Indexing text data became old hat to Google and every other search engine over the past few years. Multimedia, especially video, has everyone’s attention these days (including Hollywood screenwriters.)

To enable better video indexing, Google has taken the lead in introducing and accepting Video Sitemaps. "By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata," said the Webmaster Central blog.

That does imply some extra work for the webmaster, in the need to create a second sitemap for Google to index. One commenter on the blog asked why the video elements can’t just be added to the regular sitemap, since they have their own namespace.

Google’s John Mueller replied, saying it might not be practical, but said he would pass the suggestion along.

It appears Google is acting solo in working with video sitemaps at this time. Other search engines will have to decide whether or not to follow Google’s lead in accepting this extension.

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Ever since we first chatted with now-former Googler Vanessa Fox about webmaster tools, Google has released new capabilities for those on a fairly regular schedule.

That routine notched another mark with the debut of content analysis and sitemap details from Google Webmaster Tools. Jonathan Simon described these at the Webmaster Central blog.

Content analysis looks at three main categories: title tag issues; meta description issues; and non-indexable content issues. These appear in the Diagnostics section of Webmaster Tools.

Title tags may be too short or too long in Google’s estimation, and if a meta description tag looks odd, Google will flag that as well.

"While these pointers won’t directly help you rank better, they may help your site display better titles and snippets in search results, and this can increase visitor traffic," said Simon.

Webmasters using Sitemaps to permit better indexing of their sites by search crawlers have access to additional information with the new Sitemaps Details page in Tools. This shows what Google knows about the Sitemaps the webmaster submitted.

Depending on the site, the Sitemap Details may show the sitemap type; total number of valid URLs; the number of listed URLs in Google’s index; and the dates the sitemap was submitted to and downloaded by Google.

Simon said the new Details page also shows any errors or warnings encountered when Google last crawled specific pages. This allows the webmaster to spend less time trying to figure out how many pages Google indexed from the Sitemap.

On her Search Engine Land post, Fox chimed in on the new features by noting the availability of Video Sitemaps. For sites that use video, these Sitemaps could be the key to being included in web search results as well as video searches.

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John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like ‘keywords’ helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging ‘keywords’ to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn’t looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes – it won’t count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google’s Googlebot, affect a single robot’s actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nofollow: don't follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nosnippet: don't show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets")

noodp: don't use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site's title and description?")

noarchive: don't display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages")

unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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Paid Links Still Evil To Google

Though plenty of places in the Northern Hemisphere shiver in chilly temperatures, webmasters will continue radiating heat after the latest double-barreled barrage from Google’s loquacious engineer. Paid links have a long history of annoying Google due to the way they can affect organic rankings.

This has been the year of living dangerously for webmasters who engage in pushing PageRank through paid links. Google’s crackdown on sites using these links without a ‘nofollow’ tacked onto them means more websites will see the dreaded reduction in their PageRank as punishment.

Matt wrote about this at the Google Webmaster Central blog and his personal site. A couple of essential points he made will stand out for webmasters:

Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?

A: No. We’re giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions.

Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?

A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won’t affect search engines.

Several webmaster comments posted to the Webmaster Central blog took issue with the paid links stance, with some complaining of being penalized without cause. One commenter named Jason said one blog he has received the PR 0 hit, and has never bought or sold a link.

“What about sites that received the penalty by mistake?” he asked. “I’m hesitant to submit a re-inclusion request because it requires admission of wrongdoing. Is there any way of asking for a review that doesn’t require falsely stating that we’ve gone against the webmaster guidelines?”

In response, Matt suggested the drop could have been a result of canonicalization issues, and that PageRank does tend to fluctuate. As far as the language of the reinclusion request to which Jason objected, Matt had this to say:

I don’t want to force people to claim that they’ve violated our guidelines in doing a reconsideration request. I believe that we’ve already softened our language on that form once and that we added the option to say “something happened on this domain before I got to it.”

But your feedback is something that I’ve heard before, and I’ll try to have someone at Google look at what we can do to remove that concern. If you have suggestions for language or the best way to do it, I’m open to whatever you want to propose.

Google isn’t worried about whether someone’s site gets noticed in the search results or not. The other major search engines have similar views. To them, paid links skew what searchers see, and not always to the searcher’s benefit.

Matt’s example of this on his blog shows how a query for the very serious topic of cancer-fighting radiosurgery brings up useless and misleading results when paid links pass PageRank.

“If you stumbled across these entries on the web, you might not know whether someone got paid for writing these posts. In the same way that a regular surfer would want disclosure to know if a post were paid, all the major search engines also want to make sure that paid posts are adequately disclosed to search engines as well,” Matt said.

Use paid links without identifying them, and Google will penalize the site. It’s a cause and effect that enrages webmasters who want to rate well in the world’s dominant search engine. Many are going to feel this is part of a ploy to drive them to buy ads on Google to get noticed.

That is a side effect of Google’s attack on less than useful content. One can see why webmasters will feel this way. Google is a business, not a public utility, even if it seems otherwise to Internet users. They make the rules for their SERPs, as the other engines do, and playing on their site means following them, or going to the bottom of the list.

