Introducing a new Rich Snippets format: Events

Webmaster Level: All

Last year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster.

We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Today, we're excited to kick off the new year by adding support for events.

Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. Here's an example of what the new events Rich Snippets will look like:

The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.

If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we've prepared to help you get started. Please note, however, that marking up your content is not a guarantee that Rich Snippets will show for your site. Just as we did for previous formats, we will take a gradual approach to incorporating the new event snippets to ensure a great user experience along the way.

Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!


Dj Matioka

Running desktop and mobile versions of your site

(This post was largely translated from our Japanese version of the Webmaster Central Blog )

Recently I introduced several methods to ensure your mobile site is properly indexed by Google. Today I'd like to share information useful for webmasters who manage both desktop and mobile phone versions of a site.

One of the most common problems for webmasters who run both mobile and desktop versions of a site is that the mobile version of the site appears for users on a desktop computer, or that the desktop version of the site appears when someone finds them from a mobile device. In dealing with this scenario, here are two viable options:

Redirect mobile users to the correct version

When a mobile user or crawler (like Googlebot-Mobile) accesses the desktop version of a URL, you can redirect them to the corresponding mobile version of the same page. Google notices the relationship between the two versions of the URL and displays the standard version for searches from desktops and the mobile version for mobile searches.

If you redirect users, please make sure that the content on the corresponding mobile/desktop URL matches as closely as possible. For example, if you run a shopping site and there's an access from a mobile phone to a desktop-version URL, make sure that the user is redirected to the mobile version of the page for the same product, and not to the homepage of the mobile version of the site. We occasionally find sites using this kind of redirect in an attempt to boost their search rankings, but this practice only results in a negative user experience, and so should be avoided at all costs.

On the other hand, when there's an access to a mobile-version URL from a desktop browser or by our web crawler, Googlebot, it's not necessary to redirect them to the desktop-version. For instance, Google doesn't automatically redirect desktop users from their mobile site to their desktop site, instead they include a link on the mobile-version page to the desktop version. These links are especially helpful when a mobile site doesn't provide the full functionality of the desktop version -- users can easily navigate to the desktop-version if they prefer.

Switch content based on User-agent

Some sites have the same URL for both desktop and mobile content, but change their format according to User-agent. In other words, both mobile users and desktop users access the same URL (i.e. no redirects), but the content/format changes slightly according to the User-agent. In this case, the same URL will appear for both mobile search and desktop search, and desktop users can see a desktop version of the content while mobile users can see a mobile version of the content.

However, note that if you fail to configure your site correctly, your site could be considered to be cloaking, which can lead to your site disappearing from our search results. Cloaking refers to an attempt to boost search result rankings by serving different content to Googlebot than to regular users. This causes problems such as less relevant results (pages appear in search results even though their content is actually unrelated to what users see/want), so we take cloaking very seriously.

So what does "the page that the user sees" mean if you provide both versions with a URL? As I mentioned in the previous post, Google uses "Googlebot" for web search and "Googlebot-Mobile" for mobile search. To remain within our guidelines, you should serve the same content to Googlebot as a typical desktop user would see, and the same content to Googlebot-Mobile as you would to the browser on a typical mobile device. It's fine if the contents for Googlebot are different from the one for Googlebot-Mobile.

One example of how you could be unintentionally detected for cloaking is if your site returns a message like "Please access from mobile phones" to desktop browsers, but then returns a full mobile version to both crawlers (so Googlebot receives the mobile version). In this case, the page which web search users see (e.g. "Please access from mobile phones") is different from the page which Googlebot crawls (e.g. "Welcome to my site"). Again, we detect cloaking because we want to serve users the same relevant content that Googlebot or Googlebot-Mobile crawled.

Diagram of serving content from your mobile-enabled site

We're working on a daily basis to improve search results and solve problems, but because the relationship between PC and mobile versions of a web site can be nuanced, we appreciate the cooperation of webmasters. Your help will result in more mobile content being indexed by Google, improving the search results provided to users. Thank you for your cooperation in improving the mobile search user experience.


Dj Matioka

Region Tags in Google Search Results

Webmaster Level: All

Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan. However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location. That's why today we're adding region information supplied by webmasters to the green address line on some Google search results.

This feature is easiest to explain through an example. Let's say you've heard about a boxing club in Canada called "Capital City Boxing." You try a search for [capital city boxing] to find out more, but it's hard to tell which result is the one you're looking for. Here's a screen shot:

None of the results provide any location information in the title or snippet, nor do they have a regional TLD (such as .ca for Canada). The only way to find the result you're looking for is to refine your search ([capital city boxing canada] works) or click through the various links to figure it out. Clicking through the first result reveals that there's apparently another "Capital City Boxing" club in Alabama.

Region tags improve search results by providing valuable information about website location right in the green URL line. Continuing our prior example, here's a screen shot of the new region tag (circled in red):

As you can see, the fourth result now includes the region name "Canada" after the green URL, so you can immediately tell that this result relates to the boxing club in Canada. With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for. In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries.

As a webmaster, you can control how this feature works by adjusting your Geographic Targeting settings. Log in to Webmaster Tools and choose Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. From here you can associate a particular country/region with your site. These settings will determine the name that appears as a region tag. You can learn more about using the Geographic Target tool in a prior blog post and in our Help Center.

