a few example pages so it can learn about their format variations. Usually, 5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.

When you're done, you can review a sample of all the event data that Data Highlighter now understands. If it's correct, click "Publish."
From then on, as Google crawls your site, it will recognize your latest event listings and make them eligible for enhanced search results. You can inspect the crawled data on the Structured Data Dashboard, and unpublish at any time if you're not happy with the results.

Here’s a short video explaining how the process works:

To get started with Data Highlighter, visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

If you have any questions, please read our Help Center article or ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Highlighting!

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager

• If your page is about a band, make sure you mark up concerts being performed by that band, not by related bands or bands in the same town.
• If you sell products through your site, make sure reviews on each page are about that page's product and not the store itself.
• If your site provides song lyrics, make sure reviews are about the quality of the lyrics, not the quality of the song itself.

• Make sure you have both the old and new domain verified in the same Webmaster Tools account.
• Use a 301 redirect on all pages to tell search engines your site has moved permanently.
• Don't do a single redirect from all pages to your new home page — this gives a bad user experience.
• If there's no 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to redirect to a new page with similar content.
• If you can't do redirects, consider cross-domain canonical links.
• Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site's move.
• Have a look at the Links to Your Site in Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your new location.
• We recommend not implementing other major changes at the same time, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates.
• To help Google pick up new URLs faster, use the Fetch as Google tool to ask Google to crawl your new site, and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
• To prevent confusion, it's best to retain control of your old site’s domain and keep redirects in place for as long as possible — at least 180 days.

• Submit an updated XML Sitemap so we know about all of the pages on your site.
• In Webmaster Tools, use the Fetch as Google feature on a URL you’ve updated. Then you can choose to submit it to the index.
• You can choose to submit all of the linked pages as well — if you’ve updated an entire section of your site, you might want to submit the main page or an index page for that section to let us know about a broad collection of URLs.

• You can now broadcast live streaming video to YouTube via Hangouts On Air (requires a Google+ account).
• You can link your YouTube account with your Webmaster Tools account, making it the "official channel" for your site.
• Automatic captions continue to get better and better, supporting more languages.

Site Error alerts for major site-wide problems

• Your DNS server is down or misconfigured.
• Your web server itself is firewalled off.
• Your web server is refusing connections from Googlebot.
• Your web server is overloaded, or down.
• Your site’s robots.txt is inaccessible.

Example of a Site Error alert

URL Error anomaly alerts for potentially less critical issues

Example of a URL Error anomaly alert

Enable Message forwarding to send alerts to your inbox

Management within Webmaster Tools

To add or change associates:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Configuration, click Associates.
   
3. Click Add a new associate.
4. In the text box, type the email address of the person you want to add.
5. Select the type of association you want.
   
6. Click Add.
   

Management within YouTube

1. Log in to your YouTube partner account.
2. Click on the user menu and choose Settings > Associated Website.
3. Fill in the page you would like to associate your channel with.
   
4. Click Add. If you’re a verified owner of the site, you’re done. But if someone else in your organization manages the website, the association will be marked Pending. The owner receives a notification with an option to approve or deny the request.
   
5. After approval is granted, navigate back to this page and click Refresh to complete the association.