Preview the latest +1 button changes

Webmaster level: All

Want to test the latest +1 features? Today we’re introducing a new option for webmasters who want to be the first to know about changes to the +1 button. Enroll in the Google+ Platform Preview, available globally, to test updates before they launch to all users on your site. When you’re logged into the account you’ve enrolled with and you visit a page with the +1 button, you’ll see the latest preview release.

If you join now, you’ll be able to test the first set of updates we’ve released to Platform Preview: hover and confirmation bubbles.

If you hover your mouse over a +1 button, you’ll see a bubble letting you know what will happen when you click:



After you click, you’ll receive confirmation that the +1 has been applied:



This will give your site’s users an extra reminder of the account they’re using to +1, as well as the fact that their +1 is public.

If you have any questions, please join us in the Webmaster forum. To receive updates about the +1 button, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. And for advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site.

Posted by Joshua Ganderson, Software Engineer

Page Speed Service - Web Performance, Delivered.

Webmaster level: Advanced

Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Posted by Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager

The +1 Button: Now Faster

Webmaster level: All

One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception. Since the button’s launch, we have been hard at work improving its load time. Today, we’re proud to announce two updates that will make both the +1 button and the page loading it, faster.

First, we’ve begun to roll out out a set of changes that will make the button render up to 3x faster on your site. No action is required on your part, so just sit back, relax, and watch as the button loads more quickly than before.

In addition to the improvements made to the button, we’re also introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 experience even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we’re ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn’t lead to an increase in your page load time. For those of you who have already implemented the button, you’ll need to update the code to the new async snippet, and then you should see an overall improvement in your page load time.

To generate the new async snippet, use our +1 Configuration Tool. Below, you’ll find an example of the code, which should be included below the last <g:plusone> tag on your page for best performance.

If you haven’t already implemented the +1 button on your site, we’re excited for your first experience to be a fast one. This is a great opportunity to allow your users to recommend your site to their friends, potentially bringing in more qualified traffic from Google search. To those that already have the button, we hope that you enjoy the improvements in speed. Our team will continue to work hard to enhance the +1 button experience as we know that “fast is better than slow” is as true today as it’s ever been.

If you have any questions, please join us in the Webmaster forum. To receive updates about the +1 button, please subscribe to the Google Publisher Buttons Announce Group. For advanced tips and tricks, check our Google Code site.

Posted by David Byttow, Software Engineer

Improved handling of URLs with parameters

Webmaster level: Advanced

You may have noticed that the Parameter Handling feature disappeared from the Site configuration > Settings section of Webmaster Tools. Fear not; you can now find it under its new name, URL Parameters! Along with renaming it, we refreshed and improved the feature. We hope you’ll find it even more useful. Configuration of URL parameters made in the old version of the feature will be automatically visible in the new version. Before we reveal all the cool things you can do with URL parameters now, let us remind you (or introduce, if you are new to this feature) of the purpose of this feature and when it may come in handy.

When to use
URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs. This functionality provides a simple way to prevent crawling duplicate content on your site. Now, your site can be crawled more effectively, reducing your bandwidth usage and likely allowing more unique content from your site to be indexed. If you suspect that Googlebot's crawl coverage of the content on your site could be improved, using this feature can be a good idea. But with great power comes great responsibility! You should only use this feature if you're sure about the behavior of URL parameters on your site. Otherwise you might mistakenly prevent some URLs from being crawled, making their content no longer accessible to Googlebot.

