Création des Logiciels de gestion d'Entreprise, Création et référencement des sites web, Réseaux et Maintenance, Conception
from web contents: Let's make the mobile web faster 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: (Cross-posted on the Google Code Blog)
This week, we've been celebrating all things mobile across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to make the web faster. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our Make the mobile web faster article.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
This week, we've been celebrating all things mobile across Google. Of course, this wouldn't be complete without a component for mobile web developers! Two months ago we asked you to make the web faster. Now, we've asked the Google Mobile team for some best practices, tips, and resources for mobile web development, and we've come up with a few things we wanted to share. "Go Mobile!" with our Make the mobile web faster article.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Let visitors recommend your content 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Webmaster Level: All
We recently posted about some of the engaging gadgets you can add to your site with Google Friend Connect. Here's one more that may be of interest if you're looking for another way to get feedback from your site's visitors:
The new Recommendation gadgets make it easy for your visitors to let you and the world know which parts of your site they like best. By placing recommendation buttons next to photos, articles or other content, visitors can recommend specific items to others with the click of a button. Your most popular items will surface to the top of the recommendation list.
To install a recommendation gadget on your site, or to check out the other gadgets that are available, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comWe recently posted about some of the engaging gadgets you can add to your site with Google Friend Connect. Here's one more that may be of interest if you're looking for another way to get feedback from your site's visitors:
The new Recommendation gadgets make it easy for your visitors to let you and the world know which parts of your site they like best. By placing recommendation buttons next to photos, articles or other content, visitors can recommend specific items to others with the click of a button. Your most popular items will surface to the top of the recommendation list.
To install a recommendation gadget on your site, or to check out the other gadgets that are available, please visit www.google.com/friendconnect.
from web contents: Managing your reputation through search results 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: (Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)
A few years ago I couldn't wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah; but more importantly, so that I could take my husband's name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.
After a few years of working here, though, I've learned that you don't have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results. Below are some tips for "reputation management": influencing how you're perceived online, and what information is available relating to you.
Think twice
The first step in reputation management is preemptive: Think twice before putting your personal information online. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you're publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don't normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don't assume that just because your mom doesn't read your blog, she'll never see that post about the new tattoo you're hiding from her.
Tackle it at the source
If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to try to remove it from the site where it's appearing. Rather than immediately contacting Google, it's important to first remove it from the site where it's being published. Google doesn't own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what's already out there on the web. Whether or not the content appears in Google's search results, people are still going to be able to access it — on the original site, through other search engines, through social networking sites, etc. — if you don't remove it from the original site. You need to tackle this at the source.
Proactively publish information
Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site's webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
A few years ago I couldn't wait to get married. Because I was in love, yeah; but more importantly, so that I could take my husband's name and people would stop getting that ridiculous picture from college as a top result when they searched for me on Google.
After a few years of working here, though, I've learned that you don't have to change your name just because it brings up some embarrassing search results. Below are some tips for "reputation management": influencing how you're perceived online, and what information is available relating to you.
Think twice
The first step in reputation management is preemptive: Think twice before putting your personal information online. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you're publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don't normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don't assume that just because your mom doesn't read your blog, she'll never see that post about the new tattoo you're hiding from her.
Tackle it at the source
If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to try to remove it from the site where it's appearing. Rather than immediately contacting Google, it's important to first remove it from the site where it's being published. Google doesn't own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what's already out there on the web. Whether or not the content appears in Google's search results, people are still going to be able to access it — on the original site, through other search engines, through social networking sites, etc. — if you don't remove it from the original site. You need to tackle this at the source.
- If the content in question is on a site you own, easy — just remove it. It will naturally drop out of search results after we recrawl the page and discover the change.
- It's also often easy to remove content from sites you don't own if you put it there, such as photos you've uploaded, or content on your profile page.
- If you can't remove something yourself, you can contact the site's webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.
Proactively publish information
Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site's webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can't get the content removed from the original site, you probably won't be able to completely remove it from Google's search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
You can publish or encourage positive content in a variety of ways:
- Create a Google profile. When people search for your name, Google can display a link to your Google profile in our search results and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.
- If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
- If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
- If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we've gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Video Tutorial: Google for Webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
We're always looking for new ways to help educate our fellow webmasters. While you may already be familiar with Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Help Discussion Groups, this blog, and our Help Center, we've added another tutorial to help you understand how Google works. Hence we've made this video of a soon-to-come presentation titled "Google for Webmasters." This video will introduce how Google discovers, crawls, indexes your site's pages, and how Google displays them in search results. It also touches lightly upon challenges webmasters and search engines face, such as duplicate content, and the effective indexing of Flash and AJAX content. Lastly, it also talks about the benefits of offerings Webmaster Central and other useful Google products.
Take a look for yourself.
Discoverability:
Accessibility - Crawling and Indexing:
Ranking:
Webmaster Central Overview:
Other Resources:
Google Presentations Version:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx
Important links from this presentation as they chronologically appear in the video:
Add your URL to Google
Help Center: Sitemaps
Sitemaps.org
Robots.txt
Meta tags
Best uses of Flash
Best uses of Ajax
Duplicate content
Google's Technology
Google's History
PigeonRank
Help Center: Link Schemes
Help Center: Cloaking
Webmaster Guidelines
Webmaster Central
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Alerts
More Google Products
Special thanks to Wysz, Chark, and Alissa for the voices.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comTake a look for yourself.
Discoverability:
Accessibility - Crawling and Indexing:
Ranking:
Webmaster Central Overview:
Other Resources:
Google Presentations Version:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx
Important links from this presentation as they chronologically appear in the video:
Add your URL to Google
Help Center: Sitemaps
Sitemaps.org
Robots.txt
Meta tags
Best uses of Flash
Best uses of Ajax
Duplicate content
Google's Technology
Google's History
PigeonRank
Help Center: Link Schemes
Help Center: Cloaking
Webmaster Guidelines
Webmaster Central
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Alerts
More Google Products
Special thanks to Wysz, Chark, and Alissa for the voices.
from web contents: Adding a social playlist to your site 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
As you're building your site, you may be looking for a simple way to provide fresh content that captures the attention of first time visitors and loyal users alike. They say that music brings people together, so what better way to engage your visitors than by inviting them to help build a unique, collaborative soundtrack for your website? Now, social application creator iLike has built a special version of their social playlist gadget for sites using Google Friend Connect.
Visitors can add their favorite songs
iLike's playlist gadget lets you and your visitors shape the site's "musical footprint" as a group. With this application, anyone visiting your website can listen to songs on the playlist, and if they sign in using Friend Connect, they can add their own favorites to the list. Of course, you can also add songs to the playlist, and as the site administrator, you have the ability to remove songs or change the order.
If you already have Friend Connect running on your website, you can add some musical flair in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. Sign in at www.google.com/friendconnect, click "Social Gadgets," and you'll find the iLike "Playlist gadget" in the gallery.
Select the "Playlist gadget," and Friend Connect will automatically generate a snippet of code for you to copy-and-paste into your website's HTML. While you're there, you may also consider adding the "Wall gadget"—music can be a great conversation starter!
