Free Tools For Websites

Google Has Developed Industry-Leading Free Tools And Resources To Help People Optimize Their Sites. Webmaster Tools Provide Information And Data To Help Websites Improve How Search Engines Crawl And Index Their Content, Including Tools To Diagnose Malware, Speed Up Load Times And More. We Provide These Free Tools Because When The Web Gets Better, Users Do More Searches On Google To Find The Sites They’re Looking For.

When Site Owners Visit Webmaster Central, They Find A List Of Different Free Tools To Optimize Their Sites And Their Performance On Google.

Advice For Websites

We’ve Prioritized Supporting Websites And Providing Effective Guidance. With More Than A Trillion Pages On The Web, It’s Unfortunately Not Possible For Us To Have In-Depth Conversations With Every Website Owner, So (Like Other Search Engines) We Focus On Developing Scalable Resources To Help Millions Of Sites.

We Support Websites In Many Different Ways. For Example, We’ve Developed Resources On Creating Google-Friendly Sites And A Starter Guide For Search Engine Optimization. We’ve Built Extensive Resources In Our Webmaster Help Center, With Dozens Of Articles On Everything From The Anatomy Of A Search Result, To Robots.Txt, To Sitemaps. We Also Operate A Webmaster Blog Dedicated To Sharing Information About Search, Which Has More Than 400 Blog Posts To-Date. If A Site Owner Can’t Find The Answer He’s Looking For There, We Host A Vibrant Discussion Forum Where Industry Experts And Google Employees Respond To Questions From Around The World. For Those Who’d Rather Learn By Watching, We Have A Youtube Channel Dedicated To Giving Websites Advice, With More Than 350 Videos To Answer Common Questions. That Youtube Channel Has Received Over Five Million Total Views. We Also Participate In Search Engine Conferences Such As The Search Marketing Expo (SMX) And Search Engine Strategies (SES), Giving Presentations On Best Practices And Answering Questions In Person.

The Webmaster Central Channel On Youtube Has More Than 300 Instructive Videos For Site Owners.

Transparency And The Algorithm

Our Goal Is To Help People Find The Best Information On The Web. To Make This Possible, We Want To Help Websites Focus On Creating Great Content, Not Tricks And Gimmicks To Game Search Engines. In Order To Achieve This, There Are Certain Aspects Of Our Algorithms That Must Remain A Secret. Otherwise, We Would Enable Some Spammers To Game Google’s Results, Which In Turn Punishes Site Owners Who Offer Legitimately Useful Websites And Services. In Fact, Every Time Spammers Learn About Another Aspect Of Our Algorithms, They Try To Develop New Ways To Ruin Search Quality For Our Users. For Example:

• Pagerank: The Same Year Larry Page And Sergey Brin Founded Google, They Published What Has Become A Seminal Paper Outlining A Key Innovation In Google’s Algorithm: Pagerank. This Signal Effectively Analyzes The Links Between Pages To Assess Importance – And Inspired Spammers To Pay Each Other For Links To Try And Game Google.
  
  
• Topicality: We’ve Also Talked Extensively About How We Match Search Keywords With The Words Appearing On Websites. There’s Now A Whole Set Of Spammers Who “Keyword Stuff” Their Pages With Nonsensical Phrases Unrelated To The Actual Sites.

Despite The Challenges Posed By Spammers, We Love To Share Our Work When We Can. We’ve Published Hundreds Of Research Papers That Reveal Many Of The Technologies Behind Google. We Write Frequent Blog Posts About Changes To Our Algorithms, Such As Our Recent “Panda” Algorithm Change To Help People Find Higher-Quality Sites, And Our Recent Change To Protect Consumers From Unscrupulous Merchants. We’ve Published More Than 400 Posts About Search On The Official Google Blog, Another 300 On The Google Webmaster Central Blog, And We’ve Recently Begun Yet Another Blog Called “Inside Search” Focused Entirely On Search. We Also Operate A Help Center For Search And Another For Webmasters. That’s Not To Mention The Search Help Forums Which Have More Than 50,000 Discussions, And The Webmaster Central Help Forums With More Than 90,000. The Challenge Here Is To Balance A Desire To Share Our Search Innovations Without Rewarding Opportunistic Actors Who Would Use The Information To Attempt To Trick Their Way To The Top Of Our Search Results.

This Graphic Appears In Larry Page And Sergey Brin’s 1999 Paper On Pagerank To Describe Google’s High-Level System Architecture.

Clear Guidelines, Spam Warnings & Reconsideration Requests

Because Some Spammers Consistently Try To Game Google’s Search Algorithms, Google And Other Search Engines Have Published Detailed Quality Guidelines For Webmasters. In Addition To Providing Constructive Advice For Improving Website Performance On Google, These Guidelines Clearly Articulate Spam Tactics That Are Against The Rules And Could Lead To A Site Being Demoted Or Removed From Our Index.

Site Owners Who Sign Up For Our Free Webmaster Tools Receive Notifications When We Detect Certain Types Of Spam Issues With Their Sites. If Our Spam Team Has Taken Manual Action In Response To A Violation Of Our Quality Guidelines, We Provide A Tool For Requesting Reconsideration After It’s Been Cleaned Up.

Thanks, Sharad