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salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Posted by Selina & Jos, Search Quality Team, Dublin

In the Dutch market, the concept of so-called 'startpages' is hugely popular. In this article we will give some background information on them, and give those of you who may be startpage webmasters a few tips on how to create unique and informative startpages.

What's a startpage?

Basically, it's a webpage with a lot of links about a specific topic. The startpages are hosted on a startpage domain and each separate startpage is maintained by an individual webmaster. The links on startpages are usually ordered by categories related to the topic of the page. Besides hyperlinks, startpages often contain text, animations and pictures. Startpages are quite unique to the Dutch market, and offer a simple interface for novice users to create their own web portals, with a unique approach to user-generated content.

The whole startpage concept began in September 1998 with the launch of Startpagina.nl, which was set up to be an online linkbook for the inexperienced Internet user. Since then, Startpagina.nl has become a huge success, mainly because an enormous number of volunteers created and maintained the different startpages covering lots of interesting and diverse topics. Since Startpagina.nl emerged, lots of other startpage domains have been created, and are still being created today. The fact that there are still new startpage domains appearing and that the number of individual startpages on these domains is still increasing shows the continued popularity of startpages in the Dutch market.

Creating useful startpages

As a search engine, we love to have useful and diverse pages showing up in the search results we present to our users. We thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the best practices we've seen in creating value-added startpages.

1. Create your startpage for users, and not for search engines. This involves making sure that all your text on the page is visible to users, and writing full sentences as descriptions instead of just keywords.
2. Try to deliver unique, informative and on-topic content. The structure of startpages is pretty straightforward and does not leave much room for variation. However, you can make a difference. Try to find a topic you know a lot about that has not been fully covered yet. Create good categories that are related to your topic and give a relevant title to every category. Then, find links that are related to the categories on your page and label every link with an anchor text that is relevant. For example, instead of naming your links 'link1', 'link2' et cetera, you can choose names that make clear where the link is pointing to. And you can write a short description for every category.
3. Don't create startpages out of commercial intent or for the sole purpose of exchanging links. Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to monetize your startpage, but a page with only banners and affiliate links is not the best user experience and therefore not recommended. The same goes for startpages that are created as part of a link network. For example, pages that have all links pointing to a particular website and to other startpages that are also pointing to that same website. These kind of link schemes have no added value for the user and go against the Google webmaster guidelines.

With this post, we hope to have provided potential startpage webmasters with some helpful guidelines that will help to create the type of startpages the Dutch speaking people love!

On a final note, we would like to encourage you to fill in a paid links form if you come across a startpage that is involved in buying and selling links for the purpose of search engine manipulation. To report other forms of bad behavior, you can send a spam report. We'll review each report we get and use this feedback to enhance our algorithms and improve our search results. As always, we really appreciate your feedback and your help to provide the best search experience.

Startpagina's

Gepost door Selina en Jos, Search Quality Team, Dublin

Op de Nederlandstalige markt zijn de zogenaamde startpagina's bijzonder populair. In dit artikel willen we, naast het geven van wat achtergrondinformatie over startpagina's, toekomstige startpaginabeheerders een aantal tips geven voor het creëren van unieke en informatieve startpagina's.

Wat is een startpagina?

Een startpagina is een webpagina met een verzameling links gerelateerd aan een specifiek onderwerp. De startpagina's worden gehost op een startpagina domein en elke individuele startpagina wordt beheerd door een webmaster. De links op een startpagina zijn meestal opgedeeld in verschillende categorieën die relevant zijn voor het specifieke onderwerp van de startpagina. Naast een indeling in hyperlinks vind je op een startpagina vaak tekst, animaties en plaatjes. Het concept van startpagina's is redelijk specifiek voor de Nederlandstalige markt en komt nauwelijks voor in andere markten. Startpagina's hebben een simpele interface die het, ook voor de onervaren internetgebruikers, eenvoudig maakt om een eigen webpagina te creëren.

