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: Peeyush Ranjan and Liza Ma, Webmaster Tools team Since not every webmaster can come to us, we are coming to you. Last November, we announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now we're taking that program worldwide. We are happy to announce the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program .

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team If your site does not appear in Google Search results , you might be understandably worried. Here, we've put together some information to help you determine when and how to submit a reconsideration request for your site.  You can follow along as Bergy )the webmaster of example.com in our video( tries to find out whether he needs to submit a reconsideration request for his Ancient Roman Politics blog. Of course,

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zürich Last Thursday, many of you just couldn't get enough of us and joined our second live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune." It was an action-packed session with live presentations, questions and answers and chatting about cats and other important topics. Over the course of an hour and a half, we made four presentations, received over 600 questions and passed around close to 500 chat messages.

Written by Kaspar Szymanski and the European Guides Team, Dublin A year ago Google Guides from the Search Quality Team started monitoring Google Webmaster Help Groups in European languages. It has been an interesting time and a great, rewarding experience for all those involved :o(. We have enjoyed building and growing our communities with webmasters across Europe and we hope you have as well. The feedback we have been receiving since the beginning has been encouraging,

Written by Jonathan Simon, Webmaster Tools Team As the days grow longer and summer takes full stage, many of us are flocking to patios and parks to engage in the time-honored tradition of grilling food. When it comes to cooking outdoors, the type of grills used span a spectrum from primitive to high tech. For some people a small campfire is all that's required for the perfect outdoor dining experience.

Written by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist When it comes to talking with webmasters, we  just can't get enough . This past March we had the pleasure of connecting with hundreds of you online in our  first-ever Webmaster Help Group online live chat , which included a presentation on Images in Google Search by  Maile , lots of feedback from you on webmaster issues, a site clinic, and dozens of questions answered by folks from our Google Webmaster Central team.

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 Sean Harding, Webmaster Tools Team We all know how friendly Googlebot is . And like all benevolent robots, he listens to us and respects our wishes about parts of our site that we don't want crawled. We can just give him a robots.txt file explaining what we want, and he'll happily comply. But what if you're intimidated by the idea of communicating directly with Googlebot? After all, not all of us are fluent in the language of robots.txt .

Written by Reid Yokoyama, Search Quality Team Occasionally in the discussion group , webmasters ask, "Should I be using Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics?" Our answer is: use both! Here are three scenarios that really highlight the power of both tools. 1. Make the most of your impressions One of my favorite features of Webmaster Tools is that it will show you the Top 20 search queries your site appeared for along with the Top 20 clicked queries.

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.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst Our search quality and Webmaster Central teams love helping webmasters solve problems. But since we can't be in all places at all times answering all questions, we also try hard to show you how to help yourself. We put a lot of work into providing documentation and blog posts to answer your questions and guide you through the data and tools we provide,

By John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Zurich Setting up and running a website is getting easier and easier, and it's wonderful to see so many new webmasters sharing their voices with the world! For you as a webmaster it's pretty easy going... until you run into an issue that you just can't seem to solve on your own. Maybe some technical issues were flagged in your Webmaster Tools account; maybe you're just trying to get your robots.

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 ,

Posted by Yonatan Zunger, Search Quantity Team In 2003, Google introduced a "supplemental index" as a way of showing more documents to users. Most webmasters will probably snicker about that statement, since supplemental docs were famous for refreshing less often and showing up in search results less often. But the supplemental index served an important purpose: it stored unusual documents that we would search in more depth for harder or more esoteric queries. For a long time,