We currently show region tags only for certain domains such as .com and .net where the location information would otherwise be unclear. We don't show region tags for results on domains like .br for Brazil, because the location is already implied by the green URL line in our default display. In addition, we only display region tags when the region supplied by the site owner is different from the domain where the search was entered. For example, if you do a search from the Singapore Google domain (google.com.sg), we won't show you region tags for all the websites webmasters have targeted to Singapore because we'd end up tagging too many results, and the tag is really most relevant for foreign regions. For the initial release, we anticipate roughly 1% of search results pages will include webpages with a region tag.

We hope you'll find this new feature useful, and we welcome your feedback.


Dj Matioka

New User Agent for News

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.


Dj Matioka

Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication

Webmaster level: Intermediate

We've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we're announcing our support of the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element.



Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

• Choose your preferred domain
  When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves.

• Reduce in-site duplication
  Before starting on cross-site duplicate content questions, make sure to handle duplication within your site first.

• Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
  Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don't forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.

• Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element
  There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

Still have questions?

Q: Do the pages have to be identical?
A: No, but they should be similar. Slight differences are fine.

Q: For technical reasons I can't include a 1:1 mapping for the URLs on my sites. Can I just point the rel="canonical" at the homepage of my preferred site?
A: No; this could result in problems. A mapping from old URL to new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to use rel="canonical".

Q: I'm offering my content / product descriptions for syndication. Do my publishers need to use rel="canonical"?
A: We leave this up to you and your publishers. If the content is similar enough, it might make sense to use rel="canonical", if both parties agree.

Q: My server can't do a 301 (permanent) redirect. Can I use rel="canonical" to move my site?
A: If it's at all possible, you should work with your webhost or web server to do a 301 redirect. Keep in mind that we treat rel="canonical" as a hint, and other search engines may handle it differently. But if a 301 redirect is impossible for some reason, then a rel="canonical" may work for you. For more information, see our guidelines on moving your site.

Q: Should I use a noindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element?
A: No, since those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing - one would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Additionally, it's important that these pages are not disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, otherwise search engine crawlers will not be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

We hope this makes it easier for you to handle duplicate content in a user-friendly way. Are there still places where you feel that duplicate content is causing your sites problems? Let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum!



Dj Matioka

Microdata support for Rich Snippets

Webmaster Level: All

HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.

Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.

Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of “L’Amourita Pizza”:

Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author and date of the review, and the rating:

Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.

As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support -- including which item types and item properties are understood by Google -- is specified in our rich snippets documentation as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to ensure a great user experience.

To get started, here are some helpful links:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Dj Matioka

Working with multi-regional websites

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

Did you know that a majority of users surveyed feel that having information in their own language was more important than a low price? Living in a non-English-speaking country, I've seen friends and family members explicitly look for and use local and localized websites—properly localized sites definitely have an advantage with users. Google works hard to show users the best possible search results. Many times those are going to be pages that are localized, for the user's location and/or in the user's language.

If you're planning to take the time to create and maintain a localized version of your website, making it easy to recognize and find is a logical part of that process. In this blog post series, we'll take a look at what is involved with multi-regional and multi-lingual websites from a search engine point of view. A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in various regions (generally different countries); we call it multilingual when it is available in multiple languages, and sometimes, the website targets both multiple regions and is in multiple languages. Let's start with some general preparations and then look at websites that target multiple regions.

Preparing for global websites

Expanding a website to cover multiple regions and/or languages can be challenging. By creating multiple versions of your website, any issues with the base version will be multiplied; make sure that you have everything working properly before you start. Given that this generally means you'll suddenly be working with a multiplied number of URLs, don't forget that you'll need appropriate infrastructure to support the website.

Planning multi-regional websites

When planning sites for multiple regions (usually countries), don't forget to research legal or administrative requirements that might come into play first. These requirements may determine how you proceed, for instance whether or not you would be eligible to use a country-specific domain name.

All websites start with domain names; when it comes to domain names, Google differentiates between two types of domain names:

• ccTLDs (country-code top level domain names): These are tied to a specific country (for example .de for Germany, .cn for China). Users and search engines use this as a strong sign that your website is explicitly for a certain country.
• gTLDs (generic top level domain names): These are not tied to a specific country. Examples of gTLds are .com, .net, .org, .museum. Google sees regional top level domain names such as .eu and .asia as gTLDs, since they cannot be tied to a specific country. We also treat some vanity ccTLDs (such as .tv, .me, etc.) as gTLDs as we've found that users and webmasters frequently see these as being more generic than country-targeted (we don't have a complete list of such vanity ccTLDs that we treat as gTLDs as it may change over time). You can set geotargeting for websites with gTLDs using the Webmaster Tools Geographic Target setting.

Geotargeting factors

Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):

1. Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
   or
   Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
2. Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
3. Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).

Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.

