Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: October 2010

Website clinic: Call for submissions

Monday, October 25, 2010

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Cross-posted on the Google Grants Blog
Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google’s Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic right here on this blog. In future posts, we’ll be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.
This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that our advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like us to consider your site, read on for submission instructions.
How to Submit Your Site:To register your site for our clinic, fill in the information requested on our form. From there, we will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. Our analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit us to use your site as an example in our follow-up site clinic posts.
We have a few guidelines:

Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.
In order to ensure that you’re the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.
To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets our webmaster quality guidelines. We will be using the same principles as a basis for our analysis.

All set? Submit your site for consideration here.
The site clinic goes live today, and submissions will be accepted until Monday, November 8, 2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when we review the sites.
Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Team

Optimizing sites for TV

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

accessible to people on the goGoogle TVYouTube Leanback

YouTube desktop version on the left, YouTube Leanback on the rightSpotlight GalleryWhat does "optimized for TV" mean?

Text is large enough to be viewable from the sofa-to-TV distance.

Site navigation can be performed through button arrows on the remote (a D-pad), rather than mouse/touchpad usage

Selectable elements provide a visual queue when selected (when you’re 10 feet away, it needs to be really, really obvious what selections are highlighted)

and more...

How can webmasters gain a general idea of their site’s appearance on TV?Design considerations

On a large monitor, make your window size 1920 x 1080.

In a browser, visit your site at full screen.

Zoom the browser to 1.5x the normal size. This is performed in different ways with different keyboards. For example, in Chrome if you press ctrl+ (press ctrl and + at the same time) twice, that’ll zoom the browser to nearly 1.5x the initial size.

Move back 3 x (the distance between you and the monitor).

Check out your site!

now available in storesHow can you learn more?code.google.com/tv/web/Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Tools - Links to your site updated

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Webmaster Tools

Who links the most

Your most linked content

Webmaster Help ForumPosted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Tools: Updates to Search queries, Parameter handling and Messages

Friday, October 08, 2010

Search queries:

Better Parameter Handling:Parameter Handling
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=1234
http://example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sid=5678

http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=1
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=asc-price&page=2
http://example.com/shop.php?category=candy&sort-by=desc-price&page=2

Messages:

Webmaster Help ForumPosted by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Central Blog

Website clinic: Call for submissions

Optimizing sites for TV

Webmaster Tools - Links to your site updated

Webmaster Tools: Updates to Search queries, Parameter handling and Messages

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