Het startpagina concept kwam tot stand in september 1998 met de lancering van Startpagina.nl, dat werd opgezet als een soort van linkboek voor de onervaren internet gebruiker. Startpagina.nl bleek al gauw een enorm succes. Dit succes was vooral te danken aan het enorme aantal vrijwilligers dat meehielp om startpagina's te creëren en beheren. Dat er nu, bijna negen jaar later, nog steeds nieuwe startpagina domeinen verschijnen en dat het aantal individuele startpagina's op deze domeinen nog steeds groeit toont aan dat de startpagina's onverminderd populair zijn.

Een waardevolle startpagina creëren

Als zoekmachine vinden we het fantastisch om waardevolle pagina's met unieke content en diversiteit in onze zoekresultaten te hebben. Het leek ons daarom een goed idee om een aantal tips te geven die kunnen helpen bij het creëren van startpagina's met toegevoegde waarde.

1. Maak een startpagina voor internetgebruikers en niet voor zoekmachines. Zorg dat alle tekst zichtbaar is en gebruik volledige zinnen in plaats van enkel een aantal keywords.
2. Probeer unieke, informatieve en aan je onderwerp gerelateerde inhoud aan je bezoekers te presenteren. Hoewel de opzet van een standaard startpagina niet heel veel ruimte biedt voor variatie, kun jij als beheerder het verschil maken! Begin met het zoeken naar een onderwerp waar je veel over weet en waar naar jouw idee nog niet genoeg informatie over te vinden is. Maak vervolgens relevante categorieën aan die gerelateerd zijn aan het onderwerp en geef elke categorie een relevante naam. Zoek vervolgens de links die je op je startpagina wil plaatsen en geef elke link een anchor tekst die omschrijft waar de link je bezoeker naar toe stuurt. Noem je links niet link1, link2, en link3, maar geef ze een naam die relevant is voor de inhoud van de pagina waar de link naar verwijst. Als extra aanvulling kan voor iedere categorie een korte beschrijving worden toegevoegd.
3. Maak geen startpagina's vanuit een puur commercieel oogpunt. Er is niets mis met te proberen om wat te verdienen met je startpagina, maar vergeet niet dat je bezoekers niet zitten te wachten op een pagina met alleen reclamebanners en affiliate links. Hetzelfde geldt voor startpagina's die enkel worden aangemaakt als onderdeel van een linknetwerk. Een voorbeeld hiervan zijn startpagina's waarbij alle links verwijzen naar eenzelfde website en naar andere startpagina's die ook allemaal naar dezelfde website verwijzen. Dit soort startpagina's hebben geen enkele waarde voor je bezoekers en gaan bovendien in tegen de Google Richtlijnen voor Webmasters.

We hopen dat we met deze eerste Nederlandstalige post potentiële startpaginabeheerders hebben kunnen voorzien van een aantal nuttige tips die er voor zorgen dat zij het soort startpagina's kunnen gaan creëren waar onze Nederlandstalige gebruikers van houden!

Tot slot willen we iedereen aanmoedigen om een paid link formulier in te vullen, wanneer je een startpagina tegenkomt die links koopt en verkoopt om daarmee zoekmachines te manipuleren. Andere zaken die ingaan tegen de Google Richtlijnen voor Webmasters kun je melden door een spamrapport in te sturen. Wij bekijken elk rapport dat wordt ingestuurd en deze informatie wordt gebruikt om onze algoritmes en zoekresultaten verder te verbeteren. Zoals altijd wordt jullie feedback en hulp om onze gebruikers te voorzien van de meest relevante zoekresultaten enorm gewaardeerd!

this is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com

salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Today we are announcing a new user agent for robots.txt called Googlebot-News that gives publishers even more control over their content. In case you haven't heard of robots.txt, it's a web-wide standard that has been in use since 1994 and which has support from all major search engines and well-behaved "robots" that process the web. When a search engine checks whether it has permission to crawl and index a web page, the "check if we're allowed to crawl this page" mechanism is robots.txt.