This iLike gadget is fully integrated with your existing Friend Connect account, so you can edit your website's playlist, moderate wall posts, and manage membership all from a single interface.
Like all of the social applications that work with Friend Connect, iLike's application is built using OpenSocial, and it's a great example of how a social application can foster a sense of community around a website. Any site using Friend Connect can host gadgets created by the OpenSocial developer community.
If you're a site owner who wants to begin adding social features to your website, visit Google Friend Connect. No programming is required!
If you're a developer interested in building a social application to run on the tens thousands of websites that are now using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.opensocial.org.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comVisitors can add their favorite songs
iLike's playlist gadget lets you and your visitors shape the site's "musical footprint" as a group. With this application, anyone visiting your website can listen to songs on the playlist, and if they sign in using Friend Connect, they can add their own favorites to the list. Of course, you can also add songs to the playlist, and as the site administrator, you have the ability to remove songs or change the order.
If you already have Friend Connect running on your website, you can add some musical flair in a matter of minutes with just a few clicks. Sign in at www.google.com/friendconnect, click "Social Gadgets," and you'll find the iLike "Playlist gadget" in the gallery.
Select the "Playlist gadget," and Friend Connect will automatically generate a snippet of code for you to copy-and-paste into your website's HTML. While you're there, you may also consider adding the "Wall gadget"—music can be a great conversation starter!
This iLike gadget is fully integrated with your existing Friend Connect account, so you can edit your website's playlist, moderate wall posts, and manage membership all from a single interface.
Like all of the social applications that work with Friend Connect, iLike's application is built using OpenSocial, and it's a great example of how a social application can foster a sense of community around a website. Any site using Friend Connect can host gadgets created by the OpenSocial developer community.
If you're a site owner who wants to begin adding social features to your website, visit Google Friend Connect. No programming is required!
If you're a developer interested in building a social application to run on the tens thousands of websites that are now using Google Friend Connect, learn more at www.opensocial.org.
from web contents: Tips for getting help with your site 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: All
As a search company, we at Google try to develop scalable solutions to problems. In fact, Webmaster Tools was born out of this instinct: rather than fighting the losing battle of trying to respond to questions via email (and in multiple languages!), we developed an automated, scalable product that gives webmasters like you information about your sites and lets you handle many requests yourself. Now you can streamline the crawling of your site, improve your sitelinks, or clean up after a malware attack all on your own.
Of course, our Help Forum still gets hundreds of questions from site owners every week — everything from "Why isn't my site in Google?" to very specific questions about a particular API call or a typo in our documentation. When we see patterns—such as a string of questions about one particular topic—we continue to use that information in scalable ways, such as to help us decide which parts of the product need work, or what new features we should develop. But we also still answer a lot of individual questions in our forum, on our blog, and at industry events. However, we can't answer them all.
So how do we decide which questions to tackle? We have a few guiding principles that help us make the most of the time we spend in places like our forum. We believe that there are many areas in which Google’s interests and site owners’ interests overlap, and we’re most motivated by questions that fall into these areas. We want to improve our search results, and improve the Internet; if we can help you make your site faster, safer, more compelling, or more accessible, that’s good for both of us, and for Internet users at large. We want to help as many people at a time as we can, so we like questions that are relevant to more than just one person, and we like to answer them publicly. We want to add value with the time we spend, so we prefer questions where we can provide more insight than the average person, rather than just regurgitating what’s already written in our Help Center.
The reason I tell you all this is because you can greatly increase your chances of getting an answer if you make it clear how your question helps us meet these goals. Here are some tips for increasing the likelihood that someone will answer your question:
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
As a search company, we at Google try to develop scalable solutions to problems. In fact, Webmaster Tools was born out of this instinct: rather than fighting the losing battle of trying to respond to questions via email (and in multiple languages!), we developed an automated, scalable product that gives webmasters like you information about your sites and lets you handle many requests yourself. Now you can streamline the crawling of your site, improve your sitelinks, or clean up after a malware attack all on your own.
Of course, our Help Forum still gets hundreds of questions from site owners every week — everything from "Why isn't my site in Google?" to very specific questions about a particular API call or a typo in our documentation. When we see patterns—such as a string of questions about one particular topic—we continue to use that information in scalable ways, such as to help us decide which parts of the product need work, or what new features we should develop. But we also still answer a lot of individual questions in our forum, on our blog, and at industry events. However, we can't answer them all.
So how do we decide which questions to tackle? We have a few guiding principles that help us make the most of the time we spend in places like our forum. We believe that there are many areas in which Google’s interests and site owners’ interests overlap, and we’re most motivated by questions that fall into these areas. We want to improve our search results, and improve the Internet; if we can help you make your site faster, safer, more compelling, or more accessible, that’s good for both of us, and for Internet users at large. We want to help as many people at a time as we can, so we like questions that are relevant to more than just one person, and we like to answer them publicly. We want to add value with the time we spend, so we prefer questions where we can provide more insight than the average person, rather than just regurgitating what’s already written in our Help Center.
The reason I tell you all this is because you can greatly increase your chances of getting an answer if you make it clear how your question helps us meet these goals. Here are some tips for increasing the likelihood that someone will answer your question:
- Ask in public.
If you post your question in our forum, the whole world gets to see the answer. Then when Betty has the same question a week later, she benefits because she can find the answer instantly in our forum, and I benefit because it saves me from having to answer the same question twice (or ten times, or fifty times, or...). We have a very strong preference for answering questions publicly (in a forum, on a blog, at a conference, in a video...) so that many people can benefit from the answer. - Do your homework.
We put a lot of effort into writing articles, blog posts and FAQs to help people learn about search and site-building, and we strongly encourage you to search our Help Center, blog and/or forum for answers before asking a question. You may find an answer on the spot. If you don’t, when you post your question be sure to indicate what resources you’ve already read and why they didn’t meet your needs: for example, “I read the Help Center article on affiliate websites but I’m still not sure whether this particular affiliate page on my site has enough added value; can I get some feedback?” This shows that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves everyone from reiterating the obvious solutions if you’ve already ruled those out, and it will help get you a more specific and relevant answer. It can also help us improve our documentation if something’s missing. - Be specific.
If you ask a vague question, you’re likely to get a vague answer. The more details and context you can give, the more able someone will be to give you a relevant, personalized answer. For example, “Why was my URL removal request denied?” is likely to get you a link to this article, as removals can be denied for a variety of reasons. However, if you say what type of removal you requested, what denial reason you got, and/or the URL in question, you’re more likely to get personalized advice on what went wrong in your case and what you can do differently. - Make it relevant to others.
As I said earlier, we like to help as many people at a time as we can. If you make it clear how your question is relevant to more people than just you, we’ll have more incentive to look into it. For example: “How can site owners get their videos into Google Video search? In particular, I’m asking about the videos on www.example.com.” - Let us know if you’ve found a bug.
As above, the more specific you can be, the better. What happened? What page or URL were you on? If it’s in Webmaster Tools, what site were you managing? Do you have a screenshot? All of these things help us track down the issue sooner. We appreciate your feedback, but if it’s too vague we won’t understand what you’re trying to tell us! - Stay on-topic.
