What is the Google Site Kit plugin?
Site Kit is an official Google plugin designed for WordPress. It brings together a collection of Google tools to manage and optimize your site. It’s easy to use, even if you don’t have a lot of technical knowledge. So if you’ve ever wanted to check things like which of your pages gets the most visitors, […]
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An introduction to Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft’s Clarity is a new, free analytics tool which provides website usage statistics, session recording, and heatmaps. Compared to Google Analytics (and other analytics platforms), it’s a little basic. But it’s robust, it’s easy to use, and it has some interesting features. What is Microsoft Clarity? Clarity records information about users who visit your website, […]
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An introduction to Microsoft Bing Webmaster Tools
As a search engine, Microsoft Bing often finds itself playing the ‘underdog’ to Google’s bigger market share, budgets and brand. But Bing Webmaster Tools can still be incredibly useful when it comes to understanding SEO issues and opportunities. Using these tools can help you to make improvements which help boost your performance in all search […]
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The latest news in SEO and WordPress: September 2020
Another month, another SEO news webinar at Yoast HQ! For the uninitiated, in these webinars, Jono Alderson and myself, run through the most important bits of news relevant to us and to you. We cover many SEO topics and expand on internet marketing and the state of the web itself. Plus, we’re having a ton […]
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The latest news in SEO and WordPress: August 2020
Every month, Jono and I sit down to discuss the latest news in SEO in a live webinar for our Yoast SEO Academy members. It’s a fun way for us to provide you some of our insights on what’s happening right now. In addition, you get to ask your questions as well, so it’s a […]
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Google Search News: coming soon to a screen near you
The world of search is constantly evolving. New tools, opportunities, and features are regularly arriving, sometimes existing things change, and sometimes we say goodbye to some things to make way for the new. To help you stay on top of things, we’ve s…
Minor cleaning up in the Search Console API
With the move to the new Search Console, we’ve decided to clean up some parts of the Search Console API as well. In the Search Analytics API, going forward we’ll no longer support these Android app search appearance types: Is InstallIs App UniversalIs …
Googlebot evergreen rendering in our testing tools
Today we updated most of our testing tools so they are using the evergreen Chromium renderer. This affects our testing tools like the mobile-friendly test or the URL inspection tool in Search Console. In this post we look into what this means and …
Search Console reporting for your site’s Discover performance data
Discover is a popular way for users to stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, even when they’re not searching. To provide publishers and sites visibility into their Discover traffic, we’re adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics and help answer questions such as:
- How often is my site shown in users’ Discover? How large is my traffic?
- Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
- How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?
A quick reminder: What is Discover?
Discover is a feature within Google Search that helps users stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, without needing a query. Users get to their Discover experience in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and by swiping right from the homescreen on Pixel phones. It has grown significantly since launching in 2017 and now helps more than 800M monthly active users get inspired and explore new information by surfacing articles, videos, and other content on topics they care most about. Users have the ability to follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like to see more or less of a specific topic. In addition, Discover isn’t limited to what’s new. It surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more. Here is our guide on how you can optimize your site for Discover.
Discover in Search Console
The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information– both new and evergreen.
For questions or comments on the report, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums, or contact us through our other channels.
Posted by Michael Huzman, Ariel Kroszynski
Search Console reporting for your site’s Discover performance data
Discover is a popular way for users to stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, even when they’re not searching. To provide publishers and sites visibility into their Discover traffic, we’re adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics and help answer questions such as:
- How often is my site shown in users’ Discover? How large is my traffic?
- Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
- How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?
A quick reminder: What is Discover?
Discover is a feature within Google Search that helps users stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, without needing a query. Users get to their Discover experience in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and by swiping right from the homescreen on Pixel phones. It has grown significantly since launching in 2017 and now helps more than 800M monthly active users get inspired and explore new information by surfacing articles, videos, and other content on topics they care most about. Users have the ability to follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like to see more or less of a specific topic. In addition, Discover isn’t limited to what’s new. It surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more. Here is our guide on how you can optimize your site for Discover.
Discover in Search Console
The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information– both new and evergreen.
