)Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog ( UPDATE July 13: We have changed the name of the codelab application to Gruyere. The codelab is now located at http://google-gruyere.appspot.com . We want Googlers to have a firm understanding of the threats our services face, as well as how to help protect against those threats. We work toward these goals in a variety of ways, including security training for new engineers, technical presentations about security,

Webmaster Level: All Update on May 19, 2010: We have several translated versions of this post! If you're more comfortable reading Thai , Indonesian , Romanian , Czech , or Farsi , the links above will take you to your preferred version. Thanks again for your help. We pay attention to dozens of different languages in our spam fighting, but sometimes we really want to drill down and concentrate on a small number of languages.

Webmaster Level: All Today, as announced on the Official Google Blog, we've taken an additional step to improve access to Google webmaster services. Parallels , one of the leading providers of control panel software to hosting companies, has integrated Google Services for Websites into Parallels Plesk Panel , used by millions of website owners globally to manage their websites. If you use Plesk for managing your hosting and website services,

Webmaster Level: All Anticipating the start of the season of barbecues and potlucks, we've added recipes as our newest rich snippets format. This means that for certain sites with recipe content, Google users will see quick facts when these recipe pages show up as part of the search results. For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad , you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets.

Webmaster Level: All We've been hearing this question for many years from webmasters. That's why we built features such as the Safe Browsing API , the malware review form , and our Malware details Labs feature . As of today, once we notice your site is infected, we'll do our best to send an e-mail to the address you have associated with your account in Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster level: All Change can happenâ€"sometimes, as we saw in our previous post on URL removals , you may completely block or remove a page from your site. Other times you might only change parts of a page, or remove certain pieces of text. Depending on how frequently a page is being crawled, it can take some time before these changes get reflected in our search results. In this blog post we'll look at the steps you can take if we're still showing old,

Webmaster Level: All How many of Google's web pages use a descriptive title tag? Do we use description meta tags? Heading tags? While we always try to focus on the user, could our products use an SEO tune up? These are just some of the questions we set out to answer with Google's SEO Report Card. Google's SEO Report Card is an effort to provide Google's product teams with ideas on how they can improve their products' pages using simple and accepted optimizations.

Webmaster Level: All Last year we introduced Rich Snippets , a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic - after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster. We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people .

Webmaster Level: Beginner Want to eat healthier and exercise more in 2010? That's tough! Want to learn about search engine optimization )SEO( so you can disregard the rumors and know what's important? That's easy! Here's how to gain SEO knowledge as you go about your new start to 2010: Step 1: Absorb the basics If you like to learn by reading, download our SEO Starter Guide for reading while you're on an exercise bike, training for Ironman. Or, if you're more a video watcher,

We've just launched Site Performance, an experimental feature in Webmaster Tools that shows you information about the speed of your site and suggestions for making it faster. This is a small step in our larger effort to make the web faster . Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity , higher revenue and lower costs . Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine,

Webmaster Level: All Just a few weeks ago, we made Google Friend Connect a lot easier to use by dramatically simplifying the setup process. Today, we're excited to announce several new features that make it possible for website owners to get to know their users, encourage users to get to know each other, and match their site content )including Google ads( to visitors' interests. To learn more about these new features, check out the Google Social Web Blog .

Webmaster Level: All In May this year we announced Rich Snippets which makes it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google's search results. We're convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we've worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have review or people/social networking content on your site,

Handling duplicate content within your own website can be a big challenge. Websites grow; features get added, changed and removed; content comesâ€"content goes. Over time, many websites collect systematic cruft in the form of multiple URLs that return the same contents. Having duplicate content on your website is generally not problematic, though it can make it harder for search engines to crawl and index the content. Also,

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses )or more accurately, doesn't use( the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag.

We just announced a couple of new features on the Official Google Blog that enable users to get to the information they want faster. Both features provide additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page.

Webmaster Level: All Last month, I gave a talk at the Search Engine Strategies San Jose conference on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues . For those who couldn't make it to the conference or would like a recap, we've reproduced the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel . Below you can see the short video reproduced from the content at SES: You can view the slides here: Posted by Greg Grothaus,

Our greatest resource is the webmaster community, and here at Webmaster Central we're constantly impressed by the knowledge and expertise we see among webmasters: real-life SEOs, bloggers, online retailers, and all those other people creating great online content. How do real-life webmasters actually use Webmaster Tools? We'd love to know, and we'd like to showcase some real-life examples for the rest of the community. Create a video telling your story,

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?

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 fileâ€"whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.â€"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.

Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It's no wonder: the secret is out - as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn't guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better. Together with the Webmaster Tools design update ,