Limited Pilot, an integration between Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

There has always been a concern about webmasters about choosing which Google services to use regarding visitors/users - Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools.

The answer to above concern, for many webmasters is both. The data in Google Analytics is about what happens after a user chooses to visit your site; whereas, Webmaster Tools reports are more focused on data from before the user makes that choice.

Google has now integrated Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, via a limited pilot, for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search Queries data from Webmaster Tools.

This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.

In addition to including Search Queries data found in Webmaster Tools, these Search Engine Optimization reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.

NOTE

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports, you should sign up for the pilot and you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator. Each additional user who would like to view them also needs to individually sign up for the pilot.

The sign up sheet for the pilot is closed for now.

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How is Schema.org relevant to you as a webmaster

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo & BING) has created a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.

The main aim of Schema.org is to help search engines better understand the websites.

"Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!"

Example of a rich snippet: a search result enhanced by structured markup. In this case, the rich snippet contains a picture, reviews, and cook time for the recipe.

With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.

Details on Schema.org

1) Schema.org contains a lot of new markup types.
There are more than 100 new types as well as ported over all of the existing rich snippets types. If you’ve looked at adding rich snippets markup before but none of the existing types were relevant for your site, it’s worth taking another look. Here are a few popular types:

•     Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
•     Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
•     Event
•     Organization
•     Person
•     Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
•     Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
•     Review, AggregateRating

Or, view a full list of all schema.org types. The new markup types may be used for future rich snippets formats as well as other types of improvements to help people find your content more easily when searching.

2) Schema.org uses microdata.
Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.

3) Existing rich snippets markup formats are still supported.
If you’ve already done markup on your pages using microformats or RDFa, we’ll continue to support it. One caveat to watch out for: while it’s OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers.

4) Test your markup using the rich snippets testing tool.
It’s very useful to test your web pages with markup to make sure we’re able to parse the data correctly. As with previous rich snippets markup formats, you should use the rich snippets testing tool for this purpose. Note that while the testing tool will show the marked up information that was parsed from the page, rich snippets previews are not yet shown for schema.org markup. We’ll be adding this functionality soon.

Suggested Reading:

• Check Schema.org website for more details
• To learn more about rich snippets and how they relate to schema.org, check out the Rich snippets schema.org FAQ. 
• To get an overview of microdata as well as the conventions followed by schema.org, take a look at the schema.org Getting Started guide.

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How to add Google +1 Button to your website

Google +1 is about getting recommendations from the people you trust. 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. The search results can then be more helpful.

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.

From the Google Blog -

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.

Reference Link
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/add-1-to-help-your-site-stand-out.html

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G.Co, Google’s Official URL Shortcut Just For Google Websites

Google joins the internet biggies Twitter (T.Co) , Overstock (O.co) and Amazon (A.Co, Z.Co and K.Co) today in taking over the G.Co domain name.

G.CO, the new URL shortcut will only link to official Google products and services like GMail, Documents and Photos. Whenever you see a short "g.co" link, you can trust that it will always take you to a Google product or service.

The public URL shortener, goo.gl is available to shorten up URLs across the web.

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New Instant Preview Tool In The Labs Section Of Webmaster Tools

Google launched 'Instant Previews' in Webmasters Tools last year to help users better understand if a particular result was relevant for a their search query.

Since launch, the Instant Previews team has been keeping an eye on common complaints and problems related to how pages are rendered for Instant Previews.

When we see issues with preview images, they are frequently due to:

• Blocked resources due to a robots.txt entry
• Cloaking: Erroneous content being served to the Googlebot user-agent
• Poor alternative content when Flash is unavailable

To overcome these problems, Google has a new Instant Preview tool in the Labs section of Webmaster Tools.

Here, you can input the URL of any page on your site, then the 'Instant Preview' tool will fetch the page from your site and try to render it both as it would display in Chrome and through our Instant Preview renderer.

Google says -

"Please keep in mind that both of these renders are done using a recent build of Webkit which does not include plugins such as Flash or Silverlight, so it's important to consider the value of providing alternative content for these situations. Alternative content can be helpful to search engines, and visitors to your site without the plugin would benefit as well.

Below the renders, you’ll also see automated feedback on problems our system can detect such as missing or roboted resources."

