No matter where in the world you are, you can vote right now on webmaster-oriented questions by registering for our free Webmaster chat  ("Tricks and Treats") which is scheduled for tomorrow at 9am PDT (5pm GMT).  Even better: you can suggest your own questions that you'd like Webmaster Central Googlers to answer.

We're using the new Google Moderator tool, so posting questions and voting on your favorites is fun and easy; you'll receive an e-mail with a link to the webmaster chat questions right after you register.  Click on the check mark next to questions you find particularly interesting and important. Click on the X next to questions that seem less relevant or useful.  From your votes, Google Moderator will surface the best questions, helping us spend more time in the chat on issues you really care about.

Feel free to review our post from yesterday for more details on this event.

See you there!

P.S. - Speaking of voting:  If you're an American citizen, we hope you're also participating in the upcoming presidential election! Our friends in Google Maps have even prepared a handy lookup tool to help you find your voting place -- check it out!

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist (and humble host of this event)

You know how some myths just won't die?  Well, do we have some great news for you!  A not-so-scary bunch of Gooooooooooooglers will be on hand to drive a stake through the most ghoulish webmastering myths and misconceptions in our live online "Tricks and Treats" chat this coming Wednesday.

That's right!  You'll be treated to some brief presentations and then have the chance to ask lots of questions to Googlers ranging from Matt Cutts in Mountain View to John Mueller in Zurich to Kaspar Szymanski in Dublin (and many more folks as well).

Here's what you'll need

• About an hour of free time
• A computer with audio capabilities that is connected to the Internet and has these additional specifications
  (We'll be broadcasting via the Internet tubes this time rather than over the phone lines)
• A URL for the chat, which you can only get when you register for the event (don't worry -- it's fast and painless!)
• Costumes: optional

What will our Tricks and Treats chat include?

• INTRO:  A quick hello from some of your favorite Help Group Guides
• PRESO:  A 15 minute presentation on "Frightening Myths and Misconceptions" by John Mueller
• FAQs:  A return of our popular "Three for Three," in which we'll have three different Googlers tackling three different issues we've seen come up in the Group recently... in under three minutes each!
• And lots of Q&A!  You'll have a chance to type questions during the entire session (actually, starting an hour prior!) using our hunky-dory new Google Moderator tool.  Ask, then vote!  With this tool and your insights, we expect the most interesting questions to quickly float to the top.

When and how can you join in?

1. Mark the date on your calendar now:  Wednesday, October 22, at 9am PDT, noon EDT, and 5pm GMT
2. Register right now for this event.  Please note that you'll need to click on the "register" link on the bottom lefthand side.
3. Optionally post questions via Google Moderator one hour prior to the start of the event.  The link will be mailed to all registrants.
4. Log in 5-10 minutes prior to the start of the chat, using the link e-mailed to you by WebEx (the service hosting the event).
5. Interact!  During the event, you'll be able to chat (by typing) with your fellow attendees, and also post questions and vote on your favorite questions via Google Moderator.

We look forward to seeing you online!  In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to post a note in this thread of our friendly Webmaster Help Group.

Edited on October 21st at 12:15pm and 12:29pm PDT to add:

We've decided to open up the Google Moderator page early.  Everyone who registered for this event previously and everyone registering from this moment on will receive the link in e-mail.  Also, the event is scheduled for *5pm* GMT (correctly listed on the registration page and in the followup e-mails).

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist

Today we're going back to basics. We'll be answering the question: What is a website?

...Okay, not exactly. But we will be looking into what a "website" means in the context of Webmaster Tools, what kind of sites you can add to your Webmaster Tools account, and what data you can get from different types of sites.

Why should you care? Well, the following are all questions that we've gotten from webmasters recently:

• "I know my site has lots of incoming links; why don't I see any in my Webmaster Tools account?"
• "I see sitelinks for my site in Google's search results, but when I look in Webmaster Tools it says 'No sitelinks have been generated for your site.'"
• "Why does my Top search queries report still say 'Data is not available at this time'? My site has been verified for months."