Have a question about Google Analytics? iGoogle? Google Apps? That’s great; go ask it in the Analytics / iGoogle / Apps forum. Not every Googler is familiar with every product Google offers, so you probably won’t get an answer if you’re asking a Webmaster Central team member about something other than Web Search or Webmaster Tools. - Stay calm.
Trust me, we’ve heard it all. Making threats, being aggressive or accusatory, YELLING IN ALL CAPS, asking for “heeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp!!!!!1!!,” or claiming Google is involved in a mass conspiracy against you & your associates because your sites aren’t ranked on page one... Rather than making others want to help you, these things are likely to turn people off. The best way to get someone to help is by calmly explaining the situation, giving details, and being clear about what you’re asking for. - Listen, even when it’s not what you wanted to hear.
The answer to your question may not always be the one you wanted; but that doesn’t mean that answer isn’t correct. There are many areas of SEO and website design that are as much an art as a science, so a conclusive answer isn’t always possible. When in doubt, feel free to ask people to cite their sources, or to explain how/where they learned something. But keep an open mind and remember that most people are just trying to help, even if they don’t agree with you or tell you what you wanted to hear.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Specifying an image's license using RDFa 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: All
We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.
If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
We recently introduced a new feature on Google Image Search which allows you to restrict your search results to images that have been tagged for free reuse. As a webmaster, you may be interested in how you can let Google know which licenses your images are released under, so I've prepared a brief video explaining how to do this using RDFa markup.
If you have any questions about how to mark up your images, please ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Seamless verification of Google Sites and Blogger with Webmaster Tools 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Verifying that you own a site is the first step towards accessing all of the great features Webmaster Tools has to offer, such as crawl errors and query statistics. The Google Sites and Blogger teams have worked hard to make site verification as simple as possible. In the following videos, I'll walk you through how to verify sites created in Google Sites and Blogger.
Google Sites:
Blogger:
These videos are available in our Help Center if you have additional questions about verifying a Google Site or Blogger blog with Webmaster Tools. And as always, you can find me and many other Googlers and webmasters in our Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Note: Verification of Blogger blogs in Webmaster Tools has changed significantly. Please see the more recent blog post "Verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools" for more details.
Verifying that you own a site is the first step towards accessing all of the great features Webmaster Tools has to offer, such as crawl errors and query statistics. The Google Sites and Blogger teams have worked hard to make site verification as simple as possible. In the following videos, I'll walk you through how to verify sites created in Google Sites and Blogger.
Google Sites:
Blogger:
These videos are available in our Help Center if you have additional questions about verifying a Google Site or Blogger blog with Webmaster Tools. And as always, you can find me and many other Googlers and webmasters in our Webmaster Help Forum.
from web contents: Badware alerts for your sites 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
As part of our efforts to protect users, we have been warning people using Google search before they visit sites that have been determined to distribute badware under the guidelines published by StopBadware. Warning users is only part of the solution, though; the real win comes from helping webmasters protect their own users by alerting them when their sites have been flagged for badware -- and working with them to remove the threats.
It's my pleasure to introduce badware alerts in Google webmaster tools. You can see on the Diagnostic Summary tab if your site has been determined to distribute badware and can access information to help you correct this.
If your site has been flagged and you believe you've since removed the threats, go to http://stopbadware.org/home/review to request a review. If that's successful, your site will no longer be flagged -- and your users will be safer as a result of your diligence.
This version is only the beginning: we plan to continue to provide more data to help webmasters diagnose issues on their sites. We realize that in many cases, badware distribution is unintentional and the result of being hacked or running ads which lead directly to pages with browser exploits. Stay tuned for improvements to this feature and others on webmaster tools.
Update: this post has been updated to provide a link to the new form for requesting a review.
Update: More information is available in our Help Center article on malware and hacked sites.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comIt's my pleasure to introduce badware alerts in Google webmaster tools. You can see on the Diagnostic Summary tab if your site has been determined to distribute badware and can access information to help you correct this.
If your site has been flagged and you believe you've since removed the threats, go to http://stopbadware.org/home/review to request a review. If that's successful, your site will no longer be flagged -- and your users will be safer as a result of your diligence.This version is only the beginning: we plan to continue to provide more data to help webmasters diagnose issues on their sites. We realize that in many cases, badware distribution is unintentional and the result of being hacked or running ads which lead directly to pages with browser exploits. Stay tuned for improvements to this feature and others on webmaster tools.
Update: this post has been updated to provide a link to the new form for requesting a review.
Update: More information is available in our Help Center article on malware and hacked sites.
from web contents: Answering the top questions from government webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster level: Beginner - Intermediate
Government sites, from city to state to federal agencies, are extremely important to Google Search. For one thing, governments have a lot of content — and government websites are often the canonical source of information that’s important to citizens. Around 20 percent of Google searches are for local information, and local governments are experts in their communities.
That’s why I’ve spoken at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) national conference for the past few years. It’s always interesting speaking to webmasters about search, but the people running government websites have particular concerns and questions. Since some questions come up frequently I thought I’d share this FAQ for government websites.
Question 1: How do I fix an incorrect phone number or address in search results or Google Maps?
Although managing their agency’s site is plenty of work, government webmasters are often called upon to fix problems found elsewhere on the web too. By far the most common question I’ve taken is about fixing addresses and phone numbers in search results. In this case, government site owners really can do it themselves, by claiming their Google+ Local listing. Incorrect or missing phone numbers, addresses, and other information can be fixed by claiming the listing.
Most locations in Google Maps have a Google+ Local listing — businesses, offices, parks, landmarks, etc. I like to use the San Francisco Main Library as an example: it has contact info, detailed information like the hours they’re open, user reviews and fun extras like photos. When we think users are searching for libraries in San Francisco, we may display a map and a listing so they can find the library as quickly as possible.
If you work for a government agency and want to claim a listing, we recommend using a shared Google Account with an email address at your .gov domain if possible. Usually, ownership of the page is confirmed via a phone call or post card.
Question 2: I’ve claimed the listing for our office, but I have 43 different city parks to claim in Google Maps, and none of them have phones or mailboxes. How do I claim them?
Use the bulk uploader! If you have 10 or more listings / addresses to claim at the same time, you can upload a specially-formatted spreadsheet. Go to www.google.com/places/, click the "Get started now" button, and then look for the "bulk upload" link.
If you run into any issues, use the Verification Troubleshooter.
Question 3: We're moving from a .gov domain to a new .com domain. How should we move the site?
We have a Help Center article with more details, but the basic process involves the following steps:
In that case, many of the same steps apply: verify both sites in Webmaster Tools, use 301 redirects, clean up old links, etc. In this case you don't need to use the Change of Address form in Webmaster Tools since only part of your site is moving. If for some reason you’ll have some of the same content on both sites, you may want to include a cross-domain canonical link pointing to the preferred domain.
Question 4: We've done a ton of work to create unique titles and descriptions for pages. How do we get Google to pick them up?
First off, that's great! Better titles and descriptions help users decide to click through to get the information they need on your page. The government webmasters I’ve spoken with care a lot about the content and organization of their sites, and work hard to provide informative text for users.
Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Changes are picked up as we recrawl your site. But you can do two things to let us know about URLs that have changed:
Question 5: How do I get into the YouTube government partner program?
For this question, I have bad news, good news, and then even better news. On the one hand, the government partner program has been discontinued. But don’t worry, because most of the features of the program are now available to your regular YouTube account. For example, you can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes.
Did I say I had even better news? YouTube has added a lot of functionality useful for governments in the past year:
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Government sites, from city to state to federal agencies, are extremely important to Google Search. For one thing, governments have a lot of content — and government websites are often the canonical source of information that’s important to citizens. Around 20 percent of Google searches are for local information, and local governments are experts in their communities.
That’s why I’ve spoken at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) national conference for the past few years. It’s always interesting speaking to webmasters about search, but the people running government websites have particular concerns and questions. Since some questions come up frequently I thought I’d share this FAQ for government websites.
Question 1: How do I fix an incorrect phone number or address in search results or Google Maps?
Although managing their agency’s site is plenty of work, government webmasters are often called upon to fix problems found elsewhere on the web too. By far the most common question I’ve taken is about fixing addresses and phone numbers in search results. In this case, government site owners really can do it themselves, by claiming their Google+ Local listing. Incorrect or missing phone numbers, addresses, and other information can be fixed by claiming the listing.
Most locations in Google Maps have a Google+ Local listing — businesses, offices, parks, landmarks, etc. I like to use the San Francisco Main Library as an example: it has contact info, detailed information like the hours they’re open, user reviews and fun extras like photos. When we think users are searching for libraries in San Francisco, we may display a map and a listing so they can find the library as quickly as possible.
If you work for a government agency and want to claim a listing, we recommend using a shared Google Account with an email address at your .gov domain if possible. Usually, ownership of the page is confirmed via a phone call or post card.
Question 2: I’ve claimed the listing for our office, but I have 43 different city parks to claim in Google Maps, and none of them have phones or mailboxes. How do I claim them?
Use the bulk uploader! If you have 10 or more listings / addresses to claim at the same time, you can upload a specially-formatted spreadsheet. Go to www.google.com/places/, click the "Get started now" button, and then look for the "bulk upload" link.
If you run into any issues, use the Verification Troubleshooter.
Question 3: We're moving from a .gov domain to a new .com domain. How should we move the site?
We have a Help Center article with more details, but the basic process involves the following steps:
- 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.
In that case, many of the same steps apply: verify both sites in Webmaster Tools, use 301 redirects, clean up old links, etc. In this case you don't need to use the Change of Address form in Webmaster Tools since only part of your site is moving. If for some reason you’ll have some of the same content on both sites, you may want to include a cross-domain canonical link pointing to the preferred domain.
Question 4: We've done a ton of work to create unique titles and descriptions for pages. How do we get Google to pick them up?
First off, that's great! Better titles and descriptions help users decide to click through to get the information they need on your page. The government webmasters I’ve spoken with care a lot about the content and organization of their sites, and work hard to provide informative text for users.
Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Changes are picked up as we recrawl your site. But you can do two things to let us know about URLs that have changed:
- 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.
Question 5: How do I get into the YouTube government partner program?
For this question, I have bad news, good news, and then even better news. On the one hand, the government partner program has been discontinued. But don’t worry, because most of the features of the program are now available to your regular YouTube account. For example, you can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes.
Did I say I had even better news? YouTube has added a lot of functionality useful for governments in the past year:
- 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.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: FYI on Google Toolbar's latest features 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Are you curious already? Download the Google Toolbar for your browser and give it a try on your site!
To discuss how this feature can help visitors to your site, jump in to our Google Webmaster Help Group; or for general Google Toolbar questions, try the Toolbar group for Internet Explorer or the Toolbar group for Firefox.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
The latest version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer (beta) just added a neat feature to help users arrive at your website, or at least see your content, even when things go awry.
It's frustrating for your users to mistype your URL and receive a generic "404 - Not Found" or try to access a part of your site that might be down.
Regardless of your site being useful and information-rich, when these issues arise, most users just move on to something else. The latest release of Google Toolbar, however, helps users by detecting site issues and providing alternatives.
Website Optimizer or Website Optimiser? The Toolbar can help you find it even if you try "google.cmo" instead of "google.com".
3 site issues detected by Google Toolbar
- 404 errors with default error pages
When a visitor tries to reach your content with an invalid URL and your server returns a short, default error message (less than 512 bytes), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate URL to the visitor. If this is a general problem in your website, you will see these URLs also listed in the crawl errors section of your Webmaster Tools account.
If you choose to set up a custom error page, make sure it returns result code 404. The content of the 404 page can help your visitors to understand that they tried to reach a missing page and provides suggestions regarding how to find the content they were looking for. When a site displays a custom error page the Toolbar will no longer provide suggestions for that site. You can check the behavior of the Toolbar by visiting an invalid URL on your site with the Google Toolbar installed. - DNS errors
When a URL contains a non-existent domain name (like www.google.cmo), the Toolbar will suggest an alternate, similar looking URL with a valid domain name. - Connection failures
When your server is unreachable, the Google Toolbar will automatically display a link to the cached version of your page. This feature is only available when Google is not explicitly forbidden from caching your pages through use of a robots meta tag or crawling is blocked on the page through the robots.txt file. If your server is regularly unreachable, you will probably want to fix that first; but it may also be a good idea to check the Google cache for your pages by looking at the search results for your site.
Suggestions provided by the Google Toolbar
When one of the above situations is found, the Toolbar will try to find the most helpful links for the user. That may include:- A link to the corrected URL
When the Toolbar can find the most probable, active URL to match the user's input (or link they clicked on), it will display it right on top as a suggestion. The correction can be somewhere in the domain name, the path or the file name (the Toolbar does not look at any parameters in the URL). - A link to the cached version of the URL
When Toolbar recognizes the URL in the Google cache, it will display a link to the cached version. This is particularly useful when the user can't access your pages for some reason. As mentioned above, Google may cache your URLs provided you're not explicitly forbidding this through use of a robots meta tag or the robots.txt file. - A link to the homepage or HTML site map of your site
Sometimes going to the homepage or a site map page is the best way to find the page that a user is really looking for. Site map pages (these are not XML Sitemap files) are generally recognized based on the file name; if the Toolbar can find something called "sitemap.html" or similar, this page will probably be recognized as the site map page. Don't worry if your site map page is called something else; if a user decides to go to your homepage, they'll probably find it right away even if the Toolbar doesn't spot it. - A link to a higher level folder
Sometimes the homepage or site map page is too far out and the user would be better off just going one step up in the hierarchy. When the Toolbar can recognize that your site's structure is based on folders and sub-folders, it may suggest a page one step back. - A search within your site for keywords found in the URL
It's a good practice to use descriptive URLs. If the Toolbar can recognize keywords within the URL which the user tried to access, it will link to a site-search with those keywords. Even if the URL has changed significantly in the meantime, the search may be able to find similar content based on those keywords. For instance, if the URL was http://example.com/party-gifts/holidays/ it will suggest a search for the words "party", "gifts" and "holidays" within the site example.com. - An open Google search box
If all else fails, there's always a chance that similar content already exists elsewhere on the web. The Google web search can help your users to find it - the Toolbar will help you by adding the keywords found in the URL to the search box.
