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Written by , Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich

In writing and maintaining accurate meta tags (e.g., descriptive titles and robots information), you help Google to more accurately crawl, index and return your site in search results. Meta tags provide information to all sorts of clients, such as browsers and search engines. Just keep in mind that each client will likely only interpret the meta tags that it uses, and ignore the rest (although they might be useful for other reasons).

Here's how Google would interpret meta tags of this sample HTML page:


<!DOCTYPE …><head>
<title>Traditional Swiss cheese fondue recipes<title>utilized by Google, accuracy is valuable to webmasters
<meta name="description" content="Cheese fondue is …">utilized by Google, can be shown in our search results
<meta name="revisit-after" content="14 days">not utilized by Google or other major search engines
<META name="verify-v1" content="e8JG…Nw=" />optional, for Google webmaster tools
<meta name="GoogleBot" content="noOdp">optional
<meta …>
<meta …>
</head>

<meta name="description" content="A description of the page">
This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results. For more information, please see our blog post "Improve snippets with a meta description makeover" and the Help Center article "How do I change my site's title and description?" While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results.

<title>The title of the page</title>
While technically not a meta tag, this tag is often used together with the "description." The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and of course in the user's browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks). Some additional information can be found in our blog post "Target visitors or search engines?", especially under "Make good use of page titles."

<meta name="robots" content="…, …">
<meta name="googlebot" content="…, …">
These meta tags control how search engines crawl and index the page. The "robots" meta tag specifies rules that apply to all search engines, the "googlebot" meta tag specifies rules that apply only to Google. Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

The default rule is "index, follow" -- this is used if you omit this tag entirely or if you specify content="all." Additional information about the "robots" meta tag can be found in "Using the robots meta tag." As a side-note, you can now also specify this information in the header of your pages using the "X-Robots-Tag" HTTP header directive. This is particularly useful if you wish to fine-tune crawling and indexing of non-HTML files like PDFs, images or other kinds of documents.

<meta name="google" content="notranslate">
When we recognize that the contents of a page are not in the language that the user is likely to want to read, we often provide a link in the search results to an automatic translation of your page. In general, this gives you the chance to provide your unique and compelling content to a much larger group of users. However, there may be situations where this is not desired. By using this meta tag, you can signal that you do not wish for Google to provide a link to a translation for this page. This meta tag generally does not influence the ranking of the page for any particular language. More information can be found in the "Google Translate FAQ".

<meta name="verify-v1" content="…">
This Google webmaster tools-specific meta tag is used on the top-level page of your site to verify ownership of a site in webmaster tools (alternatively you may upload an HTML file to do this). The content value you put into this tag is provided to you in your webmaster tools account. Please note that while the contents of this meta tag (including upper and lower case) must match exactly what is provided to you, it does not matter if you change the tag from XHTML to HTML or if the format of the tag matches the format of your page. For details, see "How do I verify my site by adding a meta tag to my site's home page?"

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="…; charset=…">
This meta tag defines the content-type and character set of the page. When using this meta tag, make sure that you surround the value of the content attribute with quotes; otherwise the charset attribute may be interpreted incorrectly. If you decide to use this meta tag, it goes without saying that you should make sure that your content is actually in the specified character set. "Google Webauthoring Statistics" has interesting numbers on the use of this meta tag.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="…;url=…">
This meta tag sends the user to a new URL after a certain amount of time, sometimes used as a simple form of redirection. This kind of redirect is not supported by all browsers and can be confusing to the user. If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommended that you use a server-side 301 redirect instead. Additionally, W3C's "Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0" lists it as being deprecated.

(X)HTML and Capitalization
Google can read both HTML and XHTML-style meta tags (regardless of the code used on the page). In addition, upper or lower case is generally not important in meta tags -- we treat <TITLE> and <title> equally. The "verify-v1" meta tag is an exception, it's case-sensitive.

revisit-after Sitemap lastmod and changefreq
Occasionally webmasters needlessly include "revisit-after" to encourage a search engine's crawl schedule, however this meta tag is largely ignored. If you want to give search engines information about changes in your pages, use and submit an XML sitemap. In this file you can specify the last-modified date and the change-frequency of the URLs on your site.

