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| bio | website | johnmu.com |
|---|---|---|
| location | Switzerland | |
| age | ||
| visits | member for | 2 years, 10 months |
| seen | yesterday | |
| 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 :-).
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1d |
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Google SEO - Migrating website from a sub-directory of another website to its own domain name Any site move will result in some fluctuations for some time, as the signals propagate, but you shouldn't lose rankings for a year (for most sites it's somewhere between days and a month or so, depending on the size). |
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May 14 |
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Why do hackers inject hidden links? Often these links go to other hacked content: content that hackers place on legitimate websites, which shows commercial content like advertisements for adult or pharmaceutical sites, sometimes phishing, and sometimes automatically redirecting users. Here's a rough run-down: blog.unmaskparasites.com/2012/05/18/… |
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May 7 |
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Google Adwords have flagged my site as containing malware FWIW it looks like this is resolved in the meantime. |
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May 7 |
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Griefing to steal pagerank off my website? Hi, I work with the Google Webmaster Tools team. This was an issue on our side that only affected the Structured Data Testing tool & the appropriate dashboard in Webmaster Tools. It didn't affect web-search, and this likely wasn't really something that was found on your site. Sorry for the confusion! |
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Apr 30 |
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Which meta “robots” tag gets preference? The robots meta tags is documented in detail in developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/… -- the simple way to remember it is that the "positive" ones (all, index, follow) have no effect at all. |
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Apr 25 |
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What is the maximum size of an HTML file that Google will crawl through? Another way to test it is to go to Project Gutenberg, and search explicitly for something on the bottom of a text, eg google.com/… -- also, if your page is going to be bigger than a novel, that seems like it might end up being a bit confusing to users who end up there when searching for something on the bottom of the page... |
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Apr 24 |
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Solving “Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site.” That's correct, robots.txt & noindex will not prevent this message, but they may each be reasonable means to use in some cases - for example, if the URL is just fetched asynchronously for click-tracking with JavaScript. (using noindex + robots.txt won't work, since we don't see the noindex in those cases.) |
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Apr 23 |
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Google Webmaster Tools Index Status 0 for one year Yeah, this is the Index Status report for the www-version, but the Sitemap file is submitting non-www URLs (which can be valid in some cases). Pick a canonical and be consistent :-) |
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Apr 23 |
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How do I transition to SSL without affecting PageRank? Yeah, I think this is a pretty sound approach. FWIW there was a similar discussion on Google+ a while back where we looked into some of the specifics: plus.google.com/106413090159067280619/posts/ZZVAS65mmw4 . Separating rel=canonical & redirects time-wise probably isn't necessary, but it can make it easier to catch problems earlier. One thing you didn't mention is HSTS, which might be worth considering at some point too. |
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Apr 2 |
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Robots.txt vs Sitemap — Who wins in a Conflict When Google can properly process a robots.txt file, a URL mentioned in a Sitemap file will never trump a valid disallow directive in the robots.txt file. A URL that is disallowed from crawling should not be crawled by Googlebot. |
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Mar 26 |
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Does a plain vanilla site benefit from a “canonical” directive? FWIW Duplicate content by itself isn't a problem (assuming the site is still normally crawlable) - search engines will just pick one URL and use that. If you have preferred URL that should be used, then using rel=canonical is a great way to let them know. |
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Mar 19 |
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Robots.txt on one line Why would you want to do that? Maybe there's a different way to achieve the same thing... |
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Mar 19 |
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Google indexing titles of login only pages Usually these kinds of pages don't show up in the normal search results (but you might find them in site:-queries), so in most cases, I'd just leave them robotted out. Using the noindex (as mentioned above, you need to allow crawling then) is also fine. |
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Feb 7 |
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Total Indexed 0, 99 not selected in webmaster tools FWIW we removed the "not selected" graph there since it was much more confusing than helpful. Sorry for the confusion there! |
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Jan 15 |
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Does Google reprocesses submitted sitemaps from time to time? We recrawl Sitemaps files regularly, for most sites that's usually every couple of days. It's faster to ping if you know that something changed though (usually we recrawl them right away when they're pinged). |
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Jan 15 |
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Is it possible to find out whether one given page has been indexed? an "info:URL" query also generally works. |
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Jan 15 |
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SEO wikipedia content and blockquote - duplicate content Putting the duplicate content into an iframe and don't let it get crawled might be a solution then? |
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Jan 15 |
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How do you get your Google+ profile displayed in the right hand sidebar of the Google search results page? The second link you included is the "authorship" link, which is something we also show, but it needs a different link-type than the publisher one (authorship is for personal profiles & individual articles, publisher is for the whole website & the Google+ Page). |
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Jan 15 |
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How do you get your Google+ profile displayed in the right hand sidebar of the Google search results page? You need to make sure that you're linking to a Google+ Page, not a personal Google+ Profile, when using the rel=publisher markup. Using this markup to link to a personal profile will not work. |
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Nov 7 |
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Is there any benefit to having a link to your website's XML sitemap? FWIW we (Google) will currently process relative URLs like that for Sitemaps submissions in the robots.txt, but as you mentioned, it's not a part of the standard, and with that, it might change on our end & it might be handled differently with other Sitemaps consumers (other search engines, etc). So if you have the choice, I'd recommend just using an absolute URL. |