For questions or comments on the report, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums, or contact us through our other channels.
Posted by Michael Huzman, Ariel Kroszynski
Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console
Google recommends verifying all versions of a website — http, https, www, and non-www — in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console. Unfortunately, many separate listings can make it hard for webmasters to understand the full picture of how Google “sees” their domain as a whole. To make this easier, today we’re announcing “domain properties” in Search Console, a way of verifying and seeing the data from Google Search for a whole domain.
Domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. They give you a complete view of your website across Search Console, reducing the need to manually combine data. So regardless of whether you use m-dot URLs for mobile pages, or are (finally) getting the migration to HTTPS set up, Search Console will be able to help with a complete view of your site’s data with regards to how Google Search sees it.
If you already have DNS verification set up, Search Console will automatically create new domain properties for you over the next few weeks, with data over all reports. Otherwise, to add a new domain property, go to the property selector, add a new domain property, and use DNS verification.We recommend using domain properties where possible going forward.
Domain properties were built based on your feedback; thank you again for everything you’ve sent our way over the years! We hope this makes it easier to manage your site, and to get a complete overview without having to manually combine data. Should you have any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums, or leave us a comment on Twitter. And as always, you can also use the feedback feature built in to Search Console as well.
Posted by Erez Bixon, Search Console Team
Announcing domain-wide data in Search Console
Google recommends verifying all versions of a website — http, https, www, and non-www — in order to get the most comprehensive view of your site in Google Search Console. Unfortunately, many separate listings can make it hard for webmasters to understand the full picture of how Google “sees” their domain as a whole. To make this easier, today we’re announcing “domain properties” in Search Console, a way of verifying and seeing the data from Google Search for a whole domain.
Domain properties show data for all URLs under the domain name, including all protocols, subdomains, and paths. They give you a complete view of your website across Search Console, reducing the need to manually combine data. So regardless of whether you use m-dot URLs for mobile pages, or are (finally) getting the migration to HTTPS set up, Search Console will be able to help with a complete view of your site’s data with regards to how Google Search sees it.
If you already have DNS verification set up, Search Console will automatically create new domain properties for you over the next few weeks, with data over all reports. Otherwise, to add a new domain property, go to the property selector, add a new domain property, and use DNS verification.We recommend using domain properties where possible going forward.
Domain properties were built based on your feedback; thank you again for everything you’ve sent our way over the years! We hope this makes it easier to manage your site, and to get a complete overview without having to manually combine data. Should you have any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums, or leave us a comment on Twitter. And as always, you can also use the feedback feature built in to Search Console as well.
Posted by Erez Bixon, Search Console Team
Consolidating your website traffic on canonical URLs
In Search Console, the Performance report currently credits all page metrics to the exact URL that the user is referred to by Google Search. Although this provides very specific data, it makes property management more difficult; for example: if your s…
Focusing on the new Search Console
Over the last year, the new Search Console has been growing and growing, with the goal of making it easier for site owners to focus on the important tasks. For us, focus means being able to put in all our work into the new Search Console, being committed to the users, and with that, being able to turn off some of the older, perhaps already-improved, aspects of the old Search Console. This gives us space to further build out the new Search Console, adding and improving features over time.
Here are some of the upcoming changes in Search Console that we’re planning on making towards end of March, 2019:
Crawl errors in the new Index Coverage report
One of the more common pieces of feedback we received was that the list of crawl errors in Search Console was not actionable when it came to setting priorities (it’s normal that Google crawls URLs which don’t exist, it’s not something that needs to be fixed on the website). By changing the focus on issues and patterns used for site indexing, we believe that site owners will be able to find and fix issues much faster (and when issues are fixed, you can request reprocessing quickly too). With this, we’re going to remove the old Crawl Errors report – for desktop, smartphone, and site-wide errors. We’ll continue to improve the way issues are recognized and flagged, so if there’s something that would help you, please submit feedback in the tools.
Along with the Crawl Errors report, we’re also deprecating the crawl errors API that’s based on the same internal systems. At the moment, we don’t have a replacement for this API. We’ll inform API users of this change directly.
