We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets - and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content - so today’s announcement is very exciting for us.
In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published documentation on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)
We encourage you to read the documentation to take advantage of the different types of rich snippets currently supported: people profiles, reviews, videos, events and recipes. You can also use our testing tool (in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to make sure results show as you would expect.
Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages.
Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Yu Watanabe
We encourage those of you with videos to submit Video Sitemaps and to keep them updated with your new content. Please also visit our recently updated Video Sitemap Help Center, and utilize our Sitemap Help Forum. If you've submitted a Video Sitemap file via Webmaster Tools and want to share your experiences or problems, you can do so here.
Posted by Nelson Lee, Product Manager Video Search
A little over six months ago we released a new malware diagnostic tool in Webmaster Tools with the help of Lucas Ballard from the anti-malware team. This feature has been a great success; many of you were interested to know if Google had detected malicious software in your site, and you used the tool's information to find and remove that malware and to fix the vulnerabilities in your servers.
Well, a few days ago we promoted the malware diagnostics tool from Labs to a full Webmaster Tools feature. You can now find it under the Diagnostics menu. Not only that, we also added support for malware notifications. As you may already know, if your site has malware we may show a warning message in our search results indicating that the site is potentially harmful. If this is the case, you should remove any dangerous content as soon as possible and patch the vulnerabilities in your server. After you've done that, you can request a malware review in order to have the warning for your site removed. What's new in our latest release is that the form to request a review is now right there with the rest of the malware data:
We've also made several other improvements under the covers. Now the data is updated almost four times faster than before. And we've improved our algorithms for identifying injected content and can pinpoint exploits that were difficult to catch when the feature first launched.
On the Webmaster Tools dashboard you'll still see a warning message when you have malware on one of your sites. This message has a link that will take you directly to the malware tool. Here at Google we take malware very seriously, and we're working on several improvements to this feature so that we can tell you ASAP if we detect that your site is potentially infected. Stay tuned!
We’re always trying to make our tools easier to use and easier to access. Since you’re probably visiting your hosting control panel on a regular basis, we hope that you find this integration convenient. If you have feedback please let us know in the Webmaster Forum.
Recipes is the fifth format we support, following the introduction of reviews, people, video and, most recently, events.
If you have recipe content on your site, you can get started now by marking up your recipes with microdata, RDFa, or the hRecipe microformat. To learn more, read our documentation on how to mark up recipe information or our general help articles on rich snippets for a more complete overview.
Please remember that to ensure a great user experience we’re taking a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This means that we can’t guarantee that marking up your site will result in a rich snippet when your page shows up on our search results. However, we encourage you to get started, and once you’re done you can test your pages with our rich snippets testing tool.
Written by Jun Gong, Kosuke Suzuki, and Yu Watanabe
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
We encourage you to start looking at your site's speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone's experience on the Internet.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team
