Google has been displaying sitelinks for several websites to help with easier navigation for users when they are searching for a brand or product. Sitelinks have proven useful for both search engine users as well as for website owners, since it gives users an option to navigate through the website without even visiting it.

A Google webmaster help page for Sitelinks states this:

he links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

In the past, sitelinks have been just plain links to webpages within a website without any description or URL associated with it as seen in the screenshot below.

However, it looks like Google is now making some changes to the Sitelinks format and is including description and the URL of the link for them.

The new sitelinks are also larger in size and take up a huge chunk of space under the main search results. However, they are now more prominent and easier to read. The descriptions are also helpful for users to find out basic information about a page.

Also Read: How To Control Sitelinks That Appear For Your Site In Google Search?

The new Sitelinks format is a experimental feature and might not be seen by all users yet. However, it is definitely something Google has been working on in addition to the other changes they have been making to their products. It all started out when they decided to add a Bing like background to their homepage and continued with a slew of other changes including removing the I am feeling Luckybutton, using a new design for search results and yet more, simplifying the image search results, adding top references to results and updating their home page design while adding a new black bar.

So what do you think of the new Sitelinks? Will they help you or do you think that they use up too much space?

Google is on a roll. Just yesterday they launched a new social networking service called Google+ along with several new changes to Google search homepage, search results. They also ended up adding author thumbnails to them and launching an option to export your Google data. A few days earlier Google had also launched the +1 button for websites which allowed users to up-vote your content.

(click to enlarge)

When the +1 button had launched, Google did not provide statistics to the users. However, they have now rolled out a new feature to Webmaster Tools where you can see your +1 button activity and it’s impact on search results.

The +1 button metrics will be available as an option in your webmaster tools profile for the website and it will contain of three things which will include a "Search impact" report, +1 button Activity report and an Audience report to show you how many people have clicking on the +1 buttons.

• The Search Impact report gives you an idea of how +1s 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

The addition of statistics for the +1 button will definitely encourage more users to adapt the button on the website. After all those +1′s are going to get you additional traffic from Google.

Google Webmaster is definitely one of the best tools any site owner can use to find out how his/her site is performing in Google. In addition to showing search queries, backlinks and sitemaps, the service also has features such as search statistics, site hacked notifications, site performance to measure website load time, outdated software notification and content analysis among other things.

Another feature that Google Webmasters has is the ability to remove a URLs from Google’s search index. However, the earlier process was a bit tedious. Today, Google has rolled out a new Remove URL tool which simplifies the process of removing URLs from the index.

To Remove a webpage from Google’s index, you will need to login to your Google Webmaster account and administrate the site you want to remove the URL from.

Now Click on the Site configuration in the left hand side menu and select “Crawler access”. On the Crawler access page click on the “Remove URL” tag and click on the “New removal request” button to start the process for removing a website.

The new URL removal tool allows you to remove the page from Google index and cache, remove the page from the cache or remove an entire directory.

The new simplified process makes it easier for users to remove content since they don’t have to first block the content now. With the help of the removal request, users can remove any webpage from the website they own. Additionally, they can also remove the page from Google cache.

Google cache usually stores pages for a long time even after the original webpage is deleted, so allowing users to remove pages from cache is a extremely helpful step.

You must note that the removal of URL from the index is only temporary and will last for 90 days. During this period Google may crawl the page but it will not display it in Google search. For permanent removal, users will need to return a 404 or 410 status for the page or block the page from being crawled by using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.

Important Note: Remove URL tool is only available to people who own those websites. If you are an individual and don’t own the content you are looking to remove, you might want to visit the Webpage removal request tool.

If you have visited your Google Webmasters account today, you might notice some significant changes in the way you will see statistics about your website. The new significant change in Google Webmasters is for the search queries, where you will see a new field called impressions and the number of clicks it got.

Another significant change in Google Webmasters is the introduction of a Google Analytics style dashboard where you can see the stats and clicks for different search queries that were related to your site.

The good thing about the new statistics system is that you can narrow down the queries for different periods or even view statistics for certain days only and then also determine your search and keyword rankings easily. I don’t see any other significant changes with the dashboard other than this, but rest aside, this is something that will definitely be very useful to webmasters. What do you think?

Update: This information is not new and has been available for past two months, apologies for that. You can view more about it at the Official Google Webmasters blog.

In a announcement that sounded sweet to my ears, Google Webmaster team has decided to send out messages about hacked or spammy websites to webmasters through Google Webmaster Tools.

Starting this month, Google Webmaster Tools will notify webmasters of potential issues that have detected on websites, including:

• Spammy or abused user-generated content
• Abused forum pages or egregious amounts of comment spam
• Suspected hacking

These notifications can come as a blessing in disguise as not many users are usually aware of infections until Google decides to temporarily remove all the items of a website from the search results.

However, now once a user receives a notification they can address the issues and get rid of the infections immediately, rather than having to send out a consideration request to the Google webmaster team. A sample notification message for compromised websites will look like the image below.