A lot more to do
Okay, let’s talk about what’s new and improved. To begin with, in addition to assigning a crawl action to an individual parameter, you can now also describe the behavior of the parameter. You start by telling us whether or not the parameter changes the content of the page. If the parameter doesn’t affect the page’s content then your work is done; Googlebot will choose URLs with a representative value of this parameter and will crawl the URLs with this value. Since the parameter doesn’t change the content, any value chosen is equally good. However, if the parameter does change the content of a page, you can now assign one of four possible ways for Google to crawl URLs with this parameter:

• Let Googlebot decide
• Every URL
• Only crawl URLs with value=x
• No URLs

We also added the ability to provide your own specific value to be used, with the “Only URLs with value=x” option; you’re no longer restricted to the list of values that we provide. Optionally, you can also tell us exactly what the parameter does--whether it sorts, paginates, determines content, etc. One last improvement is that for every parameter, we’ll try to show you a sample of example URLs from your site that Googlebot crawled which contain that particular parameter.

Of the four crawl options listed above, “No URLs” is new and deserves special attention. This option is the most restrictive and, for any given URL, takes precedence over settings of other parameters in that URL. This means that if the URL contains a parameter that is set to the “No URLs” option, this URL will never be crawled, even if other parameters in the URL are set to “Every URL.” You should be careful when using this option. The second most restrictive setting is “Only URLs with value=x.”

Feature in use
Now let’s do something fun and exercise our brains on an example.

- - -

Once upon a time there was an online store, fairyclothes.example.com. The store’s website used parameters in its URLs, and the same content could be reached through multiple URLs. One day the store owner noticed, that too many redundant URLs could be preventing Googlebot from crawling the site thoroughly. So he sent his assistant CuriousQuestionAsker to The GreatWebWizard to get advice on using the URL parameters feature to reduce the duplicate content crawled by Googlebot. The Great WebWizard was famous for his wisdom. He looked at the URL parameters and proposed the following configuration:

Parameter name	Effect on content?	What should Googlebot crawl?
trackingId	None	One representative URL
sortOrder	Sorts	Only URLs with value = ‘lowToHigh’
sortBy	Sorts	Only URLs with value = ‘price’
filterByColor	Narrows	No URLs
itemId	Specifies	Every URL
page	Paginates	Every URL

The CuriousQuestionAsker couldn’t avoid his nature and started asking questions:

CuriousQuestionAsker: You’ve instructed Googlebot to choose a representative URL for trackingId (value to be chosen by Googlebot). Why not select the Only URLs with value=x option and choose the value myself?
Great WebWizard: While crawling the web Googlebot encountered the following URLs that link to your site:

1. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?trackingId=aaa123
2. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?trackingId=aaa124
3. fairyclothes.example.com/trousers/?trackingId=aaa125

Imagine that you were to tell Googebot to only crawl URLs where “trackingId=aaa125”. In that case Googlebot would not crawl URLs 1 and 2 as neither of them has the value aaa125 for trackingId. Their content would neither be crawled nor indexed and none of your inventory of fine skirts would show up in Google’s search results. No, for this case choosing a representative URL is the way to go. Why? Because that tells Googlebot that when it encounters two URLs on the web that differ only in this parameter (as URLs 1 and 2 above do) then it only needs to crawl one of them (either will do) and it will still get all the content. In the example above two URLs will be crawled; either 1 & 3, or 2 & 3. Not a single skirt or trouser will be lost.

CuriousQuestionAsker: What about the sortOrder parameter? I don’t care if the items are listed in ascending or descending order. Why not let Google select a representative value?
Great WebWizard: As Googlebot continues to crawl it may find the following URLs:

1. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
2. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’highToLow’
3. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
4. fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’ highToLow’

Notice how the first pair of URLs (1 & 2) differs only in the value of the sortOrder parameter as do URLs in the second pair (3 & 4). However, URLs 1 and 2 will produce different content: the first showing the least expensive of your skirts while the second showing the priciest. That should be your first hint that using a single representative value is not a good choice for this situation. Moreover, if you let Googlebot choose a single representative from among a set of URLs that differ only in their sortOrder parameter it might choose a different value each time. In the example above, from the first pair of URLs, URL 1 might be chosen (sortOrder=’lowToHigh’). Whereas from the second pair URL 4 might be picked (sortOrder=’ highToLow’). If that were to happen Googlebot would crawl only the least expensive skirts (twice):

• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’lowToHigh’
• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&sortBy=price&sortOrder=’ highToLow’

Your most expensive skirts would not be crawled at all! When dealing with sorting parameters consistency is key. Always sort the same way.

