Google Site Clinic

Uli Lutz, Adel Saoud, Google Search Quality Team

February 2010
Agenda

1.Google Search
2.Google Webmaster Tools
3.Information sources for webmasters
Anatomy of Google search results

• Paid search AdWords advertising program. Paid listings.

• Natural search Ranking determined algorithmically. Unpaid, unbiased
listings.
Our goals

Better search results

• The most objective and relevant search results
• Better information → better web sites
• Better web sites in our index → better search results for users
• Better understanding of web sites → better ability to handle them

Support for all webmasters

• Provide the same tools for all sites, large or small
• 100M+ sites on the web; we need something that scales
Crawling and Indexing
Crawling:
Create a copy of all the visited pages for later
processing by a search engine that will index
the downloaded pages to provide fast
searches. Google’s web crawler has the
username googlebot

Indexing:
Serving: Google determines the content of
Process of returning each page (e.g. PR, keywords)
search results that are and stores static information about
relevant and match the those pages in an index.
user query
So…what does the Googlebot read on a website?

• Text in HTML
• Files such as .doc, .xls, .pdf
• Incoming and outgoing links
• Name of a link („Anchor text“)
• Meta tags (title, description)

Googlebot understands less about:

• Non text- files like movies, images
• Flash (only to a certain extent)
• Java Script (and AJAX)
 Examples of what Google sees on a site
• Non text- files like movies, images …

Alt text should be brief, but

accurate

Image is not displayed for some reason

but at least the alt text is
Webmaster Tools front to back
Explore it all and come back often!
Solving problems with Webmaster Tools

1. One of my sitelinks is outdated!

2. Oh no! I didn't mean for that page to be in Google!
3. I redid my site and now my traffic dropped!
4. My images aren't showing up in search - why?
5. My site's a .com but it's targeted to people in
Ireland!
6. My previous SEO did spammy stuff;
how do I get my site back in Google?
7. My competitors are doing spammy things.
What can I do about it?
Dashboard

Queries your site ranks for

Crawl errors

Links to your site

Tip #1: Content analysis

Title tags, alt attributes and descriptions:

Make them descriptive and accurate
Content analysis

Title

Description

Sitelinks
Content analysis - Sitelinks
Manage your site links
Tip #2: Identify crawl errors

“Make sure search bots can crawl your site”

Crawl errors
Error categories List of URLs Error details
Tip #3:
Give information that users are looking for

“Users type words to find your pages:

Make sure that your site
includes those words within”
How do users find your site?
Top search queries your site ranks for

Top searches for which users reached your site

Tip #4: Set a geographic target

Tell Google the location of your web site:

Improve geographic targeting
Set a geographic target

• If your site targets several different regions (e.g. all English

speakers), you don’t need to set a target
• We also look at TLD and server location
Get the information you need
Make the most of Google resources
Webmaster Central
www.google.ie/webmasters
Webmaster Guidelines
Official Webmaster blog
Help Center
Google Help Forum

Feel free to use "Ringsend" in the subject to raise our attention

Thank you!

www.google.ie/webmasters
Explore it!