Sitemaps data in Index Coverage
As we move forward with the new Search Console, we’re turning the old sitemaps report off. The new sitemaps report has most of the functionality of the old report, and we’re aiming to bring the rest of the information – specifically for images & video – to the new reports over time. Moreover, to track URLs submitted in sitemap files, within the Index Coverage report you can select and filter using your sitemap files. This makes it easier to focus on URLs that you care about.
Using the URL inspection tool to fetch as Google
The new URL inspection tool offers many ways to check and review URLs on your website. It provides both a look into the current indexing, as well as a live check of URLs that you’ve recently changed. In the meantime, this tool shows even more information on URLs, such as the HTTP headers, page resource, the JavaScript console log, and a screenshot of the page. From there, you can also submit pages for re-processing, to have them added or updated in our search results as quickly as possible.
User-management is now in settings
We’ve improved the user management interface and decreased clutter from the tool by merging it with the Settings section of the new Search Console. This replaces the user-management features in the old Search Console.
Structured data dashboard to dedicated reports per vertical
To help you implement Rich Results for you site, we added several reports to the new Search Console last year. These include Jobs, Recipes, Events and Q&A. We are committed to keep adding reports like these to the new Search Console. When Google encounters a syntax error parsing Structured Data on a page, it will also be reported in aggregate to make sure you don’t miss anything critical.
Other Structured Data types that are not supported with Rich Results features, will not be reported in Search Console anymore. We hope this reduces distraction from non-critical issues, and help you to focus on fixing problems which could be visible in Search.
Letting go of some old features
With the focus on features that we believe are critical to site owners, we’ve had to make a hard decision to drop some features in Search Console. In particular:
HTML suggestions – finding short and duplicated titles can be useful for site owners, but Google’s algorithms have gotten better at showing and improving titles over the years. We still believe this is something useful for sites to look into, and there are some really good tools that help you to crawl your website to extract titles & descriptions too.
Property Sets – while they’re loved by some site owners, the small number of users makes it hard to justify maintaining this feature. However, we did learn that users need a more comprehensive view of their website and so we will soon add the option of managing a search console account over an entire domain (regardless of schema type and sub-domains). Stay tuned!
Android Apps – most of the relevant functionality has been moved to the Firebase console over the years.
Blocked resources – we added this functionality to help sites with unblocking of CSS and JavaScript files for mobile-friendliness several years back. In the meantime, these issues have gotten much fewer, the usage of this tool has dropped significantly, and you’re able to find blocked resources directly in the URL inspection tool.
Please send us feedback!
We realize some of these changes will affect your work-flows, so we want to let you know about them as early as possible. Please send us your feedback directly in the new Search Console, if there are aspects which are unclear, or which would ideally be different for your use-case. For more detailed feedback, please use our help forums, feel free to include screenshots & ideas. In the long run, we believe the new Search Console will make things much easier, help you focus on the issues affecting your site, and the opportunities available to your site, with regards to search.
We’re looking forward to an exciting year!
Posted by Hillel Maoz, Search Console Team
The new Search Console is graduating out of Beta 🎓
Today we mark an important milestone in Search Console’s history: we are graduating the new Search Console out of beta! With this graduation we are also launching the Manual Actions report and a “Test Live” capability to the recently launched URL inspection tool, which are joining a stream of reports and features we launched in the new Search Console over the past few months.
Our journey to the new Search Console
We launched the new Search Console at the beginning of the year. Since then we have been busy hearing and responding to your feedback, adding new features such as the URL Inspection Tool, and migrating key reports and features. Here’s what the new Search Console gives you:
More data:
- Get an accurate view of your website content using the Index Coverage report.
- Review your Search Analytics data going back 16 months in the Performance report.
- See information on links pointing to your site and within your site using the Links report.
- Retrieve crawling, indexing, and serving information for any URL directly from the Google index using the URL Inspection Tool.
Better alerting and new “fixed it” flows:
- Get automatic alerts and see a listing of pages affected by Crawling, Indexing, AMP, Mobile Usability, Recipes, or Job posting issues.
- Reports now show the HTML code where we think a fix necessary (if applicable).