CuriousQuestionAsker: How about the sortBy value?
Great WebWizard: This is very similar to the sortOrder attribute. You want the crawled URLs of your listing to be sorted consistently throughout all the pages, otherwise some of the items may not be visible to Googlebot. However, you should be careful which value you choose. If you sell books as well as shoes in your store, it would be better not to select the value ‘title’ since URLs pointing to shoes never contain ‘sortBy=title’, so they will not be crawled. Likewise setting ‘sortBy=size’ works well for crawling shoes, but not for crawling books. Keep in mind that parameters configuration has influence throughout the whole site.

CuriousQuestionAsker: Why not crawl URLs with parameter filterByColor?
Great WebWizard: Imagine that you have a three-page list of skirts. Some of the skirts are blue, some of them are red and others are green.

• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1
• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2
• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=3

This list is filterable. When a user selects a color, she gets two pages of blue skirts:

• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=1&flterByColor=blue
• fairyclothes.example.com/skirts/?page=2&flterByColor=blue

They seem like new pages (the set of items are different from all other pages), but there is actually no new content on them, since all the blue skirts were already included in the original three pages. There’s no need to crawl URLs that narrow the content by color, since the content served on those URLs was already crawled. There is one important thing to notice here: before you disallow some URLs from being crawled by selecting the “No URLs” option, make sure that Googlebot can access the content in another way. Considering our example, Googlebot needs to be able to find the first three links on your site, and there should be no settings that prevent crawling them.

- - -

If your site has URL parameters that are potentially creating duplicate content issues then you should check out the new URL Parameters feature in Webmaster Tools. Let us know what you think or if you have any questions post them to the Webmaster Help Forum.

Written by Kamila Primke, Software Engineer, Webmaster Tools Team

Validation: measuring and tracking code quality

Webmaster level: All

Google’s Webmaster Team is responsible for most of Google’s informational websites like Google’s Jobs site or Privacy Centers. Maintaining tens of thousands of pages and constantly releasing new Google sites requires more than just passion for the job: it requires quality management.

In this post we won’t talk about all the different tests that can be run to analyze a website; instead we’ll just talk about HTML and CSS validation, and tracking quality over time.

Why does validation matter? There are different perspectives on validation—at Google there are different approaches and priorities too—but the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn’t guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.

While paying a lot of attention to validation, we’ve developed a system to use it as a quality metric to measure how we’re doing on our own pages. Here’s what we do: we give each of our pages a score from 0-10 points, where 0 is worst (pages with 10 or more HTML and CSS validation errors) and 10 is best (0 validation errors). We started doing this more than two years ago, first by taking samples, now monitoring all our pages.

Since the beginning we’ve been documenting the validation scores we were calculating so that we could actually see how we’re doing on average and where we’re headed: is our output improving, or is it getting worse?

Here’s what our data say:

Validation score development 2009-2011.

On average there are about three validation issues per page produced by the Webmaster Team (as we combine HTML and CSS validation in the scoring process, information about the origin gets lost), down from about four issues per page two years ago.

This information is valuable for us as it tells us how close we are to our goal of always shipping perfectly valid code, and it also tells us whether we’re on track or not. As you can see, with the exception of the 2nd quarter of 2009 and the 1st quarter of 2010, we are generally observing a positive trend.

What has to be kept in mind are issues with the integrity of the data, i.e. the sample size as well as “false positives” in the validators. We’re working with the W3C in several ways, including reporting and helping to fix issues in the validators; however, as software can never be perfect, sometimes pages get dinged for non-issues: see for example the border-radius issue that has recently been fixed. We know that this is negatively affecting the validation scores we’re determining, but we have no data yet to indicate how much.