Bonus Tip

Users can get their Google Webmaster Tools messages delivered to their email address, so that you will get instant updates, rather than having to visit the webmaster console to check your messages.

To receive your webmaster message center notification to your email address, follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Login to Google Webmaster Tools and go to your dashboard.

Step 2: In the message section, select Forward to email address, from the dropdown list in the right hand side, and select the language you want to receive your messages in.

That’s it, the next time you receive a new message in your webmaster message center, it will also be forwarded to your email address so that you can check it out without having to visit the webmaster console.

Have you ever wondered how fast your website loads? We have already told you about few tools including Page Speed, a tool created by Google. Now, Google Webmaster Tools has released a new tool in their Labs called “Site performance”, which will show you the website load time for your blog or website.

Google Site Performance displays the performance for your site, which includes the page load times along with suggestions to improve the performance of your site. This can come in very handy when you want to find ways to speed up your website and make it load faster.

Some of the suggestions provided by webmaster tools are very easy to implement, however some may require major changes. Nevertheless, this is a very good and important introduction, since webmasters can now focus on improving the experience for their users.

What do you think of this new introduction? Do let us know through your comments.

Related Webmaster Tools worth Looking at:

• Monitor Website with Google Desktop Gadgets
• Monitor Website Uptime from your Desktop
• Monitor Website Uptime for Free with Montastic

How fast is your site? [Google Webmaster Blog]

There are tons of free CMS available today including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Though most of these are free, a webmaster who uses them has to constantly keep upgrading the software to make use of new features and plug security holes.

Upgrading is always a pain, one of the reasons we are coming out with WordPress Remote Manager shortly. In addition to that, Google Webmasters Tools has decided to introduce a new feature where they will alert users whenever their web software is out of date.

One of the ways we identify sites to notify is by parsing source code of web pages that we crawl. For example, WordPress and other CMS applications include a generator meta tag that specifies the version number. This has proven to be tremendously helpful in our efforts to notify webmasters. So if you’re a software developer, and would like us to help you notify your users about newer versions of your software, a great way to start would be to include a generator meta tag that tells the version number of your software. If you’re a plugin or a widget developer, including a version number in the source you provide to your users is a great way to help too.

Google Webmaster Tools basically rely on the version numbers included in the HTML source of a webpage to identify if a website requires and upgrade. However, there have been known cases of people attacking a website because of including the version number in the page. It is always better to rely on your own process to keep your software and plugins up-to-date.

This initiative will definitely help many users who usually do not have time or are unaware about new versions and will complement Google’s role on alerting users whenever their website is hacked or compromised.

New software version’ notifications for your site [Official Google Webmaster Blog]

Google Webmaster blog has made a official announcement, that they are using RSS feeds to discover content:

Google uses numerous sources to find new webpages, from links we find on the web to submitted URLs. We aim to discover new pages quickly so that users can find new content in Google search results soon after they go live. We recently launched a feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds for the discovery of new webpages.

I am not sure, but Google has been scanning RSS feeds for quite sometime now. In the past few months, I have seen our feed URL http://feeds.techie-buzz.com/techiebuzz being indexed faster than the regular URL.

What has your experience been with Google indexing RSS feeds? Do let me know about them through your comments.

Every wondered what your doing wrong with regards to SEO and headed to numerous SEO sites. That will end soon as Google Webmasters blog today announced two new features for Webmasters. One of them is Content Analysis and the other one is Sitemap Details.

What does both of these new features go, lets have a closer look at it.

Content Analysis

Content Analysis shows you problem with the content in your site and they focus on key areas such as

• Title tag issues.
• Meta description issues.
• Non-indexable content issues.

You can easily go through your webmasters account and find out which of your pages are having issues and immediately rectify those. In the process you can also learn about common mistakes you tend to make that hurt your SEO rankings.

They also have a feature where they list out the "Duplicate Titles" you are using for your content. Having your pages show up in the Content Analysis does not mean they something is wrong in fact it gives you a chance to correct those mistakes. They also detect if you have long or short titles and recommend you to change those.

They also provide you analysis on non indexable content on your sites which their robots cannot analyze, most of it is usually Flash and Image based contents. If you are using images never forget to add an alt tag since that will allow the robot to index your images too.

Sitemap Details

To get your site better indexed it is always preferable to add a sitemap to your site. Google Webmasters now provide you with details on the sitemaps that you have uploaded for your website.

The new sitemap details feature shows you additional details such as the number of links that are present in the sitemap and how many of those are actually included in the Google index. In addition to that this feature will let you know about any errors you may have in your sitemaps.

Summarizing

Overall I found two features quite interesting and helpful for webmasters to analyze and know where they are making mistakes. In addition to that you can also now know how many of your pages are indexed by Google without having to use additional SEO tools.

If you are not yet using Google Webmasters I definitely would recommend you start using it.