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Google Ready To Bid For Wireless, Maybe

If Google bids for the 700MHz spectrum, they could do so with someone else putting up cash alongside the substantial pile of currency the search ad company has accumulated.

The Wall Street Journal summarized several steps Google has taken with regards to becoming a mobile business player. They left out a couple, namely Google’s acquisitions of Grand Central and portable graphics engine maker Skia earlier this year.

When Google does take that big step by grabbing some of the valuable 700MHz spectrum, they are as likely to do so with another deep-pocketed bidder alongside them as they are to go solo to the auction. That’s speculation by the Journal, citing the usual ‘people familiar with the matter’, but it makes sense for Google to arrive with a partner.

Serving the public with a GoogleNet wireless network should benefit the mobile-using public with less expensive service and broader availability. But serving the public involves customer service, and no one will ever confuse Eric Schmidt with Bruce Nordstrom in that discussion, as Google prefers to shunt its users to newsgroups rather than take questions by email, much less by phone, about its non-revenue generating products.

If Google chose to do so, it could provide world-class customer service. Financially it makes more sense for them to foist that dirty work onto someone else, which makes a partner scenario more likely once the bidding begins.

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"If the TLD isn’t location-specific (such as .com), then search engines may use the location of the site’s IP address. This generally works pretty well, but sites that are hosted in a location other than their primary country can run into problems. In addition, large companies may have subfolders or subdomains for each country-specific site, rather than separate domains, and it may be problematic for those companies to secure each country-specific domain.

Now there’s a way to help avoid this type of guesswork, at least with Google. If you want to let Google know the location of your site, simply log in to the Google Webmaster Tools component of Google Webmaster Central.

Access the Tools tab, then choose Set Geographic Target. From there, you can provide information about where the site is located, and Google will use this information as a signal in ranking.

If your domain is a location-specific TLD (such as the .fr example above), Google will show you the country that your site is associated with but won’t let you specify something different. However, if your domain is not country specific (such as a .com or .net), you can indicate the location of the site:

At this point, you can’t specify multiple countries for a site, but you can specify a different country for each site within a domain. If you use subfolders or subdomains for country-specific sites, simply add each to your Webmaster Tools account and specify the location for each one. For example, you might have a structure such as:

www.example.com/ (U.S. site)

france.example.com/ (French site)

russia.example.com/ (Russian site)

You can provide information at a more granular level than country. For example, if your site is for a pizza restaurant in Seattle, you can specify up to the street address (although you can input any granularity that makes sense for your business such as city or state). Remember that if you want to be found for local searches, you should also add your business information to Google Local.

If your site is hosted in the same country you want associated with your site, you don’t need to specify the location in Webmaster Tools. It’s probably worthwhile to do so though, particularly since you never know when a host might move servers or if Google’s database has the IP address listed incorrectly.

Why this new tool? Says Google:

"Google has been listening to the concerns of the webmaster community and knows that they sometimes have problems with the geographic location of their sites. We do our best to determine the location of sites and rank them appropriately but are excited to provide webmasters new ways to give us additional input," said Amanda Camp engineer with Webmaster Tools. "At SES San Jose last year, we heard from many webmasters that this was one of the most important issues for them, so we’ve been working hard to come up with a solution that would be easy for them and would benefit searchers as well.""

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First, Search Engine Land spots them testing ten Sitelinks on some mobile devices, then they confirm that there will soon be eight Sitelinks in SERPs (pictured below is the current version, showing only four).

And now Google announces that with you can control your Sitelinks through Webmaster Central. Here’s how the process works:

Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you won’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users.

Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.

In the Webmaster Tools Dashboard, you’ll find this capability under Links > Sitelinks. I’m a bit unclear as to why the webmaster’s block would expire after 90 days.

However, if your site doesn’t already have sitelinks included in your Google listings, you can’t add them. Discovering sitelinks is still an automatic, algorithmic process for Google.

Search Engine Land also spotted more Webmaster Central improvements:

• “query stats . . . breakdown by date range”
• “receipts for any spam reports, paid link reports, reconsideration requests, and crawl rate change requests you’ve filed”
• “a form of a duplicate content warning,” called “High URL Counts”

As always, many of these features have long been requested by users, including during Matt Cutts’ open call at SMX Advanced.

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Google Webmaster Central has a tissue and a flashlight for them. On the official Webmaster Central blog, they announced six months of historical data will be available:

Now you can jump between 9 query stats snapshots ranging from now to 6 months ago. Note that the time interval for each of these snapshots is different. For the 7 day, 2 week, and 3 week snapshots, we report the top queries for the previous week. For the 1 to 6 month snapshots, we report statistics for the previous month. And still others of you who log in may notice that you don’t have query stats data going back to 6 months ago. We hope to improve that experience in the future.

Google also made a “download data” feature available, for the spreadsheet-obsessed data fiends out there. All the stats for Top Search Queries may be downloaded in a convenient CSV format.

Another feature shows top queries by percentage, something Google used to only show ranked by query results and clicks. That was partially helpful, but this change should make it easier to see which queries really carried visitors to a site.

Interesting commentary from former Webmaster Central goddess Vanessa Fox will be a welcome read for webmasters. Vanessa noted the addition of information about sitelinks, those extra results appearing below some search results.