Webmaster level: Intermediate
We’ve noticed a rise in the number of questions from webmasters about how best to structure a website for mobile phones and how websites can best interact with Googlebot-Mobile. In this post we’ll explain the current situation and give you specific recommendations you can implement now.

Some Background

Let’s start with a simple question: what do we mean by “mobile phone” when talking about mobile-friendly websites?
A good way to answer this question is to think about the capabilities of the mobile phone’s web browser, especially in relation to the capabilities of modern desktop browsers. To simplify matters, we can break mobile phones into a few classifications:

1. Traditional mobile phones: Phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.
2. Smartphones: Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes a diversity of devices, such Windows Phone 7, Blackberry devices, iPhones, and Android phones, and also tablets and eBook readers.We can further break down this category by support for HTML5:
   
   • Devices with browsers that do not support HTML5
   • Devices with browsers that support HTML5

Once upon a time, mobile phones connected to the Internet using browsers with limited rendering capabilities; but this is clearly a changing situation with the fast rise of smartphones which have browsers that rival the full desktop experience. As such, it’s important to note that the distinction we are making here is based on the current situation as we see it and might change in the future.

Googlebot and Mobile Content

Google has two crawlers relevant to this topic: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The questions we’re seeing more of can be summed up as follows:
Given the diversity of capabilities of mobile web browsers, what kind of content should I serve to Googlebot-Mobile?
The answer lies in the User-agent that Googlebot-Mobile supplies when crawling. There are several User-agent strings in use by Googlebot-Mobile, all of which use this format:
[Phone name(s)] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
To decide which content to serve, assess which content your website has that best serves the phone(s) in the User-agent string. A full list of Googlebot-Mobile User-agents can be found here.
Notice that we currently do not crawl with Googlebot-Mobile using a smartphone User-agent string. Thus at the current time, a correctly-configured content serving system will serve Googlebot-Mobile content only for the traditional phones described above, because that’s what the User-agent strings in use today dictate. This may change in the future, and if so, it may mean there would be a new Googlebot-Mobile User-agent string.
For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.

URL Structure for Mobile Content

The next set of questions ask about the URLs mobile content should be served from. Let’s look in detail at some common use cases.

Websites with only Desktop Experience Content

Most websites currently have only one version of their content, namely in HTML that is designed for desktop web browsers. This means all browsers access the content from the same URL.
These websites may not be serving traditional mobile phone users. The quality experienced by their smartphone users depends on the mobile browser they are using and it could be as good as browsing from the desktop.
If you serve only desktop experience content for all User Agents, you should do so for Googlebot-Mobile too; that is, treat Googlebot-Mobile as you treat all other or unknown User Agents. In these cases, Google may modify your webpages for an improved mobile experience.

Websites with Dedicated Mobile Content

Many websites have content specifically optimized for mobile users. The content could be simply reformatted for the typically smaller mobile displays, or it could be in a different format (e.g., served using WAP, etc.).
A very common question we see is: Does it matter if the different types of content are served from the same URL or from different URLs? For example, some websites have www.example.com as the URL desktop browsers are meant to access and have m.example.com or wap.example.com for the different mobile devices. Other websites serve all types of content from just one URL structure like www.example.com.
For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For example, if you redirect mobile users from www.example.com to m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case, use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.
If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.
It is worth repeating that regardless of URL structure, you must correctly detect the User-agent as given by your users and Googlebot-Mobile, and serve both the same content. Don’t forget to keep the default content, the desktop-optimized content, for when an unknown User-agent requests it.

Mobile Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools

Finally, we receive many questions about what URLs to put in Mobile Sitemaps. As explained in our Mobile Sitemaps Help Center articles, you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.

More Questions?

A good place to start is our Mobile Sites Help Center articles and the relevant sections in our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. We also created a thread in our forums for you to ask questions about this post.
Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster level: All

In the past, when you created a website or web app, you were largely limited to a few select “web safe” fonts such as Times and Arial. If you deviated from these fonts, you were required to use Adobe Flash or to embed text in images, which introduced a whole new set of trade offs. For example, images aren’t semantic, cannot be translated into other languages automatically, and can be much larger in file size than text. In addition, text in images cannot be copied to a user’s clipboard, read with screen-reading software, or easily indexed by search engines.

