A lot has been said about how to start a multi-lingual site and how to better target content through meta tags . Our users have raised a number of interesting questions about creating websites in different languages, like the one below. ' ganex ': > How does one do for INDIA. > As there are many languages spoken here. > My Site is primarily in English, but my site targets different cities in INDIA.

Recently we've seen more websites get hacked because of various security holes. In order to help webmasters with this issue, we plan to run a test that will alert some webmasters if their content management system )CMS( or publishing platform looks like it might have a security hole or be hackable. This is a test, so we're starting out by alerting five to six thousand webmasters.

Creating outbound links on your site, or "linking out", is our topic for Day 3 of Links Week . Linking out happens naturally, and for most webmasters, it's not something you have to worry about. Nonetheless, in case you're interested about an otherwise simple topic that's fundamental to the web, here's the good, the bad, and answers to more advanced questions asked by our fellow webmasters. First, let's start with the good... Relevant outbound links can help your visitors.

Since both tennis and table tennis are in the Olympics, perhaps you're wondering: if there's soccer, why not "table soccer?" Of course, we know table soccer by another name; and while foosball may not be an Olympic sport, we still cheered Nathan Johns and Jan Backes â€"two members of our Search Quality teamâ€"as they brought home the foosball silver medal at the search engine foosball smackdown at SES San Jose. "Smackdown" doesn't quite equate to "Olympics,

Now that we've bid farewell to soft 404s , in this post for 404 week we'll answer your burning 404 questions. How do you treat the response code 410 "Gone"? Just like a 404. Do you index content or follow links from a page with a 404 response code? We aim to understand as much as possible about your site and its content. So while we wouldn't want to show a hard 404 to users in search results,

During a recent visit to the Mountain View Googleplex, I had the chance to interview Matt Cutts for our German Webmaster Blog . While enjoying the California sunshine we chatted about how to rank in Google, resources for webmasters and Matt's first encounter with spam. As these topics are not only interesting for a German audience, I want to share them with you as well.

Written by Maile Ohye All of us with Webmaster Central share one passion: a serious love for improving the Internet. If you're organizing an event with an audience that would benefit from our discussing building search-engine friendly sites and maximizing the resources of Webmaster Central - such as our Webmaster Tools , Help Center and Discussion Group - please submit a speaker request .

Written by T.V. Raman , Research Scientist As a follow-up to my previous posts on accessibility, here are some design recommendations for creating web content that remains usable by the widest possible audience while helping ensure that the content gets indexed and crawled. Avoid spurious XMLHttpRequests Pages that enable users to look up information often use XMLHttpRequests to populate the page with additional information after the page has loaded. When using this pattern,

Written by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team Today's the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, so now is a perfect time to start your spring cleaning. But as a webmaster, your chores don't end after you've cleaned the garage - you'll probably also want to do some cleaning on your server as well. Exterior Before we get to the interior, step outside, and see how your site looks from the street - or in Google search results.

Written by T.V. Raman , Research Scientist Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the profound impact it has had on my life. In everyday life, things like a sheet of paper"and anything written on it"are completely inaccessible to a blind or visually impaired user.

Written by Kas, Search Quality Team One of the ways in which we continuously work to improve our service for users everywhere is to localize and adjust our tools for different regions. In November, we had a chance to introduce our international Webmaster Help Group Team and its guides from Dublin. Today I'm very happy to announce that we've launched three more Google monitored groups in Hebrew , Turkish and Hungarian . Keeping with tradition,

Written by Maile Ohye If it's good enough for the Costanzas, it's good enough for Webmaster Central: it's time for a Festivus for the rest of us )webmasterus(! Our special celebration begins not with carols and eggnog, but by remembering some of the popular Webmaster Tools features - make that Feats of Strength - for 2007. This year, you gained the ability to chickity-check out your backlinks ) URL Removal . And let's not forget Message Center and IDNA support ,

Written by Bogdan Stnescu, Software Engineer As a webmaster, you may have been concerned about your RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google's search results. By serving feeds, we could cause a poor user experience: Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results. Users clicking on a feed may miss valuable content available only in the HTML page. To address these concerns,

Written by Maile Ohye With apologizes to Vic Mizzy, we've written short verse to the tune of the " Addams Family " theme )please use your imagination(: We may be hobbyists or just geeky, Building websites and acting cheeky, Javascript redirects we won't make sneaky, Our webmaster fam-i-ly! Happy Halloween everyone! Feel free to join the discussion and share your Halloween stories and costumes. Magnum P.I., Punk Rocker, Rubik's Cube, Mr. T., and Rainbow Brite a.k.a.

Written by Raj Krishnan, Snippets Team The quality of your snippet " the short text preview we display for each web result " can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked )i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way(. We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets , and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

Written by Maile Ohye How can URL parameters, like session IDs or tracking IDs, cause duplicate content? When user and/or tracking information is stored through URL parameters, duplicate content can arise because the same page is accessible through numerous URLs. It's what Adam Lasnik referred to in " Deftly Dealing with Duplicate Content " as "store items shown )and - worse yet - linked( via multiple distinct URLs." In the example below,