John Mueller

3,311 reputation

1514

bio	website	johnmu.com
	location	Switzerland
	age
visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
	seen	22 hours ago
stats	profile views	1,277

Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google Switzerland. I work together with the web-search engineers and the webmaster-support team to help webmasters to make awesome content that search engines can understand and recommend.

I primarily post in the Google Webmaster Help forums (in English & German). You can also catch me on Google+, occasionally even in live hangouts :-).

	3,311 reputation	bio	website	johnmu.com	visits	member for	2 years, 10 months
1514 badges		location	Switzerland		seen	22 hours ago

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Sep 20	comment	Rich snippets for small sites Google is working strongly on expanding the number of sites that show rich snippets in the search results. Like Talvi says, make sure that your markup is correct (and try the testing tool at google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to make double-check) and be patient in the meantime :-).
Sep 12	awarded	Commentator
Sep 12	comment	How to stop certain urls from being indexed Finally (sorry for adding so many comments :-)), in this particular case (admin-pages), I would just make sure that the URLs return 403 when not logged in. That also prevents search engines from indexing it and is theoretically clearer than having a page return 200 + using a noindex robots meta tag. The end result is the same in the search results, but using the proper HTTP result code can help you to recognize unauthorized admin-accesses in your logs easier.
Sep 12	comment	How to stop certain urls from being indexed Also, while not necessarily incorrect, a robots meta tag with "noindex, noarchive" is equivalent to "noindex" (when a URL is not indexed, it's not archived/cached either).
Sep 12	comment	How to stop certain urls from being indexed One thing to keep in mind is that a robots.txt disallow directive does not prevent indexing of a URL nor does it result in the removal of that URL from the index. Search engines can and will index URLs without having crawled them (if they're disallowed), so if stopping URLs from being indexed is critical (and not just stopping content from being indexed), then you must use the robots meta tag or the x-robots-tag HTTP header and make sure that the URLs are not disallowed from crawling.
Sep 8	answered	Poor Man's Clean URLs vs. Mod_Rewrite
Sep 3	answered	Google isn't indexing URLs after a redirect that differs only in percent-encoding/decoding?
Sep 2	comment	How can I get search engines to crawl my site and see a localised view of my data? @Pure You need to make sure to use separate URLs per language - that's the most important part. It doesn't matter how they're split (domain / subdomain / subdirectory / file name, etc), it's just important that each URL has content in a one language, so that search engines can crawl & index all language versions and present them to the users appropriately.
Aug 31	answered	Are there any technical issues with having an 'internationalized' domain name?
Aug 31	answered	Priority of tags vs posts in a sitemap.xml file
Aug 24	answered	Why is Google putting new content straight into its Supplemental Index?
Aug 17	answered	Does Google penalize .me or .tv sites?
Aug 13	comment	What errors should I create custom pages for besides 404? One thing to keep in mind is that if you're listing the full URL of an error page in your Apache config files, that will result in a redirect to the error page and you will have to return the error code yourself. If you list the relative path, Apache will return your error page instead of the requested URL and automatically use the proper HTTP result code for you. Especially for things like 404 pages, you need to make sure that visitors (eg search engine crawlers) see the right HTTP result code.
Aug 12	comment	Google Webmasters Verification Method It's possible that someone else - or one of your older accounts? - is trying to verify the site, but in practice it doesn't really matter since it won't pass. Unless it's causing a large load on your server, I'd just ignore it :-). If it is causing a load on the server, then I'd use the robots.txt file to disallow that specific URL.
Aug 12	comment	Site too large to officially use Google Analytics? There's some more information at google.com/support/analytics/bin/… : "Google Analytics currently defines an active AdWords account as an AdWords account that has at least one active and running Campaign, with a minimum budget of $1 per day (or the equivalent amount in a non-U.S. currency)."
Aug 2	comment	HTTPS for entire site Don't guess: test :-). One simple (though rough & not 100% complete) way of checking if caching is working is to check your server logs for user requests. Are they requesting all images/files or just the uncached content? Individual users are bad judges of latency, but when aggregated, the milliseconds can be visible, so I would certainly make sure that the speed is really acceptable.
Jul 28	comment	Is using URL Rewritting the only way to make sure all pages are cached by Google? Tim, in the ones I've looked at, the WordPress URLs were set up properly. WordPress is generally pretty good with URLs :)
Jul 25	answered	Upgrading Shopping Cart Software and SERPS
Jul 24	awarded	Critic
Jul 24	comment	What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google? @Casebash: Don't worry about outbound links if the links are valuable to your content & to your users (but add a rel=nofollow if the links are ads).