Welcome

menu

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Selasa, 15 Juli 2014

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Link to Google Webmaster Central Blog

Promoting modern websites for modern devices in Google search results

Posted: 14 Jul 2014 11:54 PM PDT

Webmaster level: all

A common annoyance for web users is when websites require browser technologies that are not supported by their device. When users access such pages, they may see nothing but a blank space or miss out a large portion of the page's contents.

Starting today, we will indicate to searchers when our algorithms detect pages that may not work on their devices. For example, Adobe Flash is not supported on iOS devices or on Android versions 4.1 and higher, and a page whose contents are mostly Flash may be noted like this:

Developing modern multi-device websites

Fortunately, making websites that work on all modern devices is not that hard: websites can use HTML5 since it is universally supported, sometimes exclusively, by all devices. To help webmasters build websites that work on all types of devices regardless of the type of content they wish to serve, we recently announced two resources:

  • Web Fundamentals: a curated source for modern best practices.
  • Web Starter Kit: a starter framework supporting the Web Fundamentals best practices out of the box.

By following the best practices described in Web Fundamentals you can build a responsive web design, which has long been Google's recommendation for search-friendly sites. Be sure not to block crawling of any Googlebot of the page assets (CSS, JavaScript, and images) using robots.txt or otherwise. Being able to access these external files fully helps our algorithms detect your site's responsive web design configuration and treat it appropriately. You can use the Fetch and render as Google feature in Webmaster Tools to test how our indexing algorithms see your site.

As always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.

Troubleshooting hreflang annotations in Webmaster Tools

Posted: 14 Jul 2014 05:01 AM PDT

If you are targeting users in more than one country, chances are you already heard about rel-alternate-hreflang. If you haven't, in short, this annotation enables Google and other search engines to serve the correct language or regional version of pages to searchers, which can lead to increased user satisfaction.

Making sure the deployed annotations are usable by search engines can be rather difficult, especially on sites with many pages, and site owners all around the world haven't been shy telling us about this. Today we're releasing a feature that should make debugging rel-alternate-hreflang annotations much easier.

The Language Targeting section in the International Targeting feature enables you to identify two of the most common issues with hreflang annotations:
  • Missing return links: annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
    For each error of this kind we report where and when we detected them, as well as where the return link is expected to be.
incorrect_backlinks.png

  • Incorrect hreflang values: The value of the hreflang attribute must either be a language code in ISO 639-1 format such as "es", or a combination of language and country code such as "es-AR", where the country code is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format.
    In case our indexing systems detect language or country codes that are not in these formats, we provide example URLs to help you fix them.

incorrect_language.png

Additionally, we've moved the geographic targeting setting to this part of Webmaster Tools, so that you can find all information relevant to international and multilingual targeting in the same place.

We hope you'll find this new feature useful and that it helps you to identify issues with the rel-hreflang-implementation on your site. If you have comments or questions about the feature, please post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends