Webmaster Level: All

We’ve recently launched our global Google Webmasters Google+ page. Have you checked it out yet? Our page covers a plethora of topics:

• Official news and announcements like when our blog launched en français
• Tips such as how to handle 404s correctly
• Q&A office hours with our team
• Exclusive behind the scenes including planking puns and adventures with Googlebot

Follow us at google.com/+GoogleWebmasters and let us know in the comments what else you’d like to see on our page! If you speak Italian, Japanese, Russian or Spanish, be sure to also join one of our webmaster communities to stay up-to-date on language and region-specific news.

Posted by Mary Chen and Andrey Lipattsev, Webmaster Outreach Team

Webmaster level: All

Every day, searchers use Google to find information about businesses. Common queries include finding the phone number for customer service, the location of a business, and opening hours.

This information is typically found in a business's location page or a "contact us" section of a company's website. When Google correctly identifies these pages and is able to extract the relevant information from them, it is more likely to surface that information to searchers looking for the business.

Today we would like to share our recommendations for helping Google identify and surface this information.

Corporate phone numbers

National phone numbers for many companies are displayed prominently in Google Search results. For example, a searcher looking for Nest Labs' customer service number will see:

Today, we are launching support for schema.org markup to help you specify your preferred phone numbers using structured data markup embedded on your website. Four types of phone numbers are currently supported:

• Customer service
• Technical support
• Billing support
• Bill payment

For each phone number, you can also indicate if it is toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether the number is global or serves specific countries. Learn how to specify your national customer service numbers.

Recommendations for local business sites

Many people also turn to Google to find and discover local businesses, and the best information is often on a website's contact us or branch locator page. These location pages typically include the address of the business, the phone number, opening hours, and other information.

Today we're also introducing recommendations about the best way to build these location pages to make them easily accessible and understandable to Googlebot, and more importantly, Google's users. Our recommendations cover both crawling, indexing and visual layout suggestions, as well as new structured data markup guidelines to help Google index pages more accurately.

In addition to building great location pages, businesses are encouraged to continue using Places for Business, which is a fast and easy way to update your information across Google's service such as Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph and AdWords campaigns.

This blog post is only a brief summary of our recommendations for building location pages or branch locators. Please read the guidelines and, as always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager, Jonathan Sidi, Product Manager, Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Level: Advanced

In October, we announced guidelines for App Indexing for deep linking directly from Google Search results to your Android app. Thanks to all of you that have expressed interest. We’ve just enabled 20+ additional applications that users will soon see app deep links for in Search Results, and starting today we’re making app deep links to English content available globally.

We’re continuing to onboard more publishers in all languages. If you haven’t added deep link support to your Android app or specified these links on your website or in your Sitemaps, please do so and then notify us by filling out this form.

Here are some best practices to consider when adding deep links to your sitemap or website:

• App deep links should only be included for canonical web URLs.
• Remember to specify an app deep link for your homepage.
• Not all website URLs in a Sitemap need to have a corresponding app deep link. Do not include app deep links that aren't supported by your app.
• If you are a news site and use News Sitemaps, be sure to include your deep link annotations in the News Sitemaps, as well as your general Sitemaps.
• Don't provide annotations for deep links that execute native ARM code. This enables app indexing to work for all platforms

When Google indexes content from your app, your app will need to make HTTP requests that it usually makes under normal operation. These requests will appear to your servers as originating from Googlebot. Therefore, your server's robots.txt file must be configured properly to allow these requests.

Finally, please make sure the back button behavior of your app leads directly back to the search results page.

For more details on implementation, visit our updated developer guidelines. And, as always, you can ask questions on the mobile section of our webmaster forum.

Posted by Michael Xu, Software Engineer

Webmaster Level: Intermediate

The Google Webmaster Tools Index Status feature reports how many pages on your site are indexed by Google. In the past, we didn’t show index status data for HTTPS websites independently, but rather we included everything in the HTTP site’s report. In the last months, we’ve heard from you that you’d like to use Webmaster Tools to track your indexed URLs for sections of your website, including the parts that use HTTPS.

We’ve seen that nearly 10% of all URLs already use a secure connection to transfer data via HTTPS, and we hope to see more webmasters move their websites from HTTP to HTTPS in the future. We’re happy to announce a refinement in the way your site’s index status data is displayed in Webmaster Tools: the Index Status feature now tracks your site’s indexed URLs for each protocol (HTTP and HTTPS) as well as for verified subdirectories.