URL structures

The first three elements used for geotargeting are strongly tied to the server and to the URLs used. It's difficult to determine geotargeting on a page by page basis, so it makes sense to consider using a URL structure that makes it easy to segment parts of the website for geotargeting. Here are some of the possible URL structures with pros and cons with regards to geotargeting:

ccTLDs eg: example.de, example.fr	Subdomains with gTLDs eg: de.site.com, fr.site.com, etc.	Subdirectories with gTLDs eg: site.com/de/, site.com/fr/, etc.	URL parameters eg: site.com?loc=de, ?country=france, etc.
pros (+) - clear geotargeting - server location is irrelevant - easy separation of sites - legal requirements (sometimes)	pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - allows different server locations - easy separation of sites	pros (+) - easy to set up - can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting - low maintenance (same host)	pros (+) (not recommended)
cons (-) - expensive (+ availability) - more infrastructure - ccTLD requirements (sometimes)	cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is "de" the language or country?)	cons (-) - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - single server location - separation of sites harder	cons (-) - segmentation based on the URL is difficult - users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone - geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible

As you can see, geotargeting is not an exact science (even sites using country-code top level domain names can be global in nature), so it's important that you plan for the users from the "wrong" location. One way to do this could be to show links on all pages for users to select their region and language of choice. We'll look at some other possible solutions further on in this blog post series.

Dealing with duplicate content on global websites

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible for all pages and variations from the start. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both "example.de/" and "example.com/de/" show German language content for users in Germany), it would make sense to choose a preferred version and to redirect (or use the "rel=canonical" link element) appropriately.

Do you already have a website that targets multiple regions or do you have questions about the process of planning one? Come to the Help Forum and join the discussion. In following posts, we'll take a look at multi-lingual websites and then look at some special situations that can arise with global websites. Bis bald!



Dj Matioka

Working with multilingual websites

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

A multilingual website is any website that offers content in more than one language. Examples of multilingual websites might include a Canadian business with an English and a French version of its site, or a blog on Latin American soccer available in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Usually, it makes sense to have a multilingual website when your target audience consists of speakers of different languages. If your blog on Latin American soccer aims to reach the Brazilian audience, you may choose to publish it only in Portuguese. But if you’d like to reach soccer fans from Argentina also, then providing content in Spanish could help you with that.

Google and language recognition

Google tries to determine the main languages of each one of your pages. You can help to make language recognition easier if you stick to only one language per page and avoid side-by-side translations. Although Google can recognize a page as being in more than one language, we recommend using the same language for all elements of a page: headers, sidebars, menus, etc.

Keep in mind that Google ignores all code-level language information, from “lang” attributes to Document Type Definitions (DTD). Some web editing programs create these attributes automatically, and therefore they aren’t very reliable when trying to determine the language of a webpage.

Someone who comes to Google and does a search in their language expects to find localized search results, and this is where you, as a webmaster, come in: if you’re going to localize, make it visible in the search results with some of our tips below.

The anatomy of a multilingual site: URL structure

There's no need to create special URLs when developing a multilingual website. Nonetheless, your users might like to identify what section of your website they’re on just by glancing at the URL. For example, the following URLs let users know that they’re on the English section of this site:

http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html
http://en.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html

While these other URLs let users know that they’re viewing the same page in French:

http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html
http://fr.example.ca/mountain-bikes.html

Additionally, this URL structure will make it easier for you to analyze the indexing of your multilingual content.

If you want to create URLs with non-English characters, make sure to use UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 encoded URLs should be properly escaped when linked from within your content. Should you need to escape your URLs manually, you can easily find an online URL encoder that will do this for you. For example, if I wanted to translate the following URL from English to French,

http://example.ca/fr/mountain-bikes.html

It might look something like this:

http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html

Since this URL contains one non-English character (é), this is what it would look like properly escaped for use in a link on your pages:

http://example.ca/fr/v%C3%A9lo-de-montagne

Crawling and indexing your multilingual website

We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam. More importantly, the point of making a multilingual website is to reach a larger audience by providing valuable content in several languages. If your users can’t understand an automated translation or if it feels artificial to them, you should ask yourself whether you really want to present this kind of content to them.

If you’re going to localize, make it easy for Googlebot to crawl all language versions of your site. Consider cross-linking page by page. In other words, you can provide links between pages with the same content in different languages. This can also be very helpful to your users. Following our previous example, let’s suppose that a French speaker happens to land on http://example.ca/en/mountain-bikes.html; now, with one click he can get to http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html where he can view the same content in French.

To make all of your site's content more crawlable, avoid automatic redirections based on the user's perceived language. These redirections could prevent users (and search engines) from viewing all the versions of your site.

And last but not least, keep the content for each language on separate URLs - don't use cookies to show translated versions.

Working with character encodings

Google directly extracts character encodings from HTTP headers, HTML page headers, and content. There isn’t much you need to do about character encoding, other than watching out for conflicting information - for example, between content and headers. While Google can recognize different character encodings, we recommend that you use UTF-8 on your website whenever possible.

If your tongue gets twisted...

Now that you know all of this, your tongue may get twisted when you speak many languages, but your website doesn’t have to!

For more information, read our post on multi-regional sites and stay tuned for our next post, where we'll delve into special situations that may arise when working with global websites. Until then, don't hesitate to drop by the Help Forum and join the discussion!



Dj Matioka

URL removal explained, Part I: URLs & directories

Webmaster level: All

There's a lot of content on the Internet these days. At some point, something may turn up online that you would rather not have out there—anything from an inflammatory blog post you regret publishing, to confidential data that accidentally got exposed. In most cases, deleting or restricting access to this content will cause it to naturally drop out of search results after a while. However, if you urgently need to remove unwanted content that has gotten indexed by Google and you can't wait for it to naturally disappear, you can use our URL removal tool to expedite the removal of content from our search results as long as it meets certain criteria (which we'll discuss below).