Are you curious already? Download the Google Toolbar for your browser and give it a try on your site!
To discuss how this feature can help visitors to your site, jump in to our Google Webmaster Help Group; or for general Google Toolbar questions, try the Toolbar group for Internet Explorer or the Toolbar group for Firefox.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: We created a first steps cheat sheet for friends & family 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
We hope this content will help those who are just about to start their webmaster adventure or have so far not paid too much attention to search engine-friendly design. Over time as you gain experience you may want to have a look at our more advanced Google SEO Starter Guide. As always we welcome all webmasters and site owners, new and experienced to join discussions on our Google Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Webmaster level: beginner
Everyone knows someone who just set up their first blog on Blogger, installed WordPress for the first time or maybe who had a web site for some time but never gave search much thought. We came up with a first steps cheat sheet for just these folks. It’s a short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design, that can help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility. We made sure it’s available in thirteen languages. Please feel free to read it, print it, share it, copy and distribute it!We hope this content will help those who are just about to start their webmaster adventure or have so far not paid too much attention to search engine-friendly design. Over time as you gain experience you may want to have a look at our more advanced Google SEO Starter Guide. As always we welcome all webmasters and site owners, new and experienced to join discussions on our Google Webmaster Help Forum.
from web contents: Better targeting your indic language site 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below.
‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’
We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.
To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>
This script tag will load the
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>
When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.
Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.
Cheers,
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com‘ganex':
> How does one do for INDIA.
> As there are many languages spoken here.
> My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.
> For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil
> for Bengaluru I want in Kannada.
> For North I want in Hindi.’
We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages.
To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></>
This script tag will load the
google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this:<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("elements", "1", {
packages: "transliteration"
});
</script>
When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues.
Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them.
Cheers,
from web contents: Malware reviews via Webmaster Tools 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.
If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results:
We encourage all webmasters to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
In the past year, the number of sites affected by malware/badware grew from a handful a week to thousands per week. We noted your suggestions to improve communication for webmasters of affected sites -- suggestions mentioned in our earlier blog post "About badware warnings" as well as the stopbadware discussion group. Now, Webmaster Tools provides malware reviews.
If you find that your site is affected by malware, either through malware-labeled search results or in the summary for your site in Webmaster Tools, we've streamlined the process to review your site and return it malware-label-free in our search results:
- View a sample of the dangerous URLs on your site in Webmaster Tools.
- Make any necessary changes to your site according to StopBadware.org's Security tips.
- New: Request a malware review from Google and we'll evaluate your site.
- New: Check the status of your review.
- If we feel the site is still harmful, we'll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
- If we've determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).
We encourage all webmasters to become familiar with Stopbadware's malware prevention tips. If you have additional questions, please review our documentation or post to the discussion group. We hope you find this new feature in Webmaster Tools useful in discovering and fixing any malware-related problems, and thanks for your diligence for awareness and prevention of malware.this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: 7 must-read Webmaster Central blog posts 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Our search quality and Webmaster Central teams love helping webmasters solve problems. But since we can't be in all places at all times answering all questions, we also try hard to show you how to help yourself. We put a lot of work into providing documentation and blog posts to answer your questions and guide you through the data and tools we provide, and we're constantly looking for ways to improve the visibility of that information.
While I always encourage people to search our Help Center and blog for answers, there are a few articles in particular to which I'm constantly referring people. Some are recent and some are buried in years' worth of archives, but each is worth a read:
- Googlebot can't access my website
Web hosters seem to be getting more aggressive about blocking spam bots and aggressive crawlers from their servers, which is generally a good thing; however, sometimes they also block Googlebot without knowing it. If you or your hoster are "allowing" Googlebot through by whitelisting Googlebot IP addresses, you may still be blocking some of our IPs without knowing it (since our full IP list isn't public, for reasons explained in the post). In order to be sure you're allowing Googlebot access to your site, use the method in this blog post to verify whether a crawler is Googlebot. - URL blocked by robots.txt
Sometimes the web crawl section of Webmaster Tools reports a URL as "blocked by robots.txt", but your robots.txt file doesn't seem to block crawling of that URL. Check out this list of troubleshooting tips, especially the part about redirects. This thread from our Help Group also explains why you may see discrepancies between our web crawl error reports and our robots.txt analysis tool. - Why was my URL removal request denied?
(Okay, I'm cheating a little: this one is a Help Center article and not a blog post.) In order to remove a URL from Google search results you need to first put something in place that will prevent Googlebot from simply picking that URL up again the next time it crawls your site. This may be a 404 (or 410) status code, a noindex meta tag, or a robots.txt file, depending on what type of removal request you're submitting. Follow the directions in this article and you should be good to go. - Flash best practices
Flash continues to be a hot topic for webmasters interested in making visually complex content accessible to search engines. In this post Bergy, our resident Flash expert, outlines best practices for working with Flash. - The supplemental index
The "supplemental index" was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query. - Duplicate content
Duplicate content—another perennial concern of webmasters. This post talks in detail about duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and also references Adam's previous post on deftly dealing with duplicate content, which gives lots of good suggestions on how to avoid or mitigate problems caused by duplicate content. - Sitemaps FAQs
This post answers the most frequent questions we get about Sitemaps. And I'm not just saying it's great because I posted it. :-)
Sometimes, knowing how to find existing information is the biggest barrier to getting a question answered. So try searching our blog, Help Center and Help Group next time you have a question, and please let us know if you can't find a piece of information that you think should be there!
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comfrom web contents: Preventing Virtual Blight: my presentation from Web 2.0 Summit 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
One of the things I'm thinking about in 2009 is how Google can be even more transparent and communicate more. That led me to a personal goal for 2009: if I give a substantial conference presentation (not just a question and answer session), I'd like to digitize the talk so that people who couldn't attend the conference can still watch the presentation.
In that spirit, here's a belated holiday present. In November 2008 I spoke on a panel about "Preventing Virtual Blight" at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. A few weeks later I ended up recreating the talk at the Googleplex and we recorded the video. In fact, this is a "director's cut" because I could take a little more time for the presentation. Here's the video of the presentation:
And if you'd like to follow along at home, I'll include the actual presentation as well:
You can also access the presentation directly. By the way thanks to Wysz for recording this not just on a shoestring budget but for free. I think we've got another video ready to go pretty soon, too.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comIn that spirit, here's a belated holiday present. In November 2008 I spoke on a panel about "Preventing Virtual Blight" at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. A few weeks later I ended up recreating the talk at the Googleplex and we recorded the video. In fact, this is a "director's cut" because I could take a little more time for the presentation. Here's the video of the presentation:
And if you'd like to follow along at home, I'll include the actual presentation as well:
You can also access the presentation directly. By the way thanks to Wysz for recording this not just on a shoestring budget but for free. I think we've got another video ready to go pretty soon, too.
from web contents: Website Security for Webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Webmaster level: Intermediate to Advanced
Users are taught to protect themselves from malicious programs by installing sophisticated antivirus software, but often they may also entrust their private information to websites like yours, in which case it’s important to protect their data. It’s also very important to protect your own data; if you have an online store, you don’t want to be robbed.