If you're interested in more examples or have questions about the meta tags mentioned above, jump into our Google Webmaster Help Group and join the discussion.


Update: In case you missed it, the other popular picks were answered in the Webmaster Help Group.
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Written by Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye

Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

In order to stay within Google's quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a rel="nofollow" or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt'ed out. Here's more information explaining our stance on buying and selling links that pass PageRank:

February 2003: Google's official quality guidelines have advised "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank" for several years.

September 2005: I posted on my blog about text links and PageRank.

December 2005: Another post on my blog discussed this issue, and said

Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

September 2006: In an interview with John Battelle, I noted that "Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines."

January 2007: I posted on my blog to remind people that "links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines."

April 2007: We provided a mechanism for people to report paid links to Google.

June 2007: I addressed paid links in my keynote discussion during the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference in Seattle. Here's a video excerpt from the keynote discussion. It's less than a minute long, but highlights that Google is willing to use both algorithmic and manual detection of paid links that violate our quality guidelines, and that we are willing to take stronger action on such links in the future.

June 2007: A post on the official Google Webmaster Blog noted that "Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines." The post also introduced a new official form in Google's webmaster console so that people could report buying or selling of links.

June 2007: Google added more specific guidance to our official webmaster documentation about how to report buying or selling links and what sort of link schemes violate our quality guidelines.

August 2007: I described Google's official position on buying and selling links in a panel dedicated to paid links at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose.

September 2007: In a post on my blog recapping the SES San Jose conference, I also made my presentation available to the general public (PowerPoint link).

October 2007: Google provided comments for a Forbes article titled "Google Purges the Payola".

October 2007: Google officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that we were taking stronger action on this issue, including decreasing the toolbar PageRank of sites selling links that pass PageRank.

October 2007: An email that I sent to Search Engine Journal also made it clear that Google was taking stronger action on buying/selling links that pass PageRank.

We appreciate the feedback that we've received on this issue. A few of the more prevalent questions:

Q: Is buying or selling links that pass PageRank a violation of Google's guidelines? Why?
A: Yes, it is, for the reasons we mentioned above. I also recently did a post on my personal blog that walks through an example of why search engines wouldn't want to count such links. On a serious medical subject (brain tumors), we highlighted people being paid to write about a brain tumor treatment when they hadn't been aware of the treatment before, and we saw several cases where people didn't do basic research (or even spellchecking!) before writing paid posts.

Q: Is this a Google-only issue?
A: No. All the major search engines have opposed buying and selling links that affect search engines. For the Forbes article Google Purges The Payola, Andy Greenberg asked other search engines about their policies, and the results were unanimous. From the story:

Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google's Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which mimic Google's link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.

Other engines have also commented about this individually, e.g. a search engine representative from Microsoft commented in a recent interview and said

The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective and b.) very often irrelevant. If you are asking about those then the answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate bogus links that add little value to the user experience and are effectively trying to game the system.

Q: Is that why we've seen some sites that sell links receive lower PageRank in the Google toolbar?
A: Yes. If a site is selling links, that can affect our opinion about the value of that site or cause us to lose trust in that site.

Q: What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and the site's PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered?
A: The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google's Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.

Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?
A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions.

Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won't affect search engines.

Q: I'm aware of a site that appears to be buying/selling links. How can I get that information to Google?
A: Read our official blog post about how to report paid links from earlier in 2007. We've received thousands and thousands of reports in just a few months, but we welcome more reports. We appreciate the feedback, because it helps us take direct action as well as improve our existing algorithmic detection. We also use that data to train new algorithms for paid links that violate our quality guidelines.

Q: Can I get more information?
A: Sure. I wrote more answers about paid links earlier this year if you'd like to read them. And if you still have questions, you can join the discussion in our Webmaster Help Group.
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Written by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools team

When Matt Cutts, who heads up Google's webspam team, dropped by our Kirkland offices a little while ago we found ourselves with a video camera and an hour to spare. The result? We quickly put together a few videos we hope you'll find useful.

In our first video, Matt talks about the anatomy of a search result, and gives some useful tips on how you can help improve how your site appears in our results pages. This talk covers everything you'll see in a search result, including page title, page description, and sitelinks, and explains those other elements that can appear, such as stock quotes, cached pages links, and more.