We've got a series of blog posts lined up for you explaining how to successfully remove various types of content, and common mistakes to avoid. In this first post, I'm going to cover a few basic scenarios: removing a single URL, removing an entire directory or site, and reincluding removed content. I also strongly recommend our previous post on managing what information is available about you online.

Removing a single URL

In general, in order for your removal requests to be successful, the owner of the URL(s) in question—whether that's you, or someone else—must have indicated that it's okay to remove that content. For an individual URL, this can be indicated in any of three ways:

• block the page from crawling via a robots.txt file
• block the page from indexing via a noindex meta tag
• indicate that the page no longer exists by returning a 404 or 410 status code

Before submitting a removal request, you can check whether the URL is correctly blocked:

• robots.txt: You can check whether the URL is correctly disallowed using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.
• noindex meta tag: You can use Fetch as Googlebot to make sure the meta tag appears somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags. If you want to check a page you can't verify in Webmaster Tools, you can open the URL in a browser, go to View > Page source, and make sure you see the meta tag between the <head> and </head> tags.
• 404 / 410 status code: You can use Fetch as Googlebot, or tools like Live HTTP Headers or web-sniffer.net to verify whether the URL is actually returning the correct code. Sometimes "deleted" pages may say "404" or "Not found" on the page, but actually return a 200 status code in the page header; so it's good to use a proper header-checking tool to double-check.

If unwanted content has been removed from a page but the page hasn't been blocked in any of the above ways, you will not be able to completely remove that URL from our search results. This is most common when you don't own the site that's hosting that content. We cover what to do in this situation in a subsequent post. in Part II of our removals series.

If a URL meets one of the above criteria, you can remove it by going to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals, entering the URL that you want to remove, and selecting the "Webmaster has already blocked the page" option. Note that you should enter the URL where the content was hosted, not the URL of the Google search where it's appearing. For example, enter
   http://www.example.com/embarrassing-stuff.html
not
   http://www.google.com/search?q=embarrassing+stuff

This article has more details about making sure you're entering the proper URL. Remember that if you don't tell us the exact URL that's troubling you, we won't be able to remove the content you had in mind.

Removing an entire directory or site

In order for a directory or site-wide removal to be successful, the directory or site must be disallowed in the site's robots.txt file. For example, in order to remove the http://www.example.com/secret/ directory, your robots.txt file would need to include:
   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /secret/
It isn't enough for the root of the directory to return a 404 status code, because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 but still serve out files underneath it. Using robots.txt to block a directory (or an entire site) ensures that all the URLs under that directory (or site) are blocked as well. You can test whether a directory has been blocked correctly using either the Fetch as Googlebot or Test robots.txt features in Webmaster Tools.

Only verified owners of a site can request removal of an entire site or directory in Webmaster Tools. To request removal of a directory or site, click on the site in question, then go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL. If you enter the root of your site as the URL you want to remove, you'll be asked to confirm that you want to remove the entire site. If you enter a subdirectory, select the "Remove directory" option from the drop-down menu.

Reincluding content

You can cancel removal requests for any site you own at any time, including those submitted by other people. In order to do so, you must be a verified owner of this site in Webmaster Tools. Once you've verified ownership, you can go to Site configuration > Crawler access > Remove URL > Removed URLs (or > Made by others) and click "Cancel" next to any requests you wish to cancel.

Still have questions? Stay tuned for the rest of our series on removing content from Google's search results. If you can't wait, much has already been written about URL removals, and troubleshooting individual cases, in our Help Forum. If you still have questions after reading others' experiences, feel free to ask. Note that, in most cases, it's hard to give relevant advice about a particular removal without knowing the site or URL in question. We recommend sharing your URL by using a URL shortening service so that the URL you're concerned about doesn't get indexed as part of your post; some shortening services will even let you disable the shortcut later on, once your question has been resolved.

Edit: Read the rest of this series:
Part II: Removing & updating cached content
Part III: Removing content you don't own
Part IV: Tracking requests, what not to remove

Companion post: Managing what information is available about you online

Dj Matioka

Help Google index your videos

Webmaster Level: All

The single best way to make Google aware of all your videos on your website is to create and maintain a Video Sitemap. Video Sitemaps provide Google with essential information about your videos, including the URLs for the pages where the videos can be found, the titles of the videos, keywords, thumbnail images, durations, and other information. The Sitemap also allows you to define the period of time for which each video will be available. This is particularly useful for content that has explicit viewing windows, so that we can remove the content from our index when it expires.

Once your Sitemap is created, you can can submit the URL of the Sitemap file in Google Webmaster Tools or through your robots.txt file.

Once we have indexed a video, it may appear in our web search results in what we call a Video Onebox (a cluster of videos related to the queried topic) and in our video search property, Google Videos. A video result is immediately recognizable by its thumbnail, duration, and a description.

As an example, this is what a video result from CNN.com looks like on Google:

We encourage those of you with videos to submit Video Sitemaps and to keep them updated with your new content. Please also visit our recently updated Video Sitemap Help Center, and utilize our Sitemap Help Forum. If you've submitted a Video Sitemap file via Webmaster Tools and want to share your experiences or problems, you can do so here.