Publishers could easily contact us via a form if they didn't want to be included in Google News but did want to be in Google's web search index. Now, publishers can manage their content in Google News in an even more automated way. Site owners can just add Googlebot-News specific directives to their robots.txt file. Similar to the Googlebot and Googlebot-Image user agents, the new Googlebot-News user agent can be used to specify which pages of a website should be crawled and ultimately appear in Google News.

Here are a few examples for publishers:

Include pages in both Google web search and News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

This is the easiest case. In fact, a robots.txt file is not even required for this case.

Include pages in Google web search, but not in News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file says that no files are disallowed from Google's general web crawler, called Googlebot, but the user agent "Googlebot-News" is blocked from all files on the website.

Include pages in Google News, but not Google web search:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow:

When parsing a robots.txt file, Google obeys the most specific directive. The first two lines tell us that Googlebot (the user agent for Google's web index) is blocked from crawling any pages from the site. The next directive, which applies to the more specific user agent for Google News, overrides the blocking of Googlebot and gives permission for Google News to crawl pages from the website.

Block different sets of pages from Google web search and Google News:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /latest_news

User-agent: Googlebot-News
Disallow: /archives

The pages blocked from Google web search and Google News can be controlled independently. This robots.txt file blocks recent news articles (URLs in the /latest_news folder) from Google web search, but allows them to appear on Google News. Conversely, it blocks premium content (URLs in the /archives folder) from Google News, but allows them to appear in Google web search.

Stop Google web search and Google News from crawling pages:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

This robots.txt file tells Google that Googlebot, the user agent for our web search crawler, should not crawl any pages from the site. Because no specific directive for Googlebot-News is given, our News search will abide by the general guidance for Googlebot and will not crawl pages for Google News.

For some queries, we display results from Google News in a discrete box or section on the web search results page, along with our regular web search results. We sometimes do this for Images, Videos, Maps, and Products, too. This is known as Universal search results. Since Google News powers Universal "News" search results, if you block the Googlebot-News user agent then your site's news stories won't be included in Universal search results.

We are currently testing our support for the new user agent. If you see any problems please let us know. Note that it is possible for Google to return a link to a page in some situations even when we didn't crawl that page. If you'd like to read more about robots.txt, we provide additional documentation on our website. We hope webmasters will enjoy the flexibility and easier management that the Googlebot-News user agent provides.

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analystthis is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com

salam every one, this is a topic from google web master centrale blog: Webmaster level: Beginner/Intermediate

So there you are, minding your own business, using Webmaster Tools to check out how awesome your site is... but, wait! The Crawl errors page is full of 404 (Not found) errors! Is disaster imminent??


Fear not, my young padawan. Let’s take a look at 404s and how they do (or do not) affect your site:

Q: Do the 404 errors reported in Webmaster Tools affect my site’s ranking?
A: 404s are a perfectly normal part of the web; the Internet is always changing, new content is born, old content dies, and when it dies it (ideally) returns a 404 HTTP response code. Search engines are aware of this; we have 404 errors on our own sites, as you can see above, and we find them all over the web. In fact, we actually prefer that, when you get rid of a page on your site, you make sure that it returns a proper 404 or 410 response code (rather than a “soft 404”). Keep in mind that in order for our crawler to see the HTTP response code of a URL, it has to be able to crawl that URL—if the URL is blocked by your robots.txt file we won’t be able to crawl it and see its response code. The fact that some URLs on your site no longer exist / return 404s does not affect how your site’s other URLs (the ones that return 200 (Successful)) perform in our search results.

Q: So 404s don’t hurt my website at all?
A: If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results. However, there may be other reasons that you’d want to address certain types of 404s. For example, if some of the pages that 404 are pages you actually care about, you should look into why we’re seeing 404s when we crawl them! If you see a misspelling of a legitimate URL (www.example.com/awsome instead of www.example.com/awesome), it’s likely that someone intended to link to you and simply made a typo. Instead of returning a 404, you could 301 redirect the misspelled URL to the correct URL and capture the intended traffic from that link. You can also make sure that, when users do land on a 404 page on your site, you help them find what they were looking for rather than just saying “404 Not found."