- Share information quickly with the relevant people in your organization to drive the fix.
- Notify Google when you’ve fixed an issue. We will review your pages, validate whether the issue is fixed, and return a detailed log of the validation findings.
Simplified sitemaps and account settings management:
- Let Google know how your site is structured by submitting sitemaps
- Submit individual URLs for indexing (see below).
- Add new sites to your account, invite and manage users.
Out of Beta
While the old Search Console still has some features that are not yet available in the new one, we believe that the most common use cases are supported, in an improved way, in the new Search Console. When an equivalent feature exists in both old and new Search Console, our messages will point users to the new version. We’ll also add a reminder link in the old report. After a reasonable period, we will remove the old report.
Read more about how to migrate from old to the new Search Console, including a list of improved reports and how to perform common tasks, in our help center.
Manual Actions and Security Issues alerts
To ensure that you don’t miss any critical alerts for your site, active manual actions and security issues will be shown directly on the Overview page in the new console. In addition, the Manual Actions report has gotten a fresher look in the new Search Console. From there, you can review the details for any pending Manual Action and, if needed, file a reconsideration request.
URL Inspection – Live mode and request indexing
The URL inspection tool that we launched a few months ago now enables you to run the inspection on the live version of the page. This is useful for debugging and fixing issues in a page or confirming whether a reported issue still exists in a page. If the issue is fixed on the live version of the page, you can ask Google to recrawl and index the page.
We’re not finished yet!
Your feedback is important to us! As we evolve Search Console, your feedback helps us to tune our efforts. You can still switch between the old and new products easily, so any missing functionality you need is just a few clicks away. We will continue working on moving more reports and tools as well as adding exciting new capabilities to the new Search Console.
Posted by Hillel Maoz and Yinnon Haviv, Engineering Leads, Search Console team
Collaboration and user management in the new Search Console
As part of our reinvention of Search Console, we have been rethinking the models of facilitating cooperation and accountability for our users. We decided to redesign the product around cooperative team usage and transparency of action history. The new Search Console will gradually provide better history tracking to show who performed which significant property-affecting modifications, such as changing a setting, validating an issue or submitting a new sitemap. In that spirit we also plan to enable all users to see critical site messages.
New features
- User management is now an integral part of Search Console.
- The new Search Console enables you to share a read-only view of many reports, including Index coverage, AMP, and Mobile Usability. Learn more.
- A new user management interface that enables all users to see and (if appropriate), manage user roles for all property users.
New Role definition
- In order to provide a simpler permission model, we are planning to limit the “restricted” user role to read-only status. While being able to see all information, read-only users will no longer be able to perform any state-changing actions, including starting a fix validation or sharing an issue.
Best practices
As a reminder, here are some best practices for managing user permissions in Search Console:
- Grant users only the permission level that they need to do their work. See the permissions descriptions.
- If you need to share an issue details report, click the Share link on that page.
- Revoke permissions from users who no longer work on a property.
- When removing a previous verified owner, be sure to remove all verification tokens for that user.
- Regularly audit and update the user permissions using the Users & Permissions page in new Search Console.
User feedback
As part of our Beta exploration, we released visibility of the user management interface to all user roles. Some users reached out to request more time to prepare for the updated user management model, including the ability of restricted and full users to easily see a list of other collaborators on the site. We’ve taken that feedback and will hold off on that part of the launch. Stay tuned for more updates relating to collaboration tools and changes on our permission models.
As always, we love to hear feedback from our users. Feel free to use the feedback form within Search Console, and we welcome your discussions in our help forums as well!
Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland
Links, Mobile Usability, and site management in the new Search Console
More features are coming to the new Search Console. This time we’ve focused on importing existing popular features from the old Search Console to the new product.
Links Report
Search Console users value the ability to see links to and within their site, as Google Search sees them. Today, we are rolling out the new Links report, which combines the functionality of the “Links to your site” and “Internal Links” reports on the old Search Console. We hope you find this useful!
Mobile Usability report
Mobile Usability is an important priority for all site owners. In order to help site owners with fixing mobile usability issues, we launched the Mobile Usability report on the new Search Console. Issue names are the same as in the old report but we now allow users to submit a validation and reindexing request when an issue is fixed, similar to other reports in the new Search Console.