Dj Matioka

To slash or not to slash

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

That is the question we hear often. Onward to the answers! Historically, it’s common for URLs with a trailing slash to indicate a directory, and those without a trailing slash to denote a file:

http://example.com/foo/ (with trailing slash, conventionally a directory)
http://example.com/foo (without trailing slash, conventionally a file)

But they certainly don’t have to. Google treats each URL above separately (and equally) regardless of whether it’s a file or a directory, or it contains a trailing slash or it doesn’t contain a trailing slash.

Different content on / and no-/ URLs okay for Google, often less ideal for users

From a technical, search engine standpoint, it’s certainly permissible for these two URL versions to contain different content. Your users, however, may find this configuration horribly confusing -- just imagine if www.google.com/webmasters and www.google.com/webmasters/ produced two separate experiences.

For this reason, trailing slash and non-trailing slash URLs often serve the same content. The most common case is when a site is configured with a directory structure:
http://example.com/parent-directory/child-directory/

Your site’s configuration and your options

You can do a quick check on your site to see if the URLs:

1. http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>/
   (with trailing slash)
2. http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>
   (no trailing slash)

don’t both return a 200 response code, but that one version redirects to the other.

• If only one version can be returned (i.e., the other redirects to it), that’s great! This behavior is beneficial because it reduces duplicate content. In the particular case of redirects to trailing slash URLs, our search results will likely show the version of the URL with the 200 response code (most often the trailing slash URL) -- regardless of whether the redirect was a 301 or 302.


• If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:
  • Consider changing this behavior (more info below) to reduce duplicate content and improve crawl efficiency.
  • Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay. :)
  • Rest assured that for your root URL specifically, http://example.com is equivalent to http://example.com/ and can’t be redirected even if you’re Chuck Norris.

Steps for serving only one URL version

What if your site serves duplicate content on these two URLs:

http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>/
http://<your-domain-here>/<some-directory-here>

meaning that both URLs return 200 (neither has a redirect or contains rel=”canonical”), and you want to change the situation?

1. Choose one URL as the preferred version. If your site has a directory structure, it’s more conventional to use a trailing slash with your directory URLs (e.g., example.com/directory/ rather than example.com/directory), but you’re free to choose whichever you like.


2. Be consistent with the preferred version. Use it in your internal links. If you have a Sitemap, include the preferred version (and don’t include the duplicate URL).


3. Use a 301 redirect from the duplicate to the preferred version. If that’s not possible, rel=”canonical” is a strong option. rel=”canonical” works similarly to a 301 for Google’s indexing purposes, and other major search engines as well.


4. Test your 301 configuration through Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools. Make sure your URLs:
   http://example.com/foo/
   http://example.com/foo
   are behaving as expected. The preferred version should return 200. The duplicate URL should 301 to the preferred URL.


5. Check for Crawl errors in Webmaster Tools, and, if possible, your webserver logs as a sanity check that the 301s are implemented.


6. Profit! (just kidding) But you can bask in the sunshine of your efficient server configuration, warmed by the knowledge that your site is better optimized.

Dj Matioka

URL removal explained, Part IV: Tracking your requests & what not to remove

Webmaster Level: All

In this final installation in our URL removal series, let's talk about following up on your removal requests, as well as when not to use Google's URL removal tool. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the previous posts in this series:
Part I: Removing URLs & directories
Part II: Removing & updating cached content
Part III: Removing content you don't own
Companion post: Managing what information is available about you online

Understanding the status of your requests

Once you've submitted a removal request, it will appear in your list of requests. You can check the status of your requests at any time to see whether the content has been removed, or whether the request is still or pending or was denied.



If a request was denied, you should see a "Learn more" link next to it explaining why that particular request was denied. Since different types of removals have different requirements, the reason why a particular request was denied can vary. The "Learn more" link should help you figure out what you need to change in order to make your request successful. For example, you may need to change the URL in question so that it meets the requirements for the type of removal you requested; or, if you can't do that, you may need to request a different type of removal (one whose requirements your URL currently meets).

If a request has been marked "Removed" but you still see that content in search results, check the following:

• Is the URL that's appearing in search results the exact same URL that you submitted for removal? It's fairly common for the same, or similar, content to appear on multiple URLs on a site. You may have successfully removed one URL, but still see others containing that same content.
     Solution: Request removal of the other URL(s) in question. See this article for help.


• Keep in mind that URLs are case sensitive, so requesting removal of http://www.example.com/embarrassingstuff.html is not the same as requesting removal of http://www.example.com/EmbarrassingStuff.html
     Solution: Request removal of the exact URL(s) that appear in search results, including the same capitalization. See this article for help.


• When a request is marked "Removed," that can mean different things depending on what type of request you submitted. If you requested removal of an entire URL, then "Removed" should mean that that entire URL no longer appears in our search results. If you requested removal of the cached copy of a URL, "Removed" means that the cached copy has been removed and will no longer appear in search results; but the URL itself may still appear.
     Solution: Double-check what type of removal you requested by looking at the "Removal Type" column. If you requested a cache removal but you want the entire URL gone, make sure the URL meets the requirements for complete removal and then file a new request for complete removal of the URL.

When not to use the URL removal tool

• To clean up cruft, like old pages that 404.
  The tool is intended for URLs that urgently need to be removed, such as confidential data that was accidentally exposed. If you recently made changes to your site and just have some outdated URLs in the index, Google's crawlers will see this as we recrawl your URLs, and those pages will naturally drop out of our search results over time. There's no need to request an urgent removal through this tool.


