Change can happen—sometimes, as we saw in our previous post on URL removals, you may completely block or remove a page from your site. Other times you might only change parts of a page, or remove certain pieces of text. Depending on how frequently a page is being crawled, it can take some time before these changes get reflected in our search results. In this blog post we'll look at the steps you can take if we're still showing old, removed content in our search results, either in the form of a "snippet" or on the cached page that's linked to from the search result. Doing this makes sense when the old content contains sensitive information that needs to be removed quickly—it's not necessary to do this when you just update a website normally.

As an example, let's look at the following fictitious search result:

To change the content shown in the snippet (or on the linked cached page), you'll first need to change the content on the actual (live) page. Unless a page's publicly visible content is changed, Google's automatic processes will continue to show parts of the original content in our search results.

Once the page's content has been changed, there are several options available to make those changes visible in our search results:

1. Wait for Googlebot to re-crawl and re-index the page
   This is the natural method for how most content is updated at Google. Sometimes it can take a fairly long time, depending on how frequently Googlebot currently crawls the page in question. Once we've re-crawled and re-indexed the page, the old content will usually not be visible as it'll be replaced by the current content. Provided Googlebot is not blocked from crawling the page in question (either by robots.txt or by not being able to access the server properly), you don't have to do anything special for this to take place. It's generally not possible to speed up crawling and indexing, as these processes are fully automated and depend on many external factors.
2. Use Google's public URL removal tool to request removal of content that has been removed from someone else's webpage
   Using this tool, it's necessary to enter the exact URL of the page that has been modified, select the "Content has been removed from the page" option, and then specify one or more words that have been completely removed from that page.

   

   Note that none of the words you enter can appear on the page; even if a word has been removed from one part of the page, your request will be denied if that word still appears on another part of the page. Be sure to choose a word (or words) that no longer appear anywhere on the page. If, in the above example, you removed "top secret velocitus incalculii capturing device," you should submit those words and not something like "my project." However, if the word "top" or "device" still exists anywhere on the page, the request would be denied. To maximize your chances of success, it's often easiest to just enter one word that you're sure no longer appears anywhere on the page.

   Once your request has been processed and it's found that the submitted word(s) no longer appear on the page, the search result will no longer show a snippet, nor will the cached page be available. The title and the URL of the page will still be visible, and the entry may still appear in search results for searches related to the content that has been removed (such as searches for [velocitus incalculii]), even if those words no longer appear in the snippet. However, once the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed, the new snippet and cached page can be visible in our search results.

   Keep in mind that we will need to verify removal of the word(s) by viewing the page. If the page no longer exists and the server is returning a proper 404 or 410 HTTP result code, making us unable to view the page, you may be better off requesting removal of the page altogether.

3. Use Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool to request removal of information on a page from your website
   If you have access to the website in question and have verified ownership of it in Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the URL removal tool there (under Site Configuration > Crawler access) to request that the snippet and the cached page be removed until the page has been re-crawled. To use this tool, you only need to submit the exact URL of the page (you won't need to specify any removed words). Once your request has been processed, we'll remove the snippet and the cached page from search results. The title and the URL of the page will still be visible, and the page may also continue to rank in search results for queries related to content that has been removed. After the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed, the search result with an updated snippet and cached page (based on the new content) can be visible.

Google indexes and ranks items based not only on the content of a page, but also on other external factors, such as the inbound links to the URL. Because of this, it's possible for a URL to continue to appear in search results for content that no longer exists on the page, even after the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed. While the URL removal tool can remove the snippet and the cached page from a search result, it will not change or remove the title of the search result, change the URL that is shown, or prevent the page from being shown for searches based on any current or previous content. If this is important to you, you should make sure that the URL fulfills the requirements for a complete removal from our search results.

Removing non-HTML content

If the changed content is not in (X)HTML (for example if an image, a Flash file or a PDF file has been changed), you won't be able to use the cache removal tool. So if it's important that the old content no longer be visible in search results, the fastest solution would be to change the URL of the file so that the old URL returns a 404 HTTP result code and use the URL removal tool to remove the old URL. Otherwise, if you chose to allow Google to naturally refresh your information, know that previews of non-HTML content (such as Quick View links for PDF files) can take longer to update after recrawling than normal HTML pages would.

Proactively preventing the appearance of snippets or cached versions

As a webmaster, you have the option to use robots meta tags to proactively prevent the appearance of snippets or cached versions without using our removal tools. While we don't recommend this as a default approach (the snippet can help users recognize a relevant search result faster, and a cached page gives them the ability to view your content even in the unexpected event of your server not being available), you can use the "nosnippet" robots meta tag to prevent showing of a snippet, or the "noarchive" robots meta tag to disable caching of a page. Note that if this is changed on existing and known pages, Googlebot will need to re-crawl and re-index those pages before this change becomes visible in search results.

Source:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Now you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide Google with exactly this information. For each URL you list in your Sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap, you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

Adding images to your Sitemaps is easy. Simply follow the instructions in the Webmaster Tools Help Center or refer to the example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>

We index billions of images and see hundreds of millions of image-related queries each day. To take advantage of that traffic most effectively, take a moment to update your Sitemap file with information on the images from your site.

As of today, once we notice your site is infected, we’ll do our best to send an e-mail to the address you have associated with your account in Webmaster Tools. We believe malware is such an important issue for site owners that being quickly informed is beneficial to you and your website’s visitors.

In addition, we’ve promoted our Malware details feature out of Labs and placed it under Diagnostics. The malware data is now updated four times faster than before, we’ve updated our algorithms for identifying injected content, and we’re now able to identify exploits which we were unable to catch earlier.