If you like the video format (and even if you don't), or have ideas for subjects you'd like covered in the future, let us know what you think in our Webmaster Help Group. And rest assured, we'll be working to improve the sound quality for our next batch of vids.
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Written by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team

Our goal for the Webmaster Help Group is to be an authoritative source for accurate, friendly information and discussion. There are many terrific members of the Webmaster Groups community, and we're glad to know them all. In our English discussion group, a big Webmaster Central (WMC) thank-you to our comrades and fellow webmasters for their helpful knowledge and insight: webado, Phil Payne, JLH, cass-hacks, cristina, Sebastian, and dockarl, just to name a few.

Webado and cass-hacks both speak several languages -- thankfully, some of us do as well. We now have Googlers posting to the Google Webmaster Help Group in 12 languages! Here's a brief introduction of the Googlers, most of whom work together at our European headquarters in Dublin, in the Non-English groups (several have been posting for months, but we'd still like to give them an intro). :)


French Webmaster Help Group
Salut, I come from the French city Bordeaux where I spent most of my time, before I moved to Paris and then Dublin where I work now in Google Search Quality. When not in front of my computer, I like to go to the cinema, play chess and organize dinners
with my friends.
- Guide Google
Italian Webmaster Help Group
Ciao, my name is Stefano and I’m responsible for the Italian Webmaster Help Group. I work on search quality issues in Italian. I’m from Italy and have been living in Ireland for more than 2 years. I do love the multicultural environment you can find in Dublin and all the people from everywhere you get to know here, but sometimes it’s difficult to be so far away from my favorite football team, so now and then I really have to fly back home to get a bit of Serie A.
- Guida Google
German Webmaster Help Group
Grüss Gott! My name is Uli, and I post in the German Webmaster Help Group. I am originally from Germany but live in Ireland now. Unfortunately, I don't have my own website to show off. The German Help Group has grown into a big, vibrant community of very helpful and savvy webmasters, so if you speak German, go and check it out!
- Google Webmeister Guide
Spanish Webmaster Help Group
Hola! My name is Alvar and I'll be monitoring the Spanish Webmaster Help Group. Please join us if you speak a word or two in Spanish :-) More on the personal side, I don't own a portal or something like that but rather a tiny blog with nearly no visibility on the Internet, and I'm happy with that. I studied telecommunication engineering and my hobbies include soccer, foosball, table tennis, basically almost any other sport, traveling, photography, cinema, and technology, so I admit sitting in front of a computer can be counted as a hobby :-) Another important fact about me is that I'm from Barcelona, a city everyone should visit at least once in their life. What are you waiting for?
- Guía de Google para webmasters

Hola, I'm Rebecca. I studied to be a librarian but somehow along the way ended up being drawn into the digital side of information. So while I still snuggle up to books at night, computers take up most of my day. As for things I like to do (but wouldn't go so far as to call them hobbies…) I'm still pretty new to Dublin so I rather enjoy walking around until I'm lost and then trying to figure out how to get back home, and then when I get back home I like to play with my cat, best known for her fantastic Gollum impersonation when she gets riled up.
- Guía de Google
Dutch Webmaster Help Group
Hallo, I'm Andre. I'm very fond of Dutch music. But since living in Dublin for almost 2 years now, my taste for music has fused with the Irish sound. I like listening to live music in pubs, hanging out with the locals, have a pint or two and talking about upcoming gigs, artists, and all other topics that pass the day.
- André
Swedish Webmaster Help Group
Hejsan! My name is Hessam and I'm responsible for the Swedish Webmaster Help Group. I've been with Google for the last 2 years, working on search quality issues in Sweden. I'm originally from Sweden but moved to Dublin two years ago. My main interest is traveling and living in Dublin makes it easy to visit to all corners of Europe without blowing the budget. Thanks to cheap airlines, it takes merely a few hours from my door to the beer gardens of Munich, wine bars of Paris, ski slopes of Italy or beaches of Spain, depending on the mood. Looking forward to talking to you all!
- Google Webbansvarig Guide
Finnish Webmaster Help Group
Hei, I'm Anu and I work in the Search Quality team. I'm originally from Finland but these days I hold my umbrella high in Dublin. When I'm not online, you can catch me cycling (be it one or two wheels), playing virtual tennis or at the airport. I've been bitten by the travel bug, and try to see as many places near and far as possible. Besides all things webmaster related, I also have an interest in foreign languages, books and films. I look forward to meeting you in the Finnish Webmaster Help Group!
- Googlen Web-ylläpidon Ryhmän Opas
Polish Webmaster Help Group
Cześć, I'm Guglarz (it stands for Googler in Polish), the Googler on the Polish Webmaster Help Group. I was lucky to grow up in the city of Kraków, Poland's most beautiful city and the place where Google recently opened a research center. I've been with Google for two years now and I still love this job as much as I did the very first day. It's my favorite hobby activity in fact. If I don't work, I like to keep myself busy with general aviation, running or bowling, a sport I recently found out I was talented in. ;-)

I discovered my passion for the Internet early in school and after graduating in information science studies I was looking for a challenging position in the industry, although after the year 2000 crash there was little hope for that. It took me a couple of jobs in the established industries and some traveling around the globe before I found my dream job here at Google.

Ever since I started helping on the Polish Webmaster Help Group, it has been growing rapidly, both in terms of user numbers as much as in terms of the activity. It's really exciting to see how Polish webmasters help each other and make the web a more interesting place. Three group members, Cezary Lech, Umik and krzys in particular made an effort to vitalize the community in its early days. I'd like to say dziękuję (thank you in Polish) and please keep up the great spirit - thumbs up!
- Guglarz
Portuguese Webmaster Help Group
Olá, my name is Pedro. I'm Portuguese and I'm part of the Search Quality team. I've been working at Google since March 2006 mostly focused on the Portuguese language markets. I grew up in Tavira, a small town in the Algarve region – South of Portugal – and I always had a nerdy side, playing with computers since my very early days when memory meant 128KB. Most of my interests fall on my origins, I enjoy sailing and scuba diving, music is also on my top list. I'm based in the European Headquarters – Dublin office, and I'll be looking to strengthening contact with Portuguese webmasters (non Portuguese are also welcome).
- Ajuda a Webmasters do Google
Russian Webmaster Help Group
Привет! My name is Oxana and I come from Moldova, a teeny tiny country in Eastern Europe. My background is in mathematics and computer sciences and I have worked as a web developer for more than 7 years now. Of course I have a web site, but it features only an, unfortunately, eternal "under construction" message and a hope for a better future. :) I love to read and to travel, and at the moment I am a helpless wannabe photographer. Also, I'm a passionate WoW player and soon I'll become the best Warlock Orc on this side of Kalimdor! When I'm a grown-up person I work at Google on the Search Quality team and I primarily support the Russian market.
- Оксана
Danish Webmaster Help Group
Hej, my name is Jonas, and I am from Copenhagen, the wonderful capital of beautiful Denmark. I've been a webmaster of a blog since 2001, where I still drop a few lines every now and then. I am a jack of many trades, with a background in human geography and communication, design, and media. I've done some authoring for the web, but mostly administrative backends in PHP/MySQL, so they are not that interesting. I've been active on Usenet for awhile as well, and spent many hours there, getting smarter with the help of others.

I've been with Google for a couple of years now, working exclusively with search quality and I am now helping out in the Danish Webmaster Help Group. Looking forward to seeing you there (:
- GoogleGuide
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Written by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We're fortunate to meet many of you at conferences, where we can chat about web search and Webmaster Tools. We receive a lot of good feedback at these events: insight into the questions you're asking and issues you're facing. However, as several of our Webmaster Help Group friends have pointed out, not everyone can afford the time or expense of a conference; and many of you live in regions where webmaster-related conferences are rare.

So, we're bringing the conference to you.

We've posted notes in our Help Group from conferences we recently attended:
Next month, Jonathan and Wysz will post their notes from PubCon, while Bergy and I will cover SES Chicago.

If you can make it to one of these, we'd love to meet you face to face, but if you can't, we hope you find our jottings useful.
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Written by David Sha, Webmaster Tools Team

Welcome Go Daddy webmasters to the Google Webmaster Tools family! Today, we're announcing that Go Daddy, the world's largest hostname provider in the web hosting space, is working with us as a pilot partner so that their customers can more easily access Google Webmaster Tools. Go Daddy is a great partner, and we hope to educate more webmasters on how to make their site more search engine-friendly.