• To remove crawl errors from your Webmaster Tools account.
  The removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, not from your Webmaster Tools account. There's currently no way for you to manually remove URLs from this report; they will drop out naturally over time as we stop crawling URLs that repeatedly 404.


• To "start from scratch" with your site.
  If you're worried that your site may have a penalty, or you want to "start from scratch" after purchasing a domain from someone else, we don't recommend trying to use the URL removal tool to remove your entire site and then "start over." Search engines gather a lot of information from other sites (such as who links to you, or what words they use to describe your site) and use this to help understand your site. Even if we could remove everything we currently know about your site, a lot of it would come back exactly the same once we'd recrawled all the other sites that help us understand your site and put it in context. If you're worried that your domain has some bad history, we recommend filing a reconsideration request letting us know what you're worried about and what has changed (such as that you've acquired the domain from someone else, or that you've changed certain aspects of your site).


• To take your site "offline" after hacking.
  If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, you can use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created, e.g., http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed; instead, simply clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site so that we can reindex the new, cleaned-up content as soon as possible. This article contains more details on how to deal with hacking.


• To get the right "version" of your site indexed.
  When a request to remove https://www.example.com/tattoo.html is accepted, http://www.example.com/tattoo.html is also removed. The same is true of the www and non-www versions of your URL or site. This is because the same content is often available at each of these URLs and we realize that most webmasters and searchers don't want these duplicates appearing in search results. In short, the URL removal tool should not be used as a canonicalization tool. It won't keep your favorite version, it'll remove all versions (http/https and www/non-www) of a URL.

We hope this series has answered your questions about removing content from Google's search results, and helped you troubleshoot any issues that may arise. Join us in our Help Forum if you still have questions.



Dj Matioka

Our new search index: Caffeine

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Today, we're announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Some background for those of you who don't build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need. (Here's a good explanation of how it all works.)

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, we've built Caffeine. The image below illustrates how our old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

We've built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it's a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.

Dj Matioka

Google Videos best practices

Webmaster Level: All

We'd like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

• Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt
  
  • Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn't blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:
    
    • Playpage
    • Content and player
    • Thumbnail
    More information about robots.txt.
• Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in
  
  • Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can't be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don't need to include this.
• Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed -- protect the user experience
  
  • Sometimes publishers take videos down but don't signal to search engines that they've done so. This can result in the search engine's index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they're taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn't exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.
    
    To signal that a video has been removed,
    
    1. Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
    2. Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the <video:expiration_date> element) or mRSS feed (<dcterms:valid> tag) submitted to Google.

For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search answers check out our Help Forum.



Dj Matioka

URL removals explained, part II: Removing sensitive text from a page

Webmaster level: All

Change can happen—sometimes, as we saw in our previous post on URL removals, you may completely block or remove a page from your site. Other times you might only change parts of a page, or remove certain pieces of text. Depending on how frequently a page is being crawled, it can take some time before these changes get reflected in our search results. In this blog post we'll look at the steps you can take if we're still showing old, removed content in our search results, either in the form of a "snippet" or on the cached page that's linked to from the search result. Doing this makes sense when the old content contains sensitive information that needs to be removed quickly—it's not necessary to do this when you just update a website normally.

As an example, let's look at the following fictitious search result:

Walter E. Coyote	< Title
Chief Development Officer at Acme Corp 1948-2003: worked on the top secret velocitus incalculii capturing device which has shown potential ...	< Snippet ...
www.example.com/about/waltercoyote - Cached	< URL + link to cached page

To change the content shown in the snippet (or on the linked cached page), you'll first need to change the content on the actual (live) page. Unless a page's publicly visible content is changed, Google's automatic processes will continue to show parts of the original content in our search results.

Once the page's content has been changed, there are several options available to make those changes visible in our search results:

1. Wait for Googlebot to re-crawl and re-index the page
   This is the natural method for how most content is updated at Google. Sometimes it can take a fairly long time, depending on how frequently Googlebot currently crawls the page in question. Once we've re-crawled and re-indexed the page, the old content will usually not be visible as it'll be replaced by the current content. Provided Googlebot is not blocked from crawling the page in question (either by robots.txt or by not being able to access the server properly), you don't have to do anything special for this to take place. It's generally not possible to speed up crawling and indexing, as these processes are fully automated and depend on many external factors.
2. Use Google's public URL removal tool to request removal of content that has been removed from someone else's webpage
   Using this tool, it's necessary to enter the exact URL of the page that has been modified, select the "Content has been removed from the page" option, and then specify one or more words that have been completely removed from that page.
   
   
   
   Note that none of the words you enter can appear on the page; even if a word has been removed from one part of the page, your request will be denied if that word still appears on another part of the page. Be sure to choose a word (or words) that no longer appear anywhere on the page. If, in the above example, you removed "top secret velocitus incalculii capturing device," you should submit those words and not something like "my project." However, if the word "top" or "device" still exists anywhere on the page, the request would be denied. To maximize your chances of success, it's often easiest to just enter one word that you're sure no longer appears anywhere on the page.
   