Q: Tell me more about “soft 404s.”
A: A soft 404 is when a web server returns a response code other than 404 (or 410) for a URL that doesn’t exist. A common example is when a site owner wants to return a pretty 404 page with helpful information for his users, and thinks that in order to serve content to users he has to return a 200 response code. Not so! You can return a 404 response code while serving whatever content you want. Another example is when a site redirects any unknown URLs to their homepage instead of returning 404s. Both of these cases can have negative effects on our understanding and indexing of your site, so we recommend making sure your server returns the proper response codes for nonexistent content. Keep in mind that just because a page says “404 Not Found,” doesn’t mean it’s actually returning a 404 HTTP response code—use the Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools to double-check. If you don’t know how to configure your server to return the right response codes, check out your web host’s help documentation.

Q: How do I know whether a URL should 404, or 301, or 410?
A: When you remove a page from your site, think about whether that content is moving somewhere else, or whether you no longer plan to have that type of content on your site. If you’re moving that content to a new URL, you should 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL—that way when users come to the old URL looking for that content, they’ll be automatically redirected to something relevant to what they were looking for. If you’re getting rid of that content entirely and don’t have anything on your site that would fill the same user need, then the old URL should return a 404 or 410. Currently Google treats 410s (Gone) the same as 404s (Not found), so it’s immaterial to us whether you return one or the other.

Q: Most of my 404s are for bizarro URLs that never existed on my site. What’s up with that? Where did they come from?
A: If Google finds a link somewhere on the web that points to a URL on your domain, it may try to crawl that link, whether any content actually exists there or not; and when it does, your server should return a 404 if there’s nothing there to find. These links could be caused by someone making a typo when linking to you, some type of misconfiguration (if the links are automatically generated, e.g. by a CMS), or by Google’s increased efforts to recognize and crawl links embedded in JavaScript or other embedded content; or they may be part of a quick check from our side to see how your server handles unknown URLs, to name just a few. If you see 404s reported in Webmaster Tools for URLs that don’t exist on your site, you can safely ignore them. We don’t know which URLs are important to you vs. which are supposed to 404, so we show you all the 404s we found on your site and let you decide which, if any, require your attention.

Q: Someone has scraped my site and caused a bunch of 404s in the process. They’re all “real” URLs with other code tacked on, like http://www.example.com/images/kittens.jpg" width="100" height="300" alt="kittens"/></a... Will this hurt my site?
A: Generally you don’t need to worry about “broken links” like this hurting your site. We understand that site owners have little to no control over people who scrape their site, or who link to them in strange ways. If you’re a whiz with the regex, you could consider redirecting these URLs as described here, but generally it’s not worth worrying about. Remember that you can also file a takedown request when you believe someone is stealing original content from your website.

Q: Last week I fixed all the 404s that Webmaster Tools reported, but they’re still listed in my account. Does this mean I didn’t fix them correctly? How long will it take for them to disappear?
A: Take a look at the ‘Detected’ column on the Crawl errors page—this is the most recent date on which we detected each error. If the date(s) in that column are from before the time you fixed the errors, that means we haven’t encountered these errors since that date. If the dates are more recent, it means we’re continuing to see these 404s when we crawl.

After implementing a fix, you can check whether our crawler is seeing the new response code by using Fetch as Googlebot. Test a few URLs and, if they look good, these errors should soon start to disappear from your list of Crawl errors.

Q: Can I use Google’s URL removal tool to make 404 errors disappear from my account faster?
A: No; the URL removal tool removes URLs from Google’s search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. It’s designed for urgent removal requests only, and using it isn’t necessary when a URL already returns a 404, as such a URL will drop out of our search results naturally over time. See the bottom half of this blog post for more details on what the URL removal tool can and can’t do for you.

Still want to know more about 404s? Check out 404 week from our blog, or drop by our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analystthis is a topic published in 2013... to get contents for your blog or your forum, just contact me at: devnasser@gmail.com