Here’s the thirteenth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!
Transcription
Hey everybody! This is Matt Cutts. Its Monday, August 7th, and going to be the first day of Search Engine Strategies. I have been picking SEO’s brains on Saturday. So, already started to loose my voice a little bit. But, I wanted to alert you to some stuff that people might have missed that just happened this past Friday. I think it might have gotten missed a little bit, because it happened at 9′o clock on a Friday and partly because, like a large fraction of the A list, B list and C list, bloggers about search, are all sort of on their way or arriving at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose.
So, Google has actually done quite a bit more lately to revamp the amount of information we provide to general users and to webmasters. So, one thing is http://www.google.com/support has been beefed up a whole lot. So, all the different support stuff , there is a lot more answers with a lot more fresh information. Its pretty cool. If you go to google.com/support, that is sort of the one stop shop for all sorts of general user support needs.
However, if you found your way to this video, you are probably not just a regular user. You are probably also a webmaster. And if you are a webmaster, there is a tool you need to know about, which used to be called ‘Sitemaps’ until Friday.
It all started off sometime last year, when this tool called ‘Sitemaps’ let people submit all the urls that were on their sites. They could even say things like: when they had last changed, which urls are more important… all sorts of stuff. And lot of people made tools to create those sitemaps files and that was fantastic.
The thing that happened after that is, the Sitemaps team decided to build a more general console, something that could help webmasters with all sorts of other problems. And so, that’s been called ‘Sitemaps’. But I know, Adam Lasnik came back from Search Engine Strategies London and said that when he talked about sitemaps, everybody thought, oh XML files or stuff like that. So just this last week, ‘Sitemaps’ changed their name.
So, there is now an official area called Google Webmaster Central and if you go to that, its just http://www.google.com/webmaster or webmasters, I’ll make sure that they both work, you will get a set of lots of different tools. There is now an official Google Webmaster Blog, which is going to be mostly maintained by Venessa Fox and I am sure, I will stop by from time to time to weigh in on various things. But that used to be the Sitemaps blog, and the scope of it is broadening to now include anything related to webmasters, which I think is fantastic.
The other thing is, the sitemaps tool has now become the Google Webmaster Tools. And it got all sorts of stuff. Its not just a place where you can tell people, here are all the urls that I’ve got, Google come please call those urls. Just off the top of my head, it has got robots.txt checker, it has got things to show you what errors in urls it has seen….
Earlier today, in fact, I found where I had made a link without the http and that doesn’t work so well in Wordpress. So, I had gotten 404 errors whenever Google tried to crawl. So, I was actually, able to fix a broken link by looking at that table.
In some cases we can tell you whether you have spam penalties or not. So, if you have hidden text or something like that, we can actually show you that you have a penalty and actually give you a re-inclusion request, which we can give a little more weight to, because we know its you, you verified and proved that you really own that site.
They also just did a new release on Friday, along with change in the name and they introduced a lot of different pretty neat little stuff. Things like show me all the query words that show up in each subdirectory, or show me the crawl errors in each subdirectory and things like that.
However, the biggest thing that I am really happy about is something called preferred domain. Sometimes we see, whenever people have their links, you know, not as uniform. May be they don’t have all their ducks in a row. And so, some of the links point to www.mattcutts.com and some of the links point to just mattcutts.com. So, without the www or with the www. And, if some people from out side of you, like the ODP or whatever links to one and other people link to the other, Google tries to dis-ambiguate that. It tries to figure out, oh www and non-www are actually the same page and they are always to going to be the same site. But we can’t always get that 100% correct.
So this new feature in Sitemaps, the Google Webmaster Console or Google Webmaster Tools, whatever you want to call it, now lets you say, “OK, I verify, I own this domain and I verify I own it with-the-www as well. Now, treat those as the same.”
Now bear in mind, its a preference, so the first thing is, it might take several weeks for it to go into effect. The next thing is, its a preference, so, we don’t one hundred percent, guarantee that if you say, “I want www”, we will always go that way. But in the normal typical situation, with in a few weeks you should see your urls change from split between www or non-www, if you have this issue, to all being on which ever one you prefer.
I volunteered my domain to be used as the guinea pig by the crawl guys, so they were whipping it back and forth from www to non-www and things are looking that they are working pretty well.
So, PropstodayOUK, asked this feature, a bunch of other people have asked for this feature. I am glad we are getting around to it. I am sure we continue to keep looking for ways that we can take request from webmasters and try to turn that into useful information that they can get.
So if you haven’t taken a fresh look at the Google Webmaster Tools, I would highly recommend that you do that. Its worth your time, you can find all kinds of errors, you can test your robots.txt, you can sometimes see penalties. There is words that you rank for, words that you get ranked for and got clicked on a lot and most importantly, there is this www and non-www. So, if you have been effected by that, you can now tell google, which way you want it to be.
The Sitemaps team has been doing a great job. I am sure I’ll continue to call them ‘Sitemaps’ for a while, not being able to get used to the name change. But I’ll get used to it eventually. I hope that you will give it a try. I think it can be useful for anybody who’s got a site.
Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis
