Over the years we attended hundreds of conferences, we spoke to thousands of webmasters, and recorded hundreds of hours of videos to help web creators find information about how to perform better in Google Search results. Now we'd like to go further: help those who aren't able to travel internationally and access the same information.

Today we're officially announcing the Webmaster Conference, a series of local events around the world. These events are primarily located where it's difficult to access search conferences or information about Google Search, or where there's a specific need for a Search event. For example, if we identify that a region has problems with hacked sites, we may organize an event focusing on that specific topic.

We want web creators to have equal opportunity in Google Search regardless of their language, financial status, gender, location, or any other attribute. The conferences are always free and easily accessible in the region where they're organized, and, based on feedback from the local communities and analyses, they're tailored for the audience that signed up for the events. That means it doesn't matter how much you already know about Google Search; the event you attend will have takeaways tailored to you. The talks will be in the local language, in case of international speakers through interpreters, and we'll do our best to also offer sign language interpretation if requested.

Webmaster Conference Okinawa

The structure of the event varies from region to region. For example, in Okinawa, Japan, we had a wonderful half-day event with novice and advanced web creators where we focused on how to perform better in Google Images. At Webmaster Conference India and Indonesia, that might change and we may focus more on how to create faster websites. We will also host web communities in Europe and North America later this year, so keep an eye out for the announcements!
We will continue attending external events as usual; we are doing these events to complement the existing ones. If you want to learn more about our upcoming events, visit the Webmaster Conference site which we'll update monthly, and follow our blogs and @googlewmc on Twitter!

Posted by Takeaki Kanaya and Gary

Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2018

Of the types of spam we fought in 2018, three continue to stand out:

Spam on hacked websites: We reported in 2017 that we had seen a substantial reduction of spam from hacked websites in search results. This trend continued in 2018, with faster discovery of hacked web pages before they affect search results or put someone in harm’s way.   While we reduced how spam on hacked sites affects search, hacked websites remain a major security problem affecting the safety of the web. Even though we can’t prevent a website hack from happening, we’re committed to helping webmasters whose websites have been compromised by offering resources to help them recover from a hacked website. 

User-generated spam: A particular type of spam known as User-generated spam has been a continued focus for us. User-generated spam includes spammy posts on forums, as well as spammy accounts on free blogs and platforms, none of which are meant to be consumed by human beings, and all of which disrupt conversations while adding no value to users. In 2018, we were able to reduce the impact on search users from this type of spam by more than 80%. While we can’t prevent websites from being exploited, we do want to make it easier for website owners to learn how to protect themselves, which is why we provide resources on how to prevent abuse of your site’s public areas.

Link spam: We continued to protect the value of authoritative and relevant links as an important ranking signal for Search. We continued to deal swiftly with egregious link spam, and made a number of bad linking practices less effective for manipulating ranking. Above all, we continued to engage with webmasters and SEOs to chip away at the many myths that have emerged over the years relating to linking practices. We continued to remind website owners that if you simply stay away from building links mainly as an attempt to rank better and focus on creating great content, you should not have to worry about any of the myths or realities. We think that one of the best ways of fighting spam of all types is by encouraging website owners to just create great quality content. Resources such as the SEO starter-guide highlight best practices and bust some common myths and misconceptions related to what it takes to appear well in Google Search results. Reporting link spam is also a great way to assist us in fighting against this type of abuse and to help preserve fairness in Search ranking.

Working with users, webmasters and developers for a better web

Everyday users continue to help us find spam, malware and other issues in Search that escape our filters and processes by reporting spam on search, reporting phishing or  reporting malware. We received over 180,000 search spam user reports and we were able to take action on 64% of the reports we processed. These reports truly make a difference and we’d like to thank all of you who submitted them. 

We think it’s important to let website owners known when we detect something wrong with their website. In 2018, we generated over 186 million messages to website owners calling out potential improvements, issues and problems that could affect their site’s appearance on Search results. We can only deliver these notifications to site owners that verified their sites in Search Console, and we successfully delivered 96 million of those messages. The rest of the messages will be kept linked with the website for as long as they are relevant, so they can be seen when a webmaster successfully registers their site in Search Console. The majority of these messages were welcoming new users to Search Console, and the second largest group was informing registered Search Console users when Mobile-First Indexing became available. Of all messages, slightly over 2%—about 4 million—were related to manual actions resulting from violations of our Webmaster Guidelines. 

High quality content keeps spam off of search results, and we continued to improve the tools and reports we offer for webmasters that create that content. The Google Search Console was completely rebuilt from the ground up to provide both new and improved reports (Performance, Index Coverage, Links, Mobile Usability report), as well as brand new features (URL Inspection Tool and Site and User management). This improved Search Console graduated out of beta in 2018 and is now available generally to all registered website owners.

We didn’t forget the front-end developers who make the modern web work, and focused on helping them make their sites great for users and also search-friendly regardless of whether they are on a CMS, roll their own CSS and JS, or build on top of a web framework. With the new SEO audit capability in Lighthouse, the open-source and automated auditing tool for improving the quality of web pages, developers and webmasters can now run actionable SEO health-checks on their pages and quickly identify areas for improvement.

We also engage directly with website owners to provide help with thorny issues. Our dedicated team members meet with webmasters around the world regularly, both online and in-person. We delivered more than 190 online office hours, online events and offline events in more than 76 cities, to audiences totaling over 170,000 including SEOs, developers and online marketers. We hosted four search events in Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich and Osaka as well as an 11-city Search Conference in India. In 2018, we started live office hours in Spanish on top of English, French, German, Hindi and Japanese, where Webmasters can find help, tips and useful discussion on our Google Webmaster YouTube channel. Product experts continued to help webmasters find solutions through our official support forums in over a dozen languages. 

We look forward to continuing our work to deliver a spam-free Search experience to all in 2019!

Posted by Juan Felipe Rincón, Webmaster Outreach, Dublin

Google webspam trends and how we fought webspam in 2017

As we continued to improve, spammers also evolved. One of the trends in 2017 was an increase in website hacking—both for spamming search ranking and for spreading malware. Hacked websites are serious threats to users because hackers can take complete control of a site, deface homepages, erase relevant content, or insert malware and harmful code. They may also record keystrokes, stealing login credentials for online banking or financial transactions. In 2017 we focused on reducing this threat, and were able to detect and remove from search results more than 80 percent of these sites. But hacking is not just a spam problem for search users—it affects the owners of websites as well. To help website owners keep their websites safe, we created a hands-on resource to help webmasters strengthen their websites’ security and revamped our help resources to help webmasters recover from a hacked website. The guides are available in 19 languages.

We’re also recognizing the importance of robust content management systems (CMSs). A large percentage of websites are run on one of several popular CMSs, and subsequently spammers exploited them by finding ways to abuse their provisions for user-generated content, such as posting spam content in comment sections or forums. We’re working closely with many of the providers of popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla to help them also fight spammers that abuse their forums, comment sections and websites.


Another abuse vector is the manipulation of links, which is one of the foundation ranking signals for Search. In 2017 we doubled down our effort in removing unnatural links via ranking improvements and scalