Tuesday, March 18, 2008
February is that time of the year: the
Search Engine Strategies
conference hits London! A few of us were there to meet webmasters and search engine
representatives to talk about the latest trends and issues in the search engine world.
It was a three-day marathon full of interesting talks—and of course, we heard a lot of good
questions in between the sessions! If you didn’t get a chance to talk with us, fear not: we’ve
pulled together some of the best questions we encountered. You can find a few of them below, and
an additional set in our Webmaster Help Group. Please join the
discussion!
Why should I upload a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, if my site is crawled just fine?
All sites can benefit from submitting a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. You may help us to do a
better job of crawling and understanding your site, especially if it has dynamic content or a
complicated architecture.
Besides, you will have access to more information about your site, for example the number of pages
from your Sitemaps that are indexed by Google, any errors Google found with your Sitemap, as
well as warnings about potential problems. Also, you can submit specialized Sitemaps for certain
types of content including
Video,
Mobile,
News
and
Code.
Learn more about the benefits of
submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
How do you detect paid links? If I want to stay on the safe side, should I use the
nofollow attribute on all links?
We blogged about
our position on paid links and the use of nofollow
a few months ago. You may also find it interesting to read
this thread in our Help Group
about appropriate uses of the nofollow attribute.
How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I
do this for a dynamic website?
The instructions in our Help Center
explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or
subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of
structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/Google can
geolocate all of those patterns.
If your domain name has no regional significance, such as www.example.com, you can still associate
your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the
subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate
each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don’t support setting a
geographical target for patterns that can’t be verified such as, for example,
www.example.com/?region=countrycode.
I have a news site and it is not entirely crawled. Why? Other crawlers had no problem crawling
us…
First off, make sure that nothing prevents us from crawling your news site—the architecture
of your site or the robots.txt file. Also, we suggest you sign up for
Webmaster Tools
and submit your content. We specifically have the
News Sitemap protocol
for sites offering this type of content. If you take advantage of this feature, we can give you
more information on
which URLs we had trouble with and why.
It really rocks!
A quick note to conclude: the lively, international environment of SES is always incredible. I have had a lot of interesting conversations in English, as well as in
Italian,
French
and
Spanish.
Fellow Googlers chatted with webmasters in
English,
Danish,
Dutch,
German
and
Hungarian.
That’s amazing—and a great opportunity to get to know each other better, in the language you
speak! So next time you wonder how Google Universal Search works in English or you’re concerned
about Google News Search in German, don’t hesitate; grab us for a chat or write to us!
Comment nous l'appliquons
We archive Search Central announcements because client questions often trace back to a change that was announced years ago. Reading the original is faster than reconstructing it from second-hand summaries.
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