Verify your domain via DNS

April 1st, 2010

Google have announce another way to verify you own a domain in their webmaster tools, via a DNS TXT record.
This solves a problem I have had many times in that it verifies the whole domain.

Until now, you had to verify you owned every sub-domain on a domain before you could use webmaster tools for it, while for most sites this is fine, you verify the www. version, sometimes there are a couple more that need to be done.
for example on my site, I use the non-www domain, also there is a dev. and a api. that also need their own verification meta tag/html file. If I want to use webmaster tools on another sub-domain I have to verify again… this becomes a tiresome process.

Enter the new DNS verification. You now add a TXT record to your dns and it automatically covers any sub-domains you add.
That’s it… done! There is of course the usual dns propagation you have to worry about so it may not be a quick as adding a meta tag, but it defiantly saves time in the long run.

You can find out more by visiting the Google Web master tools or popping over to the Webmaster Central blog.

Google trial website design

November 26th, 2009

Google are playing with a new website design for a select number of thier ‘.com’ visitors today, not too much has changed and they are keeping with the minimalist look, but have changed a few colours and replaced the default browser buttons for some nice blue images.

The biggest change comes on the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) where the navigation has moved from the top of the results to a left hand column

New Google SERP Design

New Google SERP Design

Iif you cant wait for it to be rolled out worldwide, you can get a sneak peak by following these steps

1) log out of your Google account if currently logged in

2) goto http://google.com/ncr

3)  type the following javascript into your address bar to add a cookie to your browser

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com"); alert('cookie added');

4) reload the page and you should see the new design…

New Google Design

Googles Nov 09 Redesign

UPDATE:

if you would like to remove the cookie from your browser, them enter the following into your address bar

javascript:void(document.cookie='PREF=20b6e4c2f44943bb;path=/;domain=.google.com;expires=Sat, 01-Jan-2000 00:00:00 GMT'); alert('cookie removed');

Google Webmaster Central Channel

October 29th, 2009

I’ve been listening and watching these videos for a long time and was speaking to a fellow developer last night and he didnt know about them!
So I thought today I would make a quick post to let everyone know what they are and why you should listen to them.

What is the Google Webmaster Central Channel?
Its a channel on Youtube that is used mainly by Matt Cutts (project leader of Googles web spam team) to pass on little snippets of info and answer questions made by Joe Public and his wife on the Google Forum. It is also used by other teams,  to give useful information and advise on how to make the most out of Google and the web as a whole.

Why should I watch them?
Why not? Google are market leaders in their field and they are giving advise (for free) on how to improve your website, I’ve learnt many tips and tricks from watching the videos and a lot of them have helped out a lot.

Where can I watch the videos?
Here is the answer, on YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Google Webmaster Labs

October 13th, 2009

Google today launched a new section to their webmaster tools called ‘Labs‘.
This new section currently contains two tools to allow you to further manage and optimise your website.

The first is called ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ as allows you to view the information that Googlebot retrieves when it visits ont of the pages on your site. This is what people, webmasters and SEO ‘experts’, are most likley to be interested in. At fist glance it appears to be just the source code of a page, and while yes it is, it does also contain the server headers that were detected, so you can use the two to determin if googlebot sees your page as you want it to.

The second feature is a Malware status page, this feature has been around for a while outside the webmaster tools, if you knew where to find it, and its a useful tool is your site does contain some dodgy code, its good to see this is now part of the webmaster tools and easier to find.
There is a good post on the Google Security Blog that can tell you more about Malware detection so rather than write about it myself, I’ll refer you to it.

googles new search engine

August 11th, 2009

Internet giant Google have announced a preview of their new upgraded search engine for developers and web masters to test. While the UI is pretty much the same , there have been quite a few ‘under the hood’ changes. Nicknamed Caffeine, the update is mainly to the algorithms and code base used by the indexing giant. It will allow more relevant results and real-time data to be returned by searches.

You can preview the new search engine by visiting the sandbox at – http://www2.sandbox.google.com

If you would like to test country/language specific results you will need to edit the query parameters

read more at…

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/

Update – 13/08/09 @ 08:48

the sandbox is currently off-line due to server maintenance

Update – 15/08/09 @ 08:48

the sandbox is back up and running

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