Although we track more than just validation for quality control purposes, validation plays an important role in measuring the health of Google’s informational websites.

How do you use validation in your development process?

Posted by Jens O. Meiert, Google Webmaster Team

Beyond PageRank: Graduating to actionable metrics

Webmaster level: Beginner

Like any curious netizen, I have a Google Alert set up to email me whenever my name is mentioned online. Usually I get a slow trickle of my forum posts, blog posts, and tweets. But by far the most popular topic of these alerts over the past couple years has been my off-handed mention that we removed PageRank distribution data from Webmaster Tools in one of our 2009 releases.

The fact that people are still writing about this almost two years later—usually in the context of “Startling news from Susan Moskwa: ...”—really drives home how much PageRank has become a go-to statistic for some webmasters. Even the most inexperienced site owners I talk with have often heard about, and want to know more about, PageRank (“PR”) and what it means for their site. However, as I said in my fateful forum post, the Webmaster Central team has been telling webmasters for years that they shouldn't focus so much on PageRank as a metric for representing the success of one’s website. Today I’d like to explain this position in more detail and give you some relevant, actionable options to fill your time once you stop tracking your PR!

Why PageRank?
In 2008 Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google, wrote on the Official Google Blog:

“The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.”

PageRank may have distinguished Google as a search engine when it was founded in 1998; but given the rate of change Manber describes—launching “about 9 [improvements] per week on the average”—we’ve had a lot of opportunity to augment and refine our ranking systems over the last decade. PageRank is no longer—if it ever was—the be-all and end-all of ranking.

If you look at Google’s Technology Overview, you’ll notice that it calls out relevance as one of the top ingredients in our search results. So why hasn’t as much ink been spilled over relevance as has been over PageRank? I believe it’s because PageRank comes in a number, and relevance doesn’t. Both relevance and PageRank include a lot of complex factors—context, searcher intent, popularity, reliability—but it’s easy to graph your PageRank over time and present it to your CEO in five minutes; not so with relevance. I believe the succinctness of PageRank is why it’s become such a go-to metric for webmasters over the years; but just because something is easy to track doesn’t mean it accurately represents what’s going on on your website.

What do we really want?
I posit that none of us truly care about PageRank as an end goal. PageRank is just a stand-in for what we really want: for our websites to make more money, attract more readers, generate more leads, more newsletter sign-ups, etc. The focus on PageRank as a success metric only works if you assume that a higher PageRank results in better ranking, then assume that that will drive more traffic to your site, then assume that that will lead to more people doing-whatever-you-want-them-to-do on your site. On top of these assumptions, remember that we only update the PageRank displayed on the Google Toolbar a few times a year, and we may lower the PageRank displayed for some sites if we believe they’re engaging in spammy practices. So the PR you see publicly is different from the number our algorithm actually uses for ranking. Why bother with a number that’s at best three steps removed from your actual goal, when you could instead directly measure what you want to achieve? Finding metrics that are directly related to your business goals allows you to spend your time furthering those goals.

If I don’t track my PageRank, what should I be tracking?
Take a look at metrics that correspond directly to meaningful gains for your website or business, rather than just focusing on ranking signals. Also consider metrics that are updated daily or weekly, rather than numbers (like PageRank) that only change a few times a year; the latter is far too slow for you to reliably understand which of your changes resulted in the number going up or down (assuming you update your site more than a few times a year). Here are three suggestions to get you started, all of which you can track using services like Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools:

1. Conversion rate
2. Bounce rate
3. Clickthrough rate (CTR)

Conversion rate
A “conversion” is when a visitor does what you want them to do on your website. A conversion might be completing a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or downloading a white paper. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who convert (perform a conversion). This is a perfect example of a metric that, unlike PageRank, is directly tied to your business goals. When users convert they’re doing something that directly benefits your organization in a measurable way! Whereas your PageRank is both difficult to measure accurately (see above), and can go up or down without having any direct effect on your business.

Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)
In the context of organic search results, your clickthrough rate is how often people click on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results. A low CTR means that, no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren’t clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don’t think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks better. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site’s titles and snippets in our search results: are they compelling? Do they accurately represent the content of each URL? Do they give searchers a reason to click on them? Here’s some advice for improving your snippets; the HTML suggestions section of Webmaster Tools can also point you to pages that may need help. Again, remember that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if searchers don’t want to click on it.

Entire blogs and books have been dedicated to explaining and exploring web metrics, so you’ll excuse me if my explanations just scrape the surface; analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik’s site is a great place to start if you want to dig deeper into these topics. But hopefully I’ve at least convinced you that there are more direct, effective and controllable ways to measure your site’s success than PageRank.

One final note: Some site owners are interested in their site’s PR because people won’t buy links from their site unless they have a high PageRank. Buying or selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank violates our Webmaster Guidelines and is very likely to have negative consequences for your website, so a) I strongly recommend against it, and b) don’t be surprised if we aren’t interested in helping you raise your PageRank or improve your website when this is your stated goal.

We’d love to hear what metrics you’ve found useful and actionable for your website! Feel free to share your success stories with us in the comments here or in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

+1 reporting in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Webmaster level: All

It’s been a busy week for us here at the Googleplex. First we released +1 buttons to Google search sites globally, then we announced the beginning of the Google+ project.

The +1 button and the Google+ project are both about making it easier to connect with the people you trust online. For the +1 button, that means bringing advice from trusted friends and contacts right into Google search, letting the users who love your web content recommend it at the moment of decision.

But when you’re managing a website, it's usually not real until you can measure it. So we’re happy to say we’ve got one more announcement to make -- today we’re releasing reports that show you the value +1 buttons bring to your site.

First, +1 metrics in Google Webmaster Tools can show you how the +1 button affects the traffic coming to your pages:

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1‘s affect your organic search traffic. You can find out if your clickthrough rate changes when personalized recommendations help your content stand out. Do this by comparing clicks and impressions on search results with and without +1 annotations. We’ll only show statistics on clickthrough rate changes when you have enough impressions for a meaningful comparison.
  
• The Activity report shows you how many times your pages have been +1’d, from buttons both on your site and on other pages (such as Google search).
  
• Finally, the Audience report shows you aggregate geographic and demographic information about the Google users who’ve +1’d your pages. To protect privacy, we’ll only show audience information when a significant number of users have +1’d pages from your site.
  

Use the +1 Metrics menu on the side of the page to view your reports. If you haven’t yet verified your site on Google Webmaster Tools, you can follow these instructions to get access.

Finally, you can also see how users share your content using other buttons besides +1 by using Social Plugin Analytics in Google Analytics. Once you configure the JavaScript for Analytics, the Social Engagement reports help you compare the various types of sharing actions that occur on your pages.

• The Social Engagement report lets you see how site behavior changes for visits that include clicks on +1 buttons or other social actions. This allows you to determine, for example, whether people who +1 your pages during a visit are likely to spend more time on your site than people who don’t.
  
• The Social Actions report lets you track the number of social actions (+1 clicks, Tweets, etc) taken on your site, all in one place.
  
• The Social Pages report allows you to compare the pages on your site to see which are driving the highest the number of social actions.
  

If you’re using the default version of the latest Google Analytics tracking code, when you add +1 buttons to your site, we automatically enable Social Plugin Analytics for +1 in your account. You can enable analytics for other social plugins in just a few simple steps.

Social reporting is just getting started. As people continue to find new ways to interact across the web, we look forward to new reports that help business owners understand the value that social actions are providing to their business. So +1 to data!

UPDATE: 7/11/11 1:44pm PST, corrected references to the social plugin analytics feature.

Written by Dan Rodney, Software Engineer