In each of these cases, the answer was the same: the data was there, but the webmaster was looking at the wrong "version" of their domain in Webmaster Tools.


A little background
The majority of tools and settings in Webmaster Tools operate on a per-site basis. This means that when you're looking at, say, the Top search queries report, you're only seeing the top search queries for a particular site. Looking at the top queries for www.example.com will show you different data than looking at the top queries for www.example.org. Makes sense, right?

Not all websites have URLs in the form www.example.com, though. Your root URL may not include the www subdomain (example.com); it may include a custom subdomain (rollergirl.example.com); or your site may live in a subfolder, for example if it's hosted on a free hosting site (www.example.com/rollergirl/). Since we want webmasters to be able to access our tools regardless of how their site is hosted, you can add any combination of domain, subdomain(s), and/or subfolder(s) as a "site" on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. Once you've verified your ownership of that site, we'll show you the information we have for that particular piece of the web, however big or small it may be. If you've verified your domain at the root level, we'll show you data for that whole domain; if you've only verified a particular subfolder or subdomain, we'll only show you data for that subfolder or subdomain. Take Blogger as an example—someone who blogs with Blogger should only be able to have access to the data for their own subdomain (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com), not the entire blogspot.com domain.

What some people overlook is the fact that www is actually a subdomain. It's a very, very common subdomain, and many sites serve the same content whether you access them with or without the www; but the fact remains that example.com and www.example.com are two different URLs and have the potential to serve different content. For this reason, they're considered different sites in Webmaster Tools. Since they're different sites—just like www.example.com and www.example.org—they can have different data. When you're looking at the data for www.example.com (with the www subdomain) you're not seeing the data for example.com (without the subdomain), and vice versa.

What can I do to make sure I'm seeing all my data?

• If you feel like you're missing some data, add both the www and the non-www version of your domain to your Webmaster Tools account. Take a look at the data for both sites.
• Do a site: search for your domain without the www (e.g. [site:example.com]). This should return pages from your domain and any of your indexed subdomains (www.example.com, rollergirl.example.com, etc.). You should be able to tell from the results whether your site is mainly indexed with or without the www subdomain. The version that's indexed is likely to be the version that shows the most data in your Webmaster Tools account.
• Tell us whether you prefer for your site to be indexed with or without the www by setting your preferred domain.
• Let everyone else know which version you prefer by doing a site-wide 301 redirect.

Even though example.com and www.example.com may look like identical twins, any twins will be quick to tell you that they're not actually the same person. :-) Now that you know, we urge you to give both your www and non-www sites some love in Webmaster Tools, and—as usual—to post any follow-up questions in our Webmaster Help Group.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

While working on our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, we sometimes run into situations where important content is not publicly available. In order to help users find and access content that may require registration or a subscription, Google offers an option to web and news publishers called "First Click Free." First Click Free has two main goals:

1. To include highly relevant content in Google's search index. This provides a better experience for Google users who may not have known that content existed.
2. To provide a promotion and discovery opportunity for publishers with restricted content.

First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google's search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results and that Google's crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user's first click to your content is free and does not require logging in. You may, however, block the user with a login or payment or registration request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your content site.

Guidelines
Webmasters wishing to implement First Click Free should follow these guidelines:

• All users who click a Google search result to arrive at your site should be allowed to see the full text of the content they're trying to access.
• The page displayed to all users who visit from Google must be identical to the content that is shown to Googlebot.
• If a user clicks to a multi-page article, the user must be able to view the entire article. To allow this, you could display all of the content on a single page—you would need to do this for both Googlebot and for users. Alternately, you could use cookies to make sure that a user can visit each page of a multi-page article before being asked for registration or payment.