The good news is, with Google Web Fonts it is now possible to use hundreds of web safe fonts on your web pages. Launched last May, Google Web Fonts allows you to simply choose the font(s) you’d like to use on your webpage, blog, or web app, and embed the snippet of HTML and CSS. In about 30 seconds, you can have beautiful fonts on your pages that will render correctly in the large majority of popular modern web browsers. No longer will you need to use images or Flash to embed the font of your choice.

Unlike Times and Arial, which are references to fonts installed on a user’s local machine, web fonts are served via a browser request (much like an image would be served). That means you can push any web font to a user’s machine. Users will be delighted when they realize these fonts behave just as any other text in Arial would behave.

Some example web fonts, offered by the Google Web Fonts service

The adoption of the web font technology has been rapid. Google Web Fonts now serves roughly 50 million daily requests[1], across roughly 800,000 unique websites[2], and is growing at about 30% each month. Here at Google, we’re excited about the potential for web fonts to change the very fabric of the web. Beautiful typography makes the web more pleasant to browse, expressive, and interesting.

Here’s to a beautiful Web!

Written by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Web Fonts

[1] A request is a single call to the Google Font API for one or more fonts.
[2] We count a unique website as unique domains, except that “www” subdomains are not counted. For example, www.myblog.com and myblog.com would count as one domain. However, sam.myblog.com and sally.myblog.com would count as two domains.

Webmaster level: All

If you use Google Analytics to track site data, you can now link your Webmaster Tools verified site to an Analytics profile when they use the same Google Account.

Not only will your Analytics profiles be accessible within Webmaster Tools, but you'll also be able to more easily access a few Google Analytics features:

• View your Google Analytics Referring Pages report directly from the Links to your site page in Webmaster Tools. This report helps you understand the overall trends in traffic volume from referrals, as well as the sites driving those trends.


• Access the Google Analytics Dashboard directly from the Analytics link in the top left bar when you’re on a site-related page.

To link a verified site in Webmaster Tools to a Google Analytics profile:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage next to the site you want, then click Google Analytics profile.



2. Select the profile you want to associate with the site, then click Save.

Note: If your site has multiple owners, each owner will need to link their own account to a Google Analytics profile.

Written by Zhanlu Wang, Webmaster Tools Team

Webmaster level: All

Last year we relaunched an exciting feature in Webmaster Tools: Search Queries, an analysis tool that visualizes your site’s presence in our search results. It has two main parts: an interactive graph, and a table containing detailed data related to queries for which your site appears in our search results.

Two of the most important pieces of information in the table are ‘impressions’ and ‘clicks.’ ‘Impressions’ shows the number of times your pages were shown in the search results for a certain query, and ‘clicks’ is how many times users actually clicked on a result from your site.

Based on webmaster feedback, today we’re announcing a slight change in how these numbers are represented in Webmaster Tools, to simplify their interpretation. Instead of showing numbers rounded to two or three digits, the numbers will now be shown with one or two significant digits. For example, instead of Webmaster Tools showing you 246,000 impressions, it will now show 250,000 impressions, which is a nicer representation for a better, less confusing experience. We have not altered the way we calculate the numbers internally, but only changed how we round them in Webmaster Tools. Generally, a difference of less than 10% between the numbers you see now and those you saw prior to this change should not be considered significant.

Impressions before and after today’s Search Queries update

We hope that this update makes Search Queries easier to understand. If you want to learn more about this feature you can visit our Help Center. If you have feedback or suggestions for Search Queries, please let us know in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Pierre Far and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst team

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

We on the Webmaster Central team aren’t SEOs, but that doesn’t stop me from pretending to be one! In our latest video, I’ll talk about utilizing some features in Webmaster Tools as though I were the SEO for www.googlestore.com.

Just as a grandparent raves about their grandchild, I could have gone on for hours about (my baby!) Webmaster Tools. Thankfully I stopped myself -- but if you have tips to share or questions to ask, please comment below.