We hope this allows you to stay up-to-date with any malware issues we detect on your site, and to fix them quickly.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that's why we've decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet.

Source:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets.

Recipes is the fifth format we support, following the introduction of reviews, people, video and, most recently, events.

If you have recipe content on your site, you can get started now by marking up your recipes with microdata, RDFa, or the hRecipe microformat. To learn more, read our documentation on how to mark up recipe information or our general help articles on rich snippets for a more complete overview.

Please remember that to ensure a great user experience we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that we can’t guarantee that marking up your site will result in a rich snippet when your page shows up on our search results. However, we encourage you to get started, and once you’re done you can test your pages with our rich snippets testing tool.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

It used to be that you could only see Top search queries data for your site's top 100 queries. We’ve significantly increased the number of queries we show. Now if your site ranks for more than 100 queries, you’ll see new pagination buttons at the bottom of the Top Search Queries table allowing you to page through a much larger sampling of the queries that return your site in search results.

Previously, if you wanted to visualize your Top search queries data you could download your site's data and generate your own charts. To save you some time and effort, we're now generating a chart for you, and displaying it right within the page.

The Top search queries chart includes a date range selector similar to what Google Analytics offers. So now if you really want to see what your site's top search queries were for a particular week in the past, you can see the data for just that slice in time.

Finally, for sites that have numerous keywords that change frequently, we’ve added the ability to search through your site’s top search queries so that you can filter the data to exactly what you’re looking for in your query haystack.

We hope you enjoy these updates to the Top search queries feature and that it's even more useful for understanding how your site appears and performs in our search results.

Source:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Now Internet Explorer, specifically IE6, is under fire again after a critical IE vulnerability was implicated for the attack on Google’s infrastructure by Chinese hackers. While IE6 criticism is not a new phenomenon, last week’s events give those of us who advocate for the abolition of IE6 (myself included) new ammunition.

Whether you work for a company that won’t get rid of IE6 or have parents that just don’t see the need to ugprade, here are five new reasons to upgrade or switch browsers:

1. Your security and your company’s security are at risk: There’s no other way to lay it out: if the security of Google, Yahoo, and around 20 other companies were compromised due to people still running IE6, then your security is at risk too. Upgrading after a hacker uses this exploit to steal your information is simply too late, especially if you hold sensitive customer data.

2. World governments are suggesting you switch browsers: Both Germany and France have issued warnings about Internet Explorer, asking citizens to switch to prevent the same type of breach that affected Google.

3. Even Microsoft wants you to drop IE6: The Microsoft Security Research & Defense Blog specifically addressed the flaw and the risk of attack by platform. The most important part of the post was that they “recommend users of IE6 on Windows XP upgrade to a new version of Internet Explorer and/or enable DEP.”

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has asked people to voluntarily upgrade, but it is the first time that it’s been in response to an exploit or vulnerability. Think of it like a recall: would you keep driving a car that Toyota, Ford, or GM says could malfunction? Don’t make the same mistake with your computer’s security.

4. Not wanting to upgrade from Windows XP isn’t a legitimate excuse anymore: One way to delete IE6 is to upgrade your OS — both Windows Vista and Windows  7 run upgraded versions of the IE browser.

We understood why people didn’t want to upgrade when their choice was Windows Vista, but now that a very stable, solid, and secure upgrade is on the market (Windows 7), there’s no excuse not to upgrade. Yes, it’ll cost you up front, but it’s far cheaper than having your data stolen.

5. This will not be the last massive IE6 security breach: This flaw was unknown before Google’s groundbreaking China announcement. And it’s not the first flaw ever found with the browser — there are at least 142 vulnerabilities in IE6, 22 of which are nt yet patched. Would you use armor that had 142 weak spots?

Source:  http://mashable.com/2009/07/16/ie6-must-die

"Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy," an anonymous source told BusinessWeek. "Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle." Apple is also working on ways to manage ad placement on its mobile devices, a move that would encroach on Google's ad-serving business, the person says.

The deal would not only mean more exposure for the fledgling Bing search engine but also a potential for greater ad revenue. According to mobile advertising company AdMob, the majority of mobile advertising today is viewed on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, and being able to have its ads show up by default when iPhone and iPod Touch users search the Internet could bring in millions of dollars.

However, the deal would not be without danger. ZDNet.com blogger Garrett Rogers notes that Apple runs the risk of alienating their users by switching to a less-popular search engine, a move that could backfire and drive customers to Google-enabled phones.

Source:  http://tutorialblog.itcrate.net/wp-admin/post-new.php

Fast Flip is designed to let Web surfers "flip" through multiple pages of content at once, theoretically making it easier to browse through a publisher's site and find interesting material. While Fast Flip is still only available in Google Labs, the service has evidentially been successful enough that publishers are interested in experimenting with it.

Newspapers are continuing to search for ways to generate revenue from online content, and Google is touting Fast Flip as a potential answer. Google has said that the "majority" of revenue generated by Fast Flip will go back to publishers but has not given specifics.

"Readers of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and the rest of our newspaper brands operate in a multimedia universe, and our goal is to ensure our content is available on the platforms they choose," Marc Chase, president of Tribune Co.'s interactive division, told the Los Angeles Times. "We're always looking for new technologies to help us reach an even wider audience."

Source:  http://www.submitexpress.com/news/shownews.php?article=1389

Among other features is the ability to display language and set the toolkit tabs to open or close by default. Google has also expanded the dictionary tab to include parts of speech and alternate definitions.

"For example, if you're translating the word cancer into Chinese you will find alternate translations for cancer as a disease and cancer as a quickly-spreading danger so you can find just the right word for your translation," said Kartik Singh, software engineer at Google.

Source:  http://www.submitexpress.com/news/shownews.php?article=1400