For further queries and feedback check Webmaster Forum

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New Inbox Styles from Gmail

Gmail now comes with new inbox styles to help you manage your mail in the way that works best for you - Classic, Priority Inbox, Important first, Unread first & Starred first.

• Classic - This is the default inbox style most people are used to. In the Classic inbox, messages are ordered chronologically, with your most recent email at the top.
• Priority Inbox - Important and unread messages appear at the top of your inbox, then starred messages, then everything else. Each section can be customized further, so you can create your own inbox style.
• Important first - This style puts important mail at the top of the page (both read and unread messages). Everything else is in its own section at the bottom of your inbox. You may have noticed that we turned on importance arrows for everyone a few weeks ago; this inbox style separates messages with these arrows from those without.
• Unread first - Simple: unread mail at the top; everything else at the bottom.
• Starred first - Starred messages at the top; everything else at the bottom.

After you've settled on a style you like and used it for about a week, these tabs will go away, You can always change your inbox style from the drop down menu next to the Inbox label or from the Settings page.

Haven't tried yet. Think again.

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Remove Unwanted Or Old URLs Easily From Google Search

There is always the need to updated the web-pages, and remove those which are no longer required from Google search index.

Previously, in order to remove the URL, the webpage's URL must first be blocked by a site owner before the page can be removed from Google's search results.

As you have already verified the ownership of your site in the Webmasters Tools, the above mentioned requirement can be eliminated, 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 “URL removal explained”

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Webmaster Tools Site Verifcation Plugin For Wordpress

For webmasters with self-hosted WordPress blogs, there’s now a Webmaster Tools site verification plugin for Wordpress that completely automates our verification process! You can install it directly from the “Install Plugins” control panel built into your WordPress blog, or you can download the ZIP file from the WordPress plugin site. This plugin can only be used by self-hosted WordPress blogs; it can’t be installed on blogs hosted on wordpress.com.

With verified ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools, you can receive specific statistics and information (e.g. relevant search queries, malware notices) about your site directly from Google.


Ref Link: WordPress Plugin for Webmaster Tools verification

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Now Google Provides Faster Verification Process for Websites

Verifying the website in Google Webmasters Tools has always been clumsy, but there was no other go rather to follow the process for website verification.

In order to overcome that, Google has implemented several major improvements to make the Google Site Verification process faster, more straightforward, and perhaps even a pleasure to use—so you can get on with the tasks that matter to you.




New verification method recommendations

You can quickly observe the changes we’ve made to the verification page, namely the new tabbed interface. These tabs allow us to give greater visibility to the verification method that we think will be most useful to you, which is listed in the Recommended Method tab.

This is convenient though not necessarily work for your website. If this is the case, simply click the "Alternate methods" tab to see the other verification methods that are available. Verifying with an alternate method is just as powerful as verifying with a recommended method.

New Google Sites Are Automatically Verified

Google Sites administrators are now automatically verified for all new sites that they create. When you create a new Google Site, it’ll appear verified in the details page. The same goes for adding or removing owners: when you edit the owners list in your Google Site's settings, the changes will automatically appear in Webmaster Tools.

One thing to note is that Google is unable to automatically verify preexisting Google Sites at this time. If you’d like to verify your older Google Sites, please continue to use the meta tag method already available.

We hope these enhancements help get you through security even faster. For more queries and any questions, feel free to check out Google's Webmaster Help Forums.

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Google Redesigns Gmail

Google has redesigned Gmail, which was launched in the year 2004 and remained in beta version till 2009. The new redesign is not the only thing Google is embarking on, rather it's a series of interface updates to help strip out unnecessary clutter and make Gmail as beautiful as it is powerful.




What's New ?

As per Google Blog -

To start things off, Gmail has two new themes for you to try out as a sort of sneak peek. There is a "Preview” and “Preview (Dense)” themes in the Themes tab in Gmail Settings. The idea of two themes is to accommodate different screen sizes and user preferences, but until then you can pick the information density that you prefer.

Here’s what one of the new themes currently looks like:

And in conversation view:

 

Look out for these and other new features over the next few months. In the meantime, try out the new themes as a preview of the future of Gmail and you can send your feedback to Google about your experience with the new look of Gmail.

Reference Link: A Preview of  Gmail's New Look

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