   Once your request has been processed and it's found that the submitted word(s) no longer appear on the page, the search result will no longer show a snippet, nor will the cached page be available. The title and the URL of the page will still be visible, and the entry may still appear in search results for searches related to the content that has been removed (such as searches for [velocitus incalculii]), even if those words no longer appear in the snippet. However, once the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed, the new snippet and cached page can be visible in our search results.
   
   Keep in mind that we will need to verify removal of the word(s) by viewing the page. If the page no longer exists and the server is returning a proper 404 or 410 HTTP result code, making us unable to view the page, you may be better off requesting removal of the page altogether.
3. Use Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool to request removal of information on a page from your website
   If you have access to the website in question and have verified ownership of it in Google Webmaster Tools, you can use the URL removal tool there (under Site Configuration > Crawler access) to request that the snippet and the cached page be removed until the page has been re-crawled. To use this tool, you only need to submit the exact URL of the page (you won't need to specify any removed words). Once your request has been processed, we'll remove the snippet and the cached page from search results. The title and the URL of the page will still be visible, and the page may also continue to rank in search results for queries related to content that has been removed. After the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed, the search result with an updated snippet and cached page (based on the new content) can be visible.

Google indexes and ranks items based not only on the content of a page, but also on other external factors, such as the inbound links to the URL. Because of this, it's possible for a URL to continue to appear in search results for content that no longer exists on the page, even after the page has been re-crawled and re-indexed. While the URL removal tool can remove the snippet and the cached page from a search result, it will not change or remove the title of the search result, change the URL that is shown, or prevent the page from being shown for searches based on any current or previous content. If this is important to you, you should make sure that the URL fulfills the requirements for a complete removal from our search results.

Removing non-HTML content

If the changed content is not in (X)HTML (for example if an image, a Flash file or a PDF file has been changed), you won't be able to use the cache removal tool. So if it's important that the old content no longer be visible in search results, the fastest solution would be to change the URL of the file so that the old URL returns a 404 HTTP result code and use the URL removal tool to remove the old URL. Otherwise, if you chose to allow Google to naturally refresh your information, know that previews of non-HTML content (such as Quick View links for PDF files) can take longer to update after recrawling than normal HTML pages would.

Proactively preventing the appearance of snippets or cached versions

As a webmaster, you have the option to use robots meta tags to proactively prevent the appearance of snippets or cached versions without using our removal tools. While we don't recommend this as a default approach (the snippet can help users recognize a relevant search result faster, and a cached page gives them the ability to view your content even in the unexpected event of your server not being available), you can use the "nosnippet" robots meta tag to prevent showing of a snippet, or the "noarchive" robots meta tag to disable caching of a page. Note that if this is changed on existing and known pages, Googlebot will need to re-crawl and re-index those pages before this change becomes visible in search results.

We hope this blog post helps to make some of the processes behind the URL removal tool for updated pages a bit clearer. In our next blog post we'll look at ways to request removal of content that you don't own; stay tuned!

As always, we welcome your feedback and questions in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Edit: Read the rest of this series:
Part I: Removing URLs & directories
Part III: Removing content you don't own
Part IV: Tracking requests, what not to remove

Companion post: Managing what information is available about you online






Dj Matioka

Google now indexes SVG

Webmaster Level: All

You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

We index SVG content whether it is in a standalone file or embedded directly in HTML. The web is big, so it may take some time before we crawl and index most SVG files, but as of today you may start seeing them in your search results. If you want to see it yourself, try searching for [sitemap site:fastsvg.com] or [HideShow site:svg-whiz.com]

If you host SVG files and you wish to exclude them from Google’s search results, you can use the “X-Robots-Tag: noindex” directive in the HTTP header.

Check out Webmaster Central for a full list of file types we support.



Dj Matioka

Unifying content under multilingual templates

Webmaster Level: Advanced

Update: This markup can now be used for multilingual and multi-regional content in general. More information.

If you have a global site containing pages where the:

• template (i.e. side navigation, footer) is machine-translated into various languages,
• main content remains unchanged, creating largely duplicate pages,

and sometimes search results direct users to the wrong language, we’d like to help you better target your international/multilingual audience through:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="a-different-language" href="http://url-of-the-different-language-page" />

As you know, when rel=”canonical” or a 301 response code is properly implemented, we become more precise in clustering information from duplicate URLs, such as consolidating their linking properties. Now, when rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” is included in conjunction with rel=”canonical” or 301s, not only will our indexing and linking properties be more accurate, but we can better serve users the URL of their preferred language.

Sample configuration that’s prime for rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

How does this all work? Imagine that you’re the proud owner of example.com, a site called “The Network” where you allow users to create their very own profile. Let’s say Javier Lopez, a Spanish speaker, makes his page at http://es.example.com/javier-lopez:

Because you’re trying to target a multilingual audience, once Javier hits “Publish,” his profile becomes immediately available in other languages with the translated templates. Also, each of the new language versions is served on a separate URL.

Two localized versions, http://en.example.com/javier-lopez in English and http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez in French

Background on the old issue: duplicate content caused by language variations

The configuration above allowed visitors speaking different languages to more easily interpret the content, but for search engines it was slightly problematic: there are three URLs (English, French, and Spanish versions) for the same main content in Javier’s profile. Webmasters wanted to avoid duplicate content issues (such as PageRank dilution) from these multiple versions and still ensure that we would serve the appropriate version to the user.