Implementation Suggestions
To include your restricted content in Google's search index, our crawler needs to be able to access that content on your site. Keep in mind that Googlebot cannot access pages behind registration or login forms. You need to configure your website to serve the full text of each document when the request is identified as coming from Googlebot via the user-agent and IP-address. It's equally important that your robots.txt file allows access of these URLs by Googlebot.

When users click a Google search result to access your content, your web server will need to check the "Referer" HTTP request-header field. When the referring URL is on a Google domain, like www.google.com or www.google.de, your site will need to display the full text version of the page instead of the protected version of the page that is otherwise shown. Most web servers have instructions for implementing this type of behavior.

Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can I allow Googlebot to access some restricted content pages but not others?
A: Yes.

Q: Can I limit the number of restricted content pages that an individual user can access on my site via First Click Free?
A: No. Any user arriving at your site from a Google search results page should be shown the full text of the requested page.

Q: Can First Click Free URLs be submitted using Sitemap files?
A: Yes. Simply create and submit your Sitemap file as usual.

Q: Is First Click Free content guaranteed inclusion in the Google Index?
A: No. Google does not guarantee inclusion in the web index.


Do you have any more questions or comments? Come on over to the Google Webmaster Help forum and join the discussion!


Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich

Recently we've seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system (CMS) or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable. This is a test, so we're starting out by alerting five to six thousand webmasters. We will be leaving messages for owners of potentially vulnerable sites in the Google Message Center that we provide as a free service as part of Webmaster Tools. If you manage a website but haven't signed up for Webmaster Tools, don't worry. The messages will be saved and if you sign up later on, you'll still be able to access any messages that Google has left for your site.

One of the most popular pieces of software on the web is WordPress, so we're starting our test with a specific version (2.1.1) that is known to be vulnerable to exploits. If the test goes well, we may expand these messages to include other types of software on the web. The message that a webmaster will see in their Message Center if they run WordPress 2.1.1 will look like this:

Quick note from Matt: In general, it's a good idea to make sure that your webserver's software is up-to-date. For example, the current version of WordPress is 2.6.2; not only is that version more secure than previous versions, but it will also alert you when a new version of WordPress is available for downloading. If you run an older version of WordPress, I highly encourage you to upgrade to the latest version.

Written by Patrick Chapman, Search Quality Team and Matt Cutts, Software Engineer

We're always looking for new ways to help educate our fellow webmasters. While you may already be familiar with Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Help Discussion Groups, this blog, and our Help Center, we've added another tutorial to help you understand how Google works. Hence we've made this video of a soon-to-come presentation titled "Google for Webmasters." This video will introduce how Google discovers, crawls, indexes your site's pages, and how Google displays them in search results. It also touches lightly upon challenges webmasters and search engines face, such as duplicate content, and the effective indexing of Flash and AJAX content. Lastly, it also talks about the benefits of offerings Webmaster Central and other useful Google products.


Take a look for yourself.

Discoverability:



Accessibility - Crawling and Indexing:


Ranking:


Webmaster Central Overview:


Other Resources:



Google Presentations Version:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JDDqmCPdxTnmYwev-ksjIFYV7Jl3KPBrLb7KDSw3lB0/pub

Important links from this presentation as they chronologically appear in the video:
Add your URL to Google
Help Center: Sitemaps
Sitemaps.org
Robots.txt
Meta tags
Best uses of Flash
Best uses of Ajax
Duplicate content
Google's Technology
Google's History
PigeonRank
Help Center: Link Schemes
Help Center: Cloaking
Webmaster Guidelines
Webmaster Central
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Alerts
More Google Products


Special thanks to Wysz, Chark, and Alissa for the voices.

Written by Evan Tang, Search Quality

When webmasters put content out on the web it's there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world's population.

In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.

Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.

The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.

Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:

Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at mydomain dot com</span>

And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:

<meta name="google" value="notranslate">

to the <head> of your page and we won't translate any of the content on that page.

Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:

<meta name="google" content="notranslate">

Thanks to chaoskaizer for pointing this out in the comments. :)

Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.

With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Written by Josh Estelle, Google Translate