Go Daddy users will now see our link right in their hosting control center, and can launch Google Webmaster Tools directly from their hosting account. And Go Daddy makes the Google Webmaster Tools account creation process faster by adding the site, verifying the site, and submitting Sitemaps on behalf of hosting customers. Our tools show users how Google views their site, give useful stats like queries and links, diagnose problems, and share information with us in order to improve their site's visibility in search results.

As a continuation of these efforts, we look forward to working with other web hosting companies to add Google Webmaster Tools to their products soon.

And in case you're wondering, Webmaster Tools will stay 100% the same for current users. If you have questions or suggestions about our partnership with Go Daddy, let us know in our Webmaster community discussion groups.
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Written by Michael Wyszomierski and Greg Grothaus, Search Quality

Update on July 29, 2010: We've improved our Flash indexing capability and we also now support an AJAX crawling scheme! Please check out the posts (linked above) for more details.

Many webmasters have discovered the advantages of using Ajax to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. But, like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully. As promised in our post answering questions about Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology, we've compiled some tips for creating Ajax-enhanced websites that are also understood by search engines.

How will Google see my site?

One of the main issues with Ajax sites is that while Googlebot is great at following and understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have a difficult time finding its way around sites which use JavaScript for navigation. While we are working to better understand JavaScript, your best bet for creating a site that's crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.

Design for accessibility

We encourage webmasters to create pages for users, not just search engines. When you're designing your Ajax site, think about the needs of your users, including those who may not be using a JavaScript-capable browser. There are plenty of such users on the web, including those using screen readers or mobile devices.

One of the easiest ways to test your site's accessibility to this type of user is to explore the site in your browser with JavaScript turned off, or by viewing it in a text-only browser such as Lynx. Viewing a site as text-only can also help you identify other content which may be hard for Googlebot to see, including images and Flash.

Develop with progressive enhancement

If you're starting from scratch, one good approach is to build your site's structure and navigation using only HTML. Then, once you have the site's pages, links, and content in place, you can spice up the appearance and interface with Ajax. Googlebot will be happy looking at the HTML, while users with modern browsers can enjoy your Ajax bonuses.

Of course you will likely have links requiring JavaScript for Ajax functionality, so here's a way to help Ajax and static links coexist:
When creating your links, format them so they'll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you'll have the Ajax functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link. For example:

<a href=”ajax.htm?foo=32” 'ajax.html#foo=32'); return false”>foo 32</a>

Note that the static link's URL has a parameter (?foo=32) instead of a fragment (#foo=32), which is used by the Ajax code. This is important, as search engines understand URL parameters but often ignore fragments. Web developer Jeremy Keith labeled this technique as Hijax. Since you now offer static links, users and search engines can link to the exact content they want to share or reference.

While we're constantly improving our crawling capability, using HTML links remains a strong way to help us (as well as other search engines, mobile devices and users) better understand your site's structure.

Follow the guidelines

In addition to the tips described here, we encourage you to also check out our Webmaster Guidelines for more information about what can make a site good for Google and your users. The guidelines also point out some practices to avoid, including sneaky JavaScript redirects. A general rule to follow is that while you can provide users different experiences based on their capabilities, the content should remain the same. For example, imagine we've created a page for Wysz's Hamster Farm. The top of the page has a heading of "Wysz's Hamster Farm," and below it is an Ajax-powered slideshow of the latest hamster arrivals. Turning JavaScript off on the same page shouldn't surprise a user with additional text reading:
Wysz's Hamster Farm -- hamsters, best hamsters, cheap hamsters, free hamsters, pets, farms, hamster farmers, dancing hamsters, rodents, hampsters, hamsers, best hamster resource, pet toys, dancing lessons, cute, hamster tricks, pet food, hamster habitat, hamster hotels, hamster birthday gift ideas and more!
A more ideal implementation would display the same text whether JavaScript was enabled or not, and in the best scenario, offer an HTML version of the slideshow to non-JavaScript users.

This is a pretty advanced topic, so please continue the discussion by asking questions and sharing ideas over in the Webmaster Help Group. See you there!
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