This makes it easy for you to monitor different sections of your site. For example, the following URLs each show their own data in Webmaster Tools Index Status report, provided they are verified separately:

HTTP	HTTPS
http://www.example.com/	https://www.example.com/
http://example.com	https://example.com
http://www.example.com/folder/	https://www.example.com/folder/
http://example.com/folder/	https://example.com/folder/

The refined data will be visible for webmasters whose site's URLs are on HTTPS or who have subdirectories verified, such as https://example.com/folder/. Data for subdirectories will be included in the higher-level verified sites on the same hostname and protocol.

If you have a website on HTTPS or if some of your content is indexed under different subdomains, you will see a change in the corresponding Index Status reports. The screenshots below illustrate the changes that you may see on your HTTP and HTTPS sites’ Index Status graphs for instance:

HTTP site’s Index Status showing drop

HTTPS site’s Index Status showing increase

An “Update” annotation has been added to the Index Status graph for March 9th, showing when we started collecting this data. This change does not affect the way we index your URLs, nor does it have an impact on the overall number of URLs indexed on your domain. It is a change that only affects the reporting of data in Webmaster Tools user interface.

In order to see your data correctly, you will need to verify all existing variants of your site (www., non-www., HTTPS, subdirectories, subdomains) in Google Webmaster Tools. We recommend that your preferred domains and canonical URLs are configured accordingly.

Note that if you wish to submit a Sitemap, you will need to do so for the preferred variant of your website, using the corresponding URLs. Robots.txt files are also read separately for each protocol and hostname.

We hope that you’ll find this update useful, and that it’ll help you monitor, identify and fix indexing problems with your website. You can find additional details in our Index Status Help Center article. As usual, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in our webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji, WTA, thanks to the Webmaster Tools team.

Webmaster level: Beginner

Our Webmaster Academy is now available with new and targeted content!

Two years ago, Webmaster Academy launched to teach new and beginner webmasters how to make great websites. In addition to adding new content, we've now expanded and improved information on three important topics:

• Making a great site that’s valuable to your audience (Module 1)
• Learning how Google sees and understands your site (Module 2)
• Communicating with Google about your site (Module 3)

If you often find yourself overwhelmed by the depth or breadth of our resources, Webmaster Academy will help you understand the basics of creating a website and having it found in Google Search. If you’re an experienced webmaster, you might learn something new too.

Enjoy, learn, and share your feedback!

Posted by Mary Chen, Webmaster Outreach Team

Google uses a wide range of IP addresses for its different services, and the addresses may change without notification. Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service offering which hosts a wide variety of 3rd party applications. This post announces changes in the IP address range and headers used by the Google App Engine URLFetch (outbound HTTP) and outbound sockets APIs.

While we recommend that App Engine IP ranges not be used to filter inbound requests, we are aware that some services have created filters that rely on specific addresses. Google App Engine will be changing its IP range beginning this month. Please see these instructions to determine App Engine’s IP range.

Additionally, the HTTP User-Agent header string that historically allowed identification of individual App Engine applications should no longer be relied on to identify the application. With the introduction of outbound sockets for App Engine, applications may now make HTTP requests without using the URLFetch API, and those requests may set a User-Agent of their own choosing.

Posted by the Google App Engine Team

Webmaster level: all

When music lovers search for their favorite band on Google, we often show them a Knowledge Graph panel with lots of information about the band, including the band’s upcoming concert schedule. It’s important to fans and artists alike that this schedule be accurate and complete. That’s why we’re trying a new approach to concert listings. In our new approach, all concert information for an artist comes directly from that artist’s official website when they add structured data markup.

If you’re the webmaster for a musical artist’s official website, you have several choices for how to participate:

1. You can implement schema.org markup on your site. That’s easier than ever, since we’re supporting the new JSON-LD format (alongside RDFa and microdata) for this feature.
2. Even easier, you can install an events widget that has structured data markup built in, such as Bandsintown, BandPage, ReverbNation, Songkick, or GigPress.
3. You can label the site’s events with your mouse using Google’s point-and-click webmaster tool: Data Highlighter.

All these options are explained in detail in our Help Center. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help forums. So don’t you worry `bout a schema.org/Thing ... just mark up your site’s events and let the good schema.org/Times roll!

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager, Google Search