Over the years companies and webmasters have learned—often the hard way—that web application security is not a joke; we’ve seen user passwords leaked due to SQL injection attacks, cookies stolen with XSS, and websites taken over by hackers due to negligent input validation.
Today we’ll show you some examples of how a web application can be exploited so you can learn from them; for this we’ll use Gruyere, an intentionally vulnerable application we use for security training internally, too. Do not probe others’ websites for vulnerabilities without permission as it may be perceived as hacking; but you’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to run tests on Gruyere.
Client state manipulation - What will happen if I alter the URL?
Let’s say you have an image hosting site and you’re using a PHP script to display the images users have uploaded:
http://www.example.com/showimage.php?imgloc=/garyillyes/kitten.jpg
So what will the application do if I alter the URL to something like this and userpasswords.txt is an actual file?
http://www.example.com/showimage.php?imgloc=/../../userpasswords.txt
Will I get the content of userpasswords.txt?
Another example of client state manipulation is when form fields are not validated. For instance, let’s say you have this form:
It seems that the username of the submitter is stored in a hidden input field. Well, that’s great! Does that mean that if I change the value of that field to another username, I can submit the form as that user? It may very well happen; the user input is apparently not authenticated with, for example, a token which can be verified on the server.
Imagine the situation if that form were part of your shopping cart and I modified the price of a $1000 item to $1, and then placed the order.
Protecting your application against this kind of attack is not easy; take a look at the third part of Gruyere to learn a few tips about how to defend your app.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) - User input can’t be trusted
A simple, harmless URL:
http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/611788451095/%3Cscript%3Ealert('0wn3d')%3C/script%3E
But is it truly harmless? If I decode the percent-encoded characters, I get:
Gruyere, just like many sites with custom error pages, is designed to include the path component in the HTML page. This can introduce security bugs, like XSS, as it introduces user input directly into the rendered HTML page of the web application. You might say, “It’s just an alert box, so what?” The thing is, if I can inject an alert box, I can most likely inject something else, too, and maybe steal your cookies which I could use to sign in to your site as you.
Another example is when the stored user input isn’t sanitized. Let’s say I write a comment on your blog; the comment is simple:
If other users click on my innocent link, I have their cookies:
You can learn how to find XSS vulnerabilities in your own web app and how to fix them in the second part of Gruyere; or, if you’re an advanced developer, take a look at the automatic escaping features in template systems we blogged about on our Online Security blog.
Cross-site request forgery (XSRF) - Should I trust requests from evil.com?
Oops, a broken picture. It can’t be dangerous--it’s broken, after all--which means that the URL of the image returns a 404 or it’s just malformed. Is that true in all of the cases?
No, it’s not! You can specify any URL as an image source, regardless of its content type. It can be an HTML page, a JavaScript file, or some other potentially malicious resource. In this case the image source was a simple page’s URL:
That page will only work if I’m logged in and I have some cookies set. Since I was actually logged in to the application, when the browser tried to fetch the image by accessing the image source URL, it also deleted my first snippet. This doesn’t sound particularly dangerous, but if I’m a bit familiar with the app, I could also invoke a URL which deletes a user’s profile or lets admins grant permissions for other users.
To protect your app against XSRF you should not allow state changing actions to be called via GET; the POST method was invented for this kind of state-changing request. This change alone may have mitigated the above attack, but usually it's not enough and you need to include an unpredictable value in all state changing requests to prevent XSRF. Please head to Gruyere if you want to learn more about XSRF.
Cross-site script inclusion (XSSI) - All your script are belong to us
Many sites today can dynamically update a page's content via asynchronous JavaScript requests that return JSON data. Sometimes, JSON can contain sensitive data, and if the correct precautions are not in place, it may be possible for an attacker to steal this sensitive information.
Let’s imagine the following scenario: I have created a standard HTML page and send you the link; since you trust me, you visit the link I sent you. The page contains only a few lines:
Since you’re signed in to Gruyere and you have a private snippet, you’ll see an alert box on my page informing you about the contents of your snippet. As always, if I managed to fire up an alert box, I can do whatever else I want; in this case it was a simple snippet, but it could have been your biggest secret, too.
It’s not too hard to defend your app against XSSI, but it still requires careful thinking. You can use tokens as explained in the XSRF section, set your script to answer only POST requests, or simply start the JSON response with ‘\n’ to make sure the script is not executable.
SQL Injection - Still think user input is safe?
What will happen if I try to sign in to your app with a username like
While this specific example won’t expose user data, it can cause great headaches because it has the potential to completely remove the SQL table where your app stores information about members.
Generally, you can protect your app from SQL injection with proactive thinking and input validation. First, are you sure the SQL user needs to have permission to execute “DROP TABLE members”? Wouldn’t it be enough to grant only SELECT rights? By setting the SQL user’s permissions carefully, you can avoid painful experiences and lots of troubles. You might also want to configure error reporting in such way that the database and its tables’ names aren’t exposed in the case of a failed query.
Second, as we learned in the XSS case, never trust user input: what looks like a login form to you, looks like a potential doorway to an attacker. Always sanitize and quotesafe the input that will be stored in a database, and whenever possible make use of statements generally referred to as prepared or parametrized statements available in most database programming interfaces.
Knowing how web applications can be exploited is the first step in understanding how to defend them. In light of this, we encourage you to take the Gruyere course, take other web security courses from the Google Code University and check out skipfish if you're looking for an automated web application security testing tool. If you have more questions please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.comUsers are taught to protect themselves from malicious programs by installing sophisticated antivirus software, but often they may also entrust their private information to websites like yours, in which case it’s important to protect their data. It’s also very important to protect your own data; if you have an online store, you don’t want to be robbed.
Over the years companies and webmasters have learned—often the hard way—that web application security is not a joke; we’ve seen user passwords leaked due to SQL injection attacks, cookies stolen with XSS, and websites taken over by hackers due to negligent input validation.
Today we’ll show you some examples of how a web application can be exploited so you can learn from them; for this we’ll use Gruyere, an intentionally vulnerable application we use for security training internally, too. Do not probe others’ websites for vulnerabilities without permission as it may be perceived as hacking; but you’re welcome—nay, encouraged—to run tests on Gruyere.Client state manipulation - What will happen if I alter the URL?
Let’s say you have an image hosting site and you’re using a PHP script to display the images users have uploaded:
http://www.example.com/showimage.php?imgloc=/garyillyes/kitten.jpg
So what will the application do if I alter the URL to something like this and userpasswords.txt is an actual file?
http://www.example.com/showimage.php?imgloc=/../../userpasswords.txt
Will I get the content of userpasswords.txt?