A new solution for localized templates

First of all, just to be clear, the strategy we’re proposing isn’t appropriate for multilingual sites that completely translate each page’s content. We’re trying to specifically improve the situation where the template is localized but the main content of a page remains duplicate/identical across language/country variants.

Before we get into the specific steps, our prior advice remains applicable:

• Have one URL associated with one piece of content. We recommend against using the same URL for multiple languages, such as serving both French and English versions on example.com/page.html based on user information (IP address, Accept-Language HTTP header).


• When multiple languages are at play, it’s best to include the language or country indication in the URL, e.g., example.com/en/welcome.html and example.com/fr/accueil.html (which specify “en” and “fr”) rather than example.com/welcome.html and example.com/accueil.html (which don’t contain an explicit country/language specification). More suggestions can be found in our blog posts about designing localized URLs and multilingual sites.

For the new feature:

Step 1: Select the proper canonical.
The canonical designates the version of your content you’d like indexed and returned to users.

The first step towards making the right content indexable is to pick one canonical URL that best reflects the genuine locale of the page’s main content. In the example above, since Javier is a Spanish-speaking user and he created his profile on es.example.com, http://es.example.com/javier-lopez is the logical canonical. The title and snippet in all locales will be selected from the canonical URL.

Once you have the canonical URL picked out, you can either:

A. 301 (permanent redirect) from the language variants to the canonical

As an example, if a French speaker visits fr.example.com/javier-lopez (not the canonical), have this page include a cookie to remember the user's language preference of French. Then permanently redirect from fr.example.com/javier-lopez to the canonical at es.example.com/javier-lopez. Because of the cookie, es.example.com/javier-lopez will still render its boilerplate in French (even on the es.example.com subdomain!). Similarly, en.example.com/javier-lopez would set the value of this cookie to English and then 301 redirect to es.example.com/javier-lopez.

Including a language selection link is also helpful should a multilingual user prefer a different experience of your site.

B. Use rel=”canonical”

On the other language variants, include a link rel=”canonical” tag pointing to your chosen canonical. In our example, since the canonical for Javier’s profile is the Spanish version, the English and French pages (and optionally even the Spanish page itself) would include <link rel=”canonical” href="http://es.example.com/javier-lopez" />.

Cookies are not involved in this setup. Therefore, a French speaker will be served es.example.com/javier-lopez with a Spanish template. Implement step 2 if you want the French speakers to be served the French version at fr.example.com/javier-lopez in Google search results.

Step 2: In the canonical URL, specify the various language versions via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its hreflang attribute.

rel=”alternate” URLs can be displayed in search results in accordance with a user’s language preference. The title and snippet, however, remain generated from the canonical URL (as is customary with rel=”canonical”), not from the content of any rel=”alternate”.

You can help Google display the correctly localized variant of your URL to our international users by adding the following tags to http://es.example.com/javier-lopez, the selected canonical:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />

rel=”alternate” indicates that the URL contains an alternate version located at the URI of the href value. hreflang identifies the language code of the alternate URL and can be specified with ISO-639.

Please note: If your site supports many languages and you’re worried about the increased file size when declaring numerous rel=”alternate” URLs, please see our Help Center article about configuring rel=”alternate” with file size constraints.

Once the steps are completed, the configuration on “The Network” would look like this:

• http://en.example.com/javier-lopez

  either 301s with a language cookie or contains <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” />

• http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez

  either 301s with a language cookie or contains <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://es.example.com/javier-lopez” />

• http://es.example.com/javier-lopez

  is the canonical and contains
  <link rel=”alternate” hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/javier-lopez" />
  and
  <link rel=”alternate” hreflang="fr" href="http://fr.example.com/javier-lopez" />

Results of the above implementation

• When your content is returned in search results, users will likely see the URL that corresponds to their language preference, whether or not it’s the canonical. (Good news!) This is because with with rel=”canonical” or a 301 redirect, we can cluster the language variations with the canonical. With rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” at serve-time we can deliver the URL of the most appropriate language to the user: English speakers will be served en.example.com/javier-lopez as the result for the URL in Javier’s profile, French speakers will see fr.example.com/javier-lopez, Spanish speakers will see es.example.com/javier-lopez.


• By implementing step 1, only content from the canonical version will be available for users in search results (i.e. content from the duplicate versions won’t be searchable). Because the Spanish version es.example.com/javier-lopez is the canonical, queries that include template content from this page, e.g. [Javier Lopez familia] -- when using any language preference -- may return his profile (content from the canonical version). On the other hand, queries that include template content of the “duplicate” version, e.g. [Javier Lopez family], are less likely to return his profile page. If you would like the other language versions indexed separately and searchable, avoid using rel=”canonical” and rel=”alternate”.


• Indexing properties, such as linking information, from the duplicate language variants will be consolidated with the canonical.

To recap (one more time, with feeling!)

For sites that have their template localized but the keep their pages’ main content untranslated:

Step 1: Once you have the canonical picked out you can use either rel=”canonical” or a 301 (permanent redirect) from the various localized pages to the canonical URL.

Step 2: On the canonical URL, specify the language-specific duplicated content with different boilerplate via the rel=”alternate” link tag, using its hreflang attribute. This way, Google can show the correctly-localized variant of your URLs to our international users.

We realize this can be a little complicated, so if you have questions, please ask in our webmaster forum!



Dj Matioka