Site and user management
To make the new Search Console feel more like home, we’ve added the ability to add and verify new sites, and manage your property’s users and permissions, directly in new Search Console using our newly added settings page.
Keep sending feedback
As always, we would love to get your feedback through the tools directly and our help forums so please share and let us know how we’re doing.
Posted by Ariel Kroszynski and Roman Kecher – Search Console engineers
New URL inspection tool & more in Search Console
A few months ago, we introduced the new Search Console. Here are some updates on how it’s progressing.
Welcome “URL inspection” tool
One of our most common user requests in Search Console is for more details on how Google Search sees a specific URL. We listened, and today we’ve started launching a new tool, “URL inspection,” to provide these details so Search becomes more transparent. The URL Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index.
Enter a URL that you own to learn the last crawl date and status, any crawling or indexing errors, and the canonical URL for that page. If the page was successfully indexed, you can see information and status about any enhancements we found on the page, such as linked AMP version or rich results like Recipes and Jobs.
URL is indexed with valid AMP enhancement
If a page isn’t indexed, you can learn why. The new report includes information about noindex robots meta tags and Google’s canonical URL for the page.
URL is not indexed due to ‘noindex’ meta tag in the HTML
A single click can take you to the issue report showing all other pages affected by the same issue to help you track down and fix common bugs.
We hope that the URL Inspection tool will help you debug issues with new or existing pages in the Google Index. We began rolling it out today; it will become available to all users in the coming weeks.
More exciting updates
In addition to the launch of URL inspection, we have a few more features and reports we recently launched to the new Search Console:
- Sixteen months of traffic data: The Search Analytics API now returns 16 months of data, just like the Performance report.
- Recipe report: The Recipe report help you fix structured data issues affecting recipes rich results. Use our task-oriented interface to test and validate your fixes; we will keep you informed on your progress using messages.
- New Search Appearance filters in Search Analytics: The performance report now gives you more visibility on new search appearance results, including Web Light and Google Play Instant results.
Thank you for your feedback
We are constantly reading your feedback, conducting surveys, and monitoring usage statistics of the new Search Console. We are happy to see so many of you using the new issue validation flow in Index Coverage and the AMP report. We notice that issues tend to get fixed quicker when you use these tools. We also see that you appreciate the updates on the validation process that we provide by email or on the validation details page.
We want to thank everyone who provided feedback: it has helped us improve our flows and fix bugs on our side.
More to come
The new Search Console is still beta, but it’s adding features and reports every month. Please keep sharing your feedback through the various channels and let us know how we’re doing.
Posted by Roman Kecher and Sion Schori – Search Console engineers
Google Search at I/O 2018
With the eleventh annual Google I/O wrapped up, it’s a great time to reflect on some of the highlights.
What we did at I/O
The event was a wonderful way to meet many great people from various communities across the globe, exchange ideas, and gather feedback. Besides many great web sessions, codelabs, and office hours we shared a few things with the community in two sessions specific to Search:
- Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites with John Mueller and Tom Greenaway
- Build a successful web presence with Google Search with Mariya Moeva and John Mueller
The sessions included the launch of JavaScript error reporting in the Mobile Friendly Test tool, dynamic rendering (we will discuss this in more detail in a future post), and an explanation of how CMS can use the Indexing and Search Console APIs to provide users with insights. For example, Wix lets their users submit their homepage to the index and see it in Search results instantly, and Squarespace created a Google Search keywords report to help webmasters understand what prospective users search for.
During the event, we also presented the new Search Console in the Sandbox area for people to try and were happy to get a lot of positive feedback, from people being excited about the AMP Status report to others exploring how to improve their content for Search.
Hands-on codelabs, case studies and more
We presented the Structured Data Codelab that walks you through adding and testing structured data. We were really happy to see that it ended up being one of the top 20 codelabs by completions at I/O. If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Structured Data, check out our case studies.