Another example of client state manipulation is when form fields are not validated. For instance, let’s say you have this form:
It seems that the username of the submitter is stored in a hidden input field. Well, that’s great! Does that mean that if I change the value of that field to another username, I can submit the form as that user? It may very well happen; the user input is apparently not authenticated with, for example, a token which can be verified on the server.
Imagine the situation if that form were part of your shopping cart and I modified the price of a $1000 item to $1, and then placed the order.
Protecting your application against this kind of attack is not easy; take a look at the third part of Gruyere to learn a few tips about how to defend your app.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) - User input can’t be trusted
A simple, harmless URL:
http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/611788451095/%3Cscript%3Ealert('0wn3d')%3C/script%3E
But is it truly harmless? If I decode the percent-encoded characters, I get:
<script>alert('0wn3d')</script>Gruyere, just like many sites with custom error pages, is designed to include the path component in the HTML page. This can introduce security bugs, like XSS, as it introduces user input directly into the rendered HTML page of the web application. You might say, “It’s just an alert box, so what?” The thing is, if I can inject an alert box, I can most likely inject something else, too, and maybe steal your cookies which I could use to sign in to your site as you.
Another example is when the stored user input isn’t sanitized. Let’s say I write a comment on your blog; the comment is simple:
<a href=”javascript:alert(‘0wn3d’)”>Click here to see a kitten</a>
If other users click on my innocent link, I have their cookies:
You can learn how to find XSS vulnerabilities in your own web app and how to fix them in the second part of Gruyere; or, if you’re an advanced developer, take a look at the automatic escaping features in template systems we blogged about on our Online Security blog.
Cross-site request forgery (XSRF) - Should I trust requests from evil.com?
Oops, a broken picture. It can’t be dangerous--it’s broken, after all--which means that the URL of the image returns a 404 or it’s just malformed. Is that true in all of the cases?No, it’s not! You can specify any URL as an image source, regardless of its content type. It can be an HTML page, a JavaScript file, or some other potentially malicious resource. In this case the image source was a simple page’s URL:
That page will only work if I’m logged in and I have some cookies set. Since I was actually logged in to the application, when the browser tried to fetch the image by accessing the image source URL, it also deleted my first snippet. This doesn’t sound particularly dangerous, but if I’m a bit familiar with the app, I could also invoke a URL which deletes a user’s profile or lets admins grant permissions for other users.
To protect your app against XSRF you should not allow state changing actions to be called via GET; the POST method was invented for this kind of state-changing request. This change alone may have mitigated the above attack, but usually it's not enough and you need to include an unpredictable value in all state changing requests to prevent XSRF. Please head to Gruyere if you want to learn more about XSRF.
Cross-site script inclusion (XSSI) - All your script are belong to us
Many sites today can dynamically update a page's content via asynchronous JavaScript requests that return JSON data. Sometimes, JSON can contain sensitive data, and if the correct precautions are not in place, it may be possible for an attacker to steal this sensitive information.
Let’s imagine the following scenario: I have created a standard HTML page and send you the link; since you trust me, you visit the link I sent you. The page contains only a few lines:
<script>function _feed(s) {alert("Your private snippet is: " + s['private_snippet']);}</script><script src="http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/611788451095/feed.gtl"></script>Since you’re signed in to Gruyere and you have a private snippet, you’ll see an alert box on my page informing you about the contents of your snippet. As always, if I managed to fire up an alert box, I can do whatever else I want; in this case it was a simple snippet, but it could have been your biggest secret, too.
It’s not too hard to defend your app against XSSI, but it still requires careful thinking. You can use tokens as explained in the XSRF section, set your script to answer only POST requests, or simply start the JSON response with ‘\n’ to make sure the script is not executable.
SQL Injection - Still think user input is safe?
What will happen if I try to sign in to your app with a username like
JohnDoe’; DROP TABLE members;--
While this specific example won’t expose user data, it can cause great headaches because it has the potential to completely remove the SQL table where your app stores information about members.
Generally, you can protect your app from SQL injection with proactive thinking and input validation. First, are you sure the SQL user needs to have permission to execute “DROP TABLE members”? Wouldn’t it be enough to grant only SELECT rights? By setting the SQL user’s permissions carefully, you can avoid painful experiences and lots of troubles. You might also want to configure error reporting in such way that the database and its tables’ names aren’t exposed in the case of a failed query.
Second, as we learned in the XSS case, never trust user input: what looks like a login form to you, looks like a potential doorway to an attacker. Always sanitize and quotesafe the input that will be stored in a database, and whenever possible make use of statements generally referred to as prepared or parametrized statements available in most database programming interfaces.
Knowing how web applications can be exploited is the first step in understanding how to defend them. In light of this, we encourage you to take the Gruyere course, take other web security courses from the Google Code University and check out skipfish if you're looking for an automated web application security testing tool. If you have more questions please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.
from web contents: Giving Tablet Users the Full-Sized Web 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster level: All
Since we announced Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites, a common question we’ve heard from webmasters is how to best treat tablet devices. This is a similar question Android app developers face, and for that the Building Quality Tablet Apps guide is a great starting point.
Although we do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites, there are some tips for building websites that serve smartphone and tablet users well.
When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect. Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.
Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices. If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.
Another common configuration is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and to redirect users to the relevant version. If you use this configuration, be careful not to inadvertently redirect tablet users to the smartphone-optimized site too.
In summary, any Android device that does not have the word “Mobile” in the user-agent is a tablet (or other large screen) device that is best served the desktop site.
For example, here’s the user-agent from Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone:
Or from Firefox on the Galaxy Nexus:
Compare those to the user-agent from Chrome on Nexus 7:
Or from Firefox on Nexus 7:
Because the Galaxy Nexus’s user agent includes “Mobile” it should be served your smartphone-optimized website, while the Nexus 7 should receive the full site.
We hope this helps you build better tablet-optimized websites. As always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
Since we announced Google’s recommendations for building smartphone-optimized websites, a common question we’ve heard from webmasters is how to best treat tablet devices. This is a similar question Android app developers face, and for that the Building Quality Tablet Apps guide is a great starting point.
Although we do not have specific recommendations for building search engine friendly tablet-optimized websites, there are some tips for building websites that serve smartphone and tablet users well.
When considering your site’s visitors using tablets, it’s important to think about both the devices and what users expect. Compared to smartphones, tablets have larger touch screens and are typically used on Wi-Fi connections. Tablets offer a browsing experience that can be as rich as any desktop or laptop machine, in a more mobile, lightweight, and generally more convenient package. This means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, users expect to see your desktop site rather than your site’s smartphone site.
Our recommendation for smartphone-optimized sites is to use responsive web design, which means you have one site to serve all devices. If your website uses responsive web design as recommended, be sure to test your website on a variety of tablets to make sure it serves them well too. Remember, just like for smartphones, there are a variety of device sizes and screen resolutions to test.
Another common configuration is to have separate sites for desktops and smartphones, and to redirect users to the relevant version. If you use this configuration, be careful not to inadvertently redirect tablet users to the smartphone-optimized site too.
