A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags. Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below. ‘ganex': > How does one do for INDIA. > As there are many languages spoken here. > My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA. > For Hyderabad - I want in Urdu & Telugu and for Chennai I want in Tamil > for Bengaluru I want in Kannada. > For North I want in Hindi.’ We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages. To include the transliteration API, first you need the AJAX script. This script tag will load the google.load function, which lets you load the individual Google APIs. For loading Google Transliteration API, call to google.load looks like this: google.load("elements", "1", { packages: "transliteration" }); When it comes to targeting, don't forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!). We also have our own official Orkut webmaster community! Here users can share thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues. Sign up for our Orkut community now and if you have any additional thoughts we'd love to hear about them. Cheers, Jayashree and Zareen, Search Quality Team, Google India More... Less...

Since we launched enhanced indexing with the Custom Search platform earlier this year, webmasters who submit Sitemaps to Webmaster Tools get special treatment: Custom Search recognizes the submitted Sitemaps and indexes URLs from these Sitemaps into a separate index for higher quality Custom Search results. We analyze your Custom Search Engines (CSEs), pick up the appropriate Sitemaps, and figure out which URLs are relevant for your engines for enhanced indexing. You get the dual benefit of better discovery for Google.com and more comprehensive coverage in your own CSEs. Today, we're taking another step towards improving your experience with Google webmaster services with the launch of On-Demand Indexing in Custom Search. With On-Demand Indexing, you can now tell us about the pages on your websites that are new, or that are important and have changed, and Custom Search will instantly schedule them for crawl, and index and serve them in your CSEs usually within 24 hours, often much faster. How do you tell us about these URLs? You guessed it provide a Sitemap to Webmaster Tools, like you always do, and tell Custom Search about it. Just go to the CSE control panel, click on the Indexing tab, select your On-Demand Sitemap, and hit the "Index Now" button. You can tell us which of these URLs are most important to you via the priority and lastmod attributes that you provide in your Sitemap. Each CSE has a number of pages allocated within the On-Demand Index, and with these attributes, you can us which are most important for indexing. If you need greater allocation in the On-Demand index, as well as more customization controls, Google Site Search provides a range of options. Some important points to remember:You only need to submit your Sitemaps once in Webmaster Tools. Custom Search will automatically list the Sitemaps submitted via Webmaster Tools and you can decide which Sitemap to select for On-Demand Indexing.Your Sitemap needs to be for a website verified in Webmaster Tools, so that we can verify ownership of the right URLs.In order for us to index these additional pages, our crawlers must be able to crawl them. You can use "Webmaster Tools > Crawl Errors > URLs restricted by robots.txt" or check your robots.txt file to ensure that you're not blocking us from crawling these pages.Submitting pages for On-Demand Indexing will not make them appear any faster in the main Google index, or impact ranking on Google.com.We hope you'll use this feature to inform us regularly of the most important changes on your sites, so we can respond quickly and get those pages indexed in your CSE. As always, we're always listening for your feedback on Custom Search. Written by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager, Search More... Less...

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, "What are some simple ways that I can improve my website's performance in Google?" There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing. Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current. So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Well, here's a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out." Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team More... Less...

hotdog lion kingand infinitely more fun: webmasters and their pets incognito! Happy Halloween, everyone! If you see any costumes that would pass the SafeSearch filter :), feel like sharing a gripe or telling a good story, please join the chat! Take care, and don't forget to brush your teeth.  Yours scarily,   The Webmaster Central Team Our glasses-wearing, no vampire-teeth vampire (Ryan), zoombie Mur, Holiday Fail (Tiffany Lane), Colbert Hipster (Dan Vanderkam), Rick Astley Cutts, Homeboy Ben D'Angelo, Me -- pinker & poofier, Investment Bank CEO Shyam Jayaraman (though you can't see the golden parachute in his backpack) Chark as Juno, Wysz as Beah Burger (our co-worker), Adi and Matt Dougherty as yellow ninja, red ninja! Heroes come in all shapes and sizes Powdered toast man, Mike Leotta Adam Lasnik as, let me see if I get this right, a "secret service agent masquerading as a backstage tech" :) Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead More... Less...

What featured over 750 webmasters and a large number of Googlers from around the world, hundreds of questions, and over one hundred answers over the course of nearly two hours? If you guessed "the Tricks and Treats webmaster event from this earlier this month!" well, you're either absolutely brilliant, you read the title of this post, or both! How did it go?It was an exhilarating, exhausting, and educational event, if we may say so ourselves, even though there were a few snafus. We're aware that the sound quality wasn't great for some folks, and we've also appreciated quite-helpful constructive criticisms in this feedback thread. Last but not least, we are bummed to admit that someone (whose name starts with 'A' and ends with 'M') uncharacteristically forgot to hit the record button (really!), so there's unfortunately no audio recording to share :-(. But on more positive notes, we're delighted that so many of you enjoyed our presentations (embedded below), our many answers, and even some of our bad jokes (mercifully not to be repeated). What next?Well, for starters, all of us Webmaster Central Googlers will be spending quite some time taking in your feedback. Some of you have requested sessions exclusively covering particular (pre-announced) topics or tailored to specific experience levels, and we've also heard from many webmasters outside of the U.S. who would love online events in other languages and at more convenient times. No promises, but you can bet we're eager to please! Stay tuned on this blog (and, as a hint and hallo to our German-speaking webmasters, do make sure to follow our German webmaster blog ;-). And finally, a big thank you!A heartfelt thank you to my fellow Googlers, many of whom got up at the crack of dawn to get to the office early for the chat and previous day's runthrough or stayed at work late in Europe. But more importantly, major props to all of you (from New Delhi, New York, New Zealand and older places) who asked great questions and hung out with us online for up to two hours. You webmasters are the reason we love coming to work each day, and we look forward to our next chat! * * * The presentationsWe had presentations from John, Jonathan, Maile, and Wysz. Presentations from the first three are embedded below (Wysz didn't have a written presentation this time). John's slides on "Frightening Webmastering Myths" Jonathan's slides on "Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools" Maile's slides on "Where We're Coming From" Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist Edited on Wednesday, October 29 at 6:00pm to update number of participants More... Less...