Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: June 2014

Android app indexing is now open for everyone!

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Webmaster level: All

Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.

App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.

Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.

Getting started is easy

We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:

As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.

We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You can publish them in one of the following ways:

Add a rel=alternate <link> element to specify the corresponding app URI.
You can insert it in the <head> section of each web page, or in your sitemap. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
Use the App indexing API

There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during app indexing. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:

We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.

Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Making site moves easier

Friday, June 06, 2014

Webmaster level: intermediate-advanced
Few topics confuse and scare webmasters more than site moves. To help you avoid surprises, we've created an in-depth guide on how to handle site moves in a Googlebot-friendly way. So what, exactly, is a site move and how do you go about moving a site correctly?

Basics of site moves

A site move is, broadly, one of two types of content migrations:

Site moves without URL changes. Only the underlying infrastructure serving the website is changed without any visible changes to the URL structure. For example, you might move www.example.com to a different hosting provider while keeping the same URLs and site structure on www.example.com.
Site moves with URL changes. Here, the URLs on the website change in any number of ways:
- The protocol: http://www.example.com to https://www.example.com
- The domain name: example.com to example.net
- The URL paths: http://example.com/page.php?id=1 to http://example.com/widget

We've seen cases where webmasters implemented site moves incorrectly, or missed out steps that would have greatly increased the chances of the site move completing successfully. To help webmasters design and implement site moves correctly, we've updated the site move guidelines in our Help Center. In parallel, we continue to improve our crawling and indexing systems to detect and handle site moves if you follow our guidelines.

Moving to responsive web design

A related increasingly-common question we're seeing is how can a website move from having separate mobile URLs or dynamic serving to using responsive web design. To help you implement this configuration change, please see this new page on our smartphones recommendations site.
And, as always, please ask on our Webmaster Help forums if you have more questions.
Posted by Pierre Far and Zineb Ait Bahajji, Webmaster Trends Analysts

Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted

Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Webmaster level: all

Have you ever used Google Search on your smartphone and clicked on a promising-looking result, only to end up on the mobile site’s homepage, with no idea why the page you were hoping to see vanished? This is such a common annoyance that we’ve even seen comics about it. Usually this happens because the website is not properly set up to handle requests from smartphones and sends you to its smartphone homepage—we call this a “faulty redirect”.

We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway”:

This search label has been deprecated.

And we’re providing advice and resources to help you direct your audience to the pages they want. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Do a few searches on your own phone (or with a browser set up to act like a smartphone) and see how your site behaves. Simple but effective. :)

2. Check out Webmaster Tools—we’ll send you a message if we detect that any of your site’s pages are redirecting smartphone users to the homepage. We’ll also show you any faulty redirects we detect in the Smartphone Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools:

3. Investigate any faulty redirects and fix them. Here’s what you can do:

Use the example URLs we provide in Webmaster Tools as a starting point to debug exactly where the problem is with your server configuration.
Set up your server so that it redirects smartphone users to the equivalent URL on your smartphone site.
If a page on your site doesn’t have a smartphone equivalent, keep users on the desktop page, rather than redirecting them to the smartphone site’s homepage. Doing nothing is better than doing something wrong in this case.
Try using responsive web design, which serves the same content for desktop and smartphone users.

If you’d like to know more about building smartphone-friendly sites, read our full recommendations. And, as always, if you need more help you can ask a question in our webmaster forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Webmaster Central Blog

Android app indexing is now open for everyone!

Making site moves easier

Directing smartphone users to the page they actually wanted

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