Telling Android smartphones and tablets apart
For Android-based devices, it’s easy to distinguish between smartphones and tablets using the user-agent string supplied by browsers: Although both Android smartphones and tablets will include the word “Android” in the user-agent string, only the user-agent of smartphones will include the word “Mobile”.In summary, any Android device that does not have the word “Mobile” in the user-agent is a tablet (or other large screen) device that is best served the desktop site.
For example, here’s the user-agent from Chrome on a Galaxy Nexus smartphone:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Galaxy Nexus Build/JRO03O) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Mobile Safari/535.19Or from Firefox on the Galaxy Nexus:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0Compare those to the user-agent from Chrome on Nexus 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; Nexus 7 Build/JRO03S) AppleWebKit/535.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.166 Safari/535.19Or from Firefox on Nexus 7:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:16.0) Gecko/16.0 Firefox/16.0Because the Galaxy Nexus’s user agent includes “Mobile” it should be served your smartphone-optimized website, while the Nexus 7 should receive the full site.
We hope this helps you build better tablet-optimized websites. As always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.
this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
from web contents: Musings on Down Under 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog:
Earlier this year, a bunch of Googlers (Maile, Peeyush, Dan, Adam and I) bunged ourselves across the equator and headed to Sydney, so we could show our users and webmasters that just because you're "down under" doesn't mean you're under our radar. We had a great time getting to know folks at our Sydney office, and an even greater time meeting and chatting with all the people attending Search Summit and Search Engine Room. What makes those 12-hour flights worthwhile is getting the chance to inform and be informed about the issues important to the webmaster community.
One of the questions we heard quite frequently: Should we as webmasters/SEOs/SEMs/users be worried about personalized search?
Our answer: a resounding NO! Personalized search takes each user's search behavior, and subtly tunes the search results to better match their interests over time. For a user, this means that even if you're a lone entomologist in a sea of sports fans, you'll always get the results most relevant to you for the query "cricket". For the webmaster, it allows niche markets that collide on the same search terms to disambiguate themselves based on individual user preferences, and this really presents a tremendous opportunity for visibility. Also, to put things in perspective, search engines have been moving towards some degree of personalization for years; for example, providing country/language specific results is already a form of personalization, just at a coarser granularity. Making it more fine-grained is the logical next step, and helps level the playing field for smaller niche websites which now have a chance to rank well for users that want their content the most.
Another question that popped up a lot: I'm moving my site from domain X to Y. How do I make sure all my hard-earned reputation carries over?
Here are the important bits to think about:
Earlier this year, a bunch of Googlers (Maile, Peeyush, Dan, Adam and I) bunged ourselves across the equator and headed to Sydney, so we could show our users and webmasters that just because you're "down under" doesn't mean you're under our radar. We had a great time getting to know folks at our Sydney office, and an even greater time meeting and chatting with all the people attending Search Summit and Search Engine Room. What makes those 12-hour flights worthwhile is getting the chance to inform and be informed about the issues important to the webmaster community.
One of the questions we heard quite frequently: Should we as webmasters/SEOs/SEMs/users be worried about personalized search?
Our answer: a resounding NO! Personalized search takes each user's search behavior, and subtly tunes the search results to better match their interests over time. For a user, this means that even if you're a lone entomologist in a sea of sports fans, you'll always get the results most relevant to you for the query "cricket". For the webmaster, it allows niche markets that collide on the same search terms to disambiguate themselves based on individual user preferences, and this really presents a tremendous opportunity for visibility. Also, to put things in perspective, search engines have been moving towards some degree of personalization for years; for example, providing country/language specific results is already a form of personalization, just at a coarser granularity. Making it more fine-grained is the logical next step, and helps level the playing field for smaller niche websites which now have a chance to rank well for users that want their content the most.
Another question that popped up a lot: I'm moving my site from domain X to Y. How do I make sure all my hard-earned reputation carries over?
Here are the important bits to think about:
- For each page on domain X, have it 301-redirect to the corresponding page on Y. (How? Typically through .htaccess, but check with your hosting provider).
- You might want to stagger the move, and redirect sub-sections of your site over time. This gives you the chance to keep an eye on the effects, and also gives search engines' crawl/indexing pipelines time to cover the space of redirected URLs.
- http://www.google.com/webmasters is your friend. Keep an eye on it during the transition to make sure that the redirects are having the effect you want.
- Give it time. How quickly the transition is reflected in the results depends on how quickly we recrawl your site and see those redirects, which depends on a lot of factors including the current reputation of your site's pages.
- Don't forget to update your Sitemap. (You are using Sitemaps, aren't you?)
- If possible, don't substantially change the content of your pages at the same time you make the move. Otherwise, it will be difficult to tell if ranking changes are due to the change of content or incorrectly implemented redirects.
from web contents: Analytics - Another tool for webmasters 2013
salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards.
But we wanted to highlight some of the webmaster-specific metrics within Google Analytics for our regular readers, since it offers a lot of easily-accessible information that will enrich the work you're doing.
For instance, do you know how many visitors to your site are using IE versus Firefox? And even further, how many of those IE or Firefox users are converting on a goal you have set up? Google Analytics can tell you information like this so you can prepare and tailor your website for your audience. Then, when you are designing, you can prioritize your testing to make sure that the site works on the most popular browsers and operating systems first.
Are your visitors using Java-enabled browsers? What version of Flash are the majority of your visitors using? What connection speed do they have? If you find that lots of visitors are using a dial-up service, you're going to want to put in some more effort to streamline the load time of images on your site, for example.
Plus, Google Analytics will make your company's marketing division very happy. It reports on the most effective search keywords, the most popular referring sources and the geographic location of visitors, as well as the performance of banner ads, PPC keyword campaigns, and email newsletters. If you haven't tried Google Analytics, watch the Flash tour of the product or set up a free account now and see statistics on your visitors and the traffic to your site within three hours.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Teamthis is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com
But we wanted to highlight some of the webmaster-specific metrics within Google Analytics for our regular readers, since it offers a lot of easily-accessible information that will enrich the work you're doing.
For instance, do you know how many visitors to your site are using IE versus Firefox? And even further, how many of those IE or Firefox users are converting on a goal you have set up? Google Analytics can tell you information like this so you can prepare and tailor your website for your audience. Then, when you are designing, you can prioritize your testing to make sure that the site works on the most popular browsers and operating systems first.
Are your visitors using Java-enabled browsers? What version of Flash are the majority of your visitors using? What connection speed do they have? If you find that lots of visitors are using a dial-up service, you're going to want to put in some more effort to streamline the load time of images on your site, for example.
Plus, Google Analytics will make your company's marketing division very happy. It reports on the most effective search keywords, the most popular referring sources and the geographic location of visitors, as well as the performance of banner ads, PPC keyword campaigns, and email newsletters. If you haven't tried Google Analytics, watch the Flash tour of the product or set up a free account now and see statistics on your visitors and the traffic to your site within three hours.
Posted by Jeff Gillis, Google Analytics Teamthis is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com