Posted by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster level: Intermediate to Advanced

Once in a while we get asked whether a site’s visibility in Google’s search results can be impacted in a negative way if it’s unavailable when Googlebot tries to crawl it. Sometimes downtime is unavoidable: a webmaster might decide to take a site down due to ongoing site maintenance, or legal or cultural requirements. Outages that are not clearly marked as such can negatively affect a site’s reputation. While we cannot guarantee any crawling, indexing or ranking, there are methods to deal with planned website downtime in a way that will generally not negatively affect your site’s visibility in the search results.

For example, instead of returning an HTTP result code 404 (Not Found) or showing an error page with the status code 200 (OK) when a page is requested, it’s better to return a 503 HTTP result code (Service Unavailable) which tells search engine crawlers that the downtime is temporary. Moreover, it allows webmasters to provide visitors and bots with an estimated time when the site will be up and running again. If known, the length of the downtime in seconds or the estimated date and time when the downtime will be complete can be specified in an optional Retry-After header, which Googlebot may use to determine when to recrawl the URL.

Returning a 503 HTTP result code can be a great solution for a number of other situations. We encounter a lot of problems with sites that return 200 (OK) result codes for server errors, downtime, bandwidth-overruns or for temporary placeholder pages (“Under Construction”). The 503 HTTP result code is the webmaster’s solution of choice for all these situations. As for planned server downtime like hardware maintenance, it’s a good idea to have a separate

server available to actually return the 503 HTTP result code. It is important, however, to not treat 503 as a permanent solution: lasting 503s can eventually be seen as a sign that the server is now permanently unavailable and can result in us removing URLs from Google’s index.

header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');

header('Retry-After: Sat, 8 Oct 2011 18:27:00 GMT');

If you set up a 503 (Service Unavailable) response, the header information might look like this when using PHP.

Similar to how you can make 404 pages more useful to users, it’s also a good idea to provide a customized 503 message explaining the situation to users and letting them know when the site will be available again. For further information regarding HTTP result codes, please see RFC 2616.

Posted by Tomer Honen and Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team, Dublin

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

As you’re working to increase your traffic with Webmaster Tools, did you know that you’re also able to monetize this traffic with Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is a program that enables webmasters like you to display relevant ads on your websites and earn revenue. It’s free to use and gives you access to Google’s vast network of advertisers. After a quick and easy set up, AdSense is designed to help you start showing ads on your site that fit in with your audience, while allowing you to earn money from the unique content you’ve created.

A key factor in understanding the opportunities you have with AdSense is understanding the traffic you have coming to your site. Webmaster Tools and other Google tools, such as Google Analytics, provide you with the insight to identify who your visitors are and where they’re coming from. You’re working to bring more people to your site and optimize your most successful pages to boost overall traffic. You can use this information with Google AdSense to display ads that are targeted to your traffic and better suited to match the content on your most successful pages. For example, you can use Webmaster Tools to identify how often your pages appear within Google search results. Knowing these to potentially be your most visible pages, you can use AdSense to display optimized ads on these pages.

Take a look below to see what different AdSense ads can look like.

Text Ad - Medium Rectangle (300x250)	Video Ad - Medium Rectangle (300x250)

Image Ad - Leaderboad (728x90)

Why use Google AdSense?

• Earn revenue from relevant and engaging advertising that enhances the user experience of your site.
• You’re in control, protecting your brand by customizing the size, location, and type of ads that appear.
• Gain insight with the powerful integration of Google Analytics and AdSense, helping you easily identify trends and factors that influence the earning potential of your website.
• Simple and easy to set up. Just add a few lines of code to your site and you’re ready to start showing ads.
• No risk. No obligation. There’s no minimum term of commitment. And it’s free.

Google AdSense automatically delivers ads that are targeted to your content and audience. AdSense also allows you to create Custom Channels that help advertisers target certain pages of your website, or even specific sections of these pages. As a Webmaster Tools user you have an advantage in understanding which Google search results guide traffic to your pages. You can use this information to provide more accurate descriptions of your custom channels for advertisers, allowing you to show even more relevant ads to your users. In turn, you can earn more revenue by displaying these more relevant and high quality ads.

Sign up and monetize your website with Google AdSense.
You can also learn more about Google AdSense in the AdSense Help Forum.

Posted by Nathan DeOms, Google AdSense Publisher Engagement Team