During the in-person office hours we saw a lot of interest around HTTPS, mobile-first indexing, AMP, and many other topics. The in-person Office Hours were a wonderful addition to our monthly Webmaster Office Hours hangout. The questions and comments will help us adjust our documentation and tools by making them clearer and easier to use for everyone.
Highlights and key takeaways
We also repeated a few key points that web developers should have an eye on when building websites, such as:
- Indexing and rendering don’t happen at the same time. We may defer the rendering to a later point in time.
- Make sure the content you want in Search has metadata, correct HTTP statuses, and the intended canonical tag.
- Hash-based routing (URLs with “#”) should be deprecated in favour of the JavaScript History API in Single Page Apps.
- Links should have an href attribute pointing to a URL, so Googlebot can follow the links properly.
Make sure to watch this talk for more on indexing, dynamic rendering and troubleshooting your site. If you wanna learn more about things to do as a CMS developer or theme author or Structured Data, watch this talk.
We were excited to meet some of you at I/O as well as the global I/O extended events and share the latest developments in Search. To stay in touch, join the Webmaster Forum or follow us on Twitter, Google+, and YouTube.
Posted by Martin Splitt, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Our goal: helping webmasters and content creators
Great websites are the result of the hard work of website owners who make their content and services accessible to the world. Even though it’s simpler now to run a website than it was years ago, it can still feel like a complex undertaking. This is why we invest a lot of time and effort in improving Google Search so that website owners can spend more time focusing on building the most useful content for their users, while we take care of helping users find that content.
Most website owners find they don’t have to worry much about what Google is doing—they post their content, and then Googlebot discovers, crawls, indexes and understands that content, to point users to relevant pages on those sites. However, sometimes the technical details still matter, and sometimes a great deal.
For those times when site owners would like a bit of help from someone at Google, or an explanation for why something works a particular way, or why things appear in a particular way, or how to fix what looks like a technical glitch, we have a global team dedicated to making sure there are many places for a website owner to get help from Google and knowledgeable members of the community.
The first place to start for help is Google Webmasters, a place where all of our support resources (many of which are available in 40 languages) are within easy reach:
- Google Web Fundamentals: Provides technical guidance on building a modern website that takes advantage of open web standards.
- Google Search developer documentation: Describes how Google crawls and indexes a website. Includes authoritative guidance on building a site that is optimized for Google Search.
- Search Console Help Center: Provides detailed information on how to use and take advantage of Search Console, the best way for a website owner to understand how Google sees their site.
- The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide: Provides a complete overview of the basics of SEO according to our recommended best practices.
- Google webmaster guidelines: Describes policies and practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action that can negatively affect their Search appearance.
- Google Webmasters YouTube Channel
Our second path to getting help is through our Google Webmaster Central Help Forums. We have forums in 16 languages—in English, Spanish, Hindi, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean. The forums are staffed with dedicated Googlers who are there to make sure your questions get answered. Aside from the Googlers who monitor the forums, there is an amazing group of Product Experts who generously offer their time to help other members of the community—many times providing greater detail and analysis for a particular website’s content than we could. The forums allow for both a public discussion and, if the case requires it, for private follow-up replies in the forum.
A third path for support to website owners is our series of Online Webmaster Office Hours — in English, German, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi and French. Anyone who joins these is welcome to ask us questions about website appearance in Google Search, which we will answer to the best of our abilities. All of our team members think that one of the best parts of speaking at conferences and events is the opportunity to answer questions from the audience, and the online office hours format creates that opportunity for many more people who might not be able to travel to a specialized event. You can always check out the Google Webmaster calendar for upcoming webmaster officer hours and live events.
While how a website behaves on the web is openly visible to all who can see it, we know that some website owners prefer not to make it known their website has a problem in a public forum. There’s no shame in asking for support, but if you have an issue for your website that seems sensitive—for which you don’t think you can share all the details publicly—you can call out that you would prefer to share necessary details only with someone experienced and who is willing to help, using the forum’s “Private Reply” feature.
Are there other things you think we should be doing that would help your website get the most out of search? Please let us know — in our forums, our office hours, or via Twitter @googlewmc.
Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón from Google’s Webmaster Outreach & Support team
