Watch out for your .yu domain!

Are you the owner of a .yu domain? Then you might have heard the news: as of September 30, all .yu domains will stop working, regardless of their renewal date. This means that any content you're hosting on a .yu domain will no longer be online. For those of you who would still like to have your site online, we've prepared some recommendations to make sure that Google keeps crawling, indexing, and serving your content appropriately.

• Check your backlinks. Since it won't be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a "comma separated value" -- .csv -- file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.

• Check your internal links. If you are planning to simply move your content in bulk from the old to the new site, make sure that the new internal navigation is up to date. For example, if you are renaming pages on your site from "www.example.yu/home.htm" to "www.example.com/home.htm" make sure that your internal navigation reflects such changes to prevent broken links.

• Start moving the site to your new domain. It's a good idea to start moving while you can still maintain control of your old domain, so don't wait! As mentioned in our best practices when moving your site, we recommend starting by moving a single directory or subdomain, and testing the results before completing the move. Remember that you will not be able to keep a 301 redirection on your old domain after September 30, so start your test early.

While you're moving your site, you can test how Google crawls and indexes your new site at its new location by submitting a Sitemap via Google Webmaster Tools. Although we may not crawl or index all the pages listed in each Sitemap, we recommend that you submit one because doing so helps Google understand your site better. You can read more on this topic in our answers to the most frequently asked questions on Sitemaps. And remember that for any question or concerns we're waiting for you in the Google Webmaster Help Forum!
Update: as mentioned here, we have introduced a new feature: Change of Address. Check it out if you are moving from one domain to another! By using this feature you will help us update our index faster and hopefully make the transition for your users smoother.

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

Let's make the web faster

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google Code Blog)

From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.

We are excited to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:

• Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is HTML5. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.
  
• In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.
  
• Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.
  
• While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC's decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.

To find out what Googlers think about making the web faster, see the video below. If you have ideas on how to speed up the web, please share them with the rest of the community. Let's all work together to make the web faster!



Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations and Bill Coughran, SVP, Engineering

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 15th - 19th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Maile Ohye gave a webmaster-focused presentation about Product Search.

Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag:

• Do dates in URLs determine freshness?
• What impact does "page bloat" have on Google rankings?
• What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?
• Should I include my logo text using the 'alt' attribute or CSS?
• What's the preferred way to check for links to my site?

To get you started on watching this latest batch of videos, here's Matt's answer about directories and paid links:



Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Flash indexing with external resource loading

Webmaster Level: All

We just added external resource loading to our Flash indexing capabilities. This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it.
This new capability improves search quality by allowing relevant content contained in external resources to appear in response to users' queries. For example, this result currently comes up in response to the query [2002 VW Transporter 888]:

Prior to this launch, this result did not appear, because all of the relevant content is contained in an XML file loaded by a SWF file.

To date, when Google encounters SWF files on the web, we can:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn't particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

If you don't want your SWF file or any of its external resources crawled by search engines, please use an appropriate robots.txt directive.

Written by Janis Stipins, Software Engineer

Reconsideration requests: Now with notifications

If you've submitted a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools, you've probably wondered what happens once Google receives it. We've always done our best to act upon these requests as quickly as possible, but until now we haven't notified webmasters once we've processed their requests.

As of last week, after your request has been processed, we'll confirm this by sending a message to your Message Center in Webmaster Tools. (Prefer to be notified by email? You can do that too.) Sometime after you receive a reconsideration request confirmation message, check your site's performance in search results. If it's doing well, it means that Google has reviewed your site and believes that it adheres to our Webmaster Guidelines. If your site still isn't performing well in search, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines and also checking out these possible reasons why your site might not be doing as well as you expect.

Posted by Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Search Quality

Best practices for Product Search

Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate

If you run an e-commerce site and you'd like your products to be eligible to be shown in Google search results, then check out our "Product Search for Webmasters" video. In addition to the basics on Product Search, I cover:

• Attributes to include in your feed
• FAQs
• Will my products' rankings improve if I include custom attributes in my feed?
• Do product listings expire after 30 days?
• How often should I submit my feed?

More information can be found in the Product Search Help Center.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Webmaster Central YouTube update for June 8th - 12th

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Matt Cutts answered a few new questions from the Grab Bag:

• What if a search for my business triggers "Did you mean?"
• Why do big brands rank so well?
• Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO?

Matt also went over a great example of whitehat linkbait:



And if you've ever thought about hiding text, here's one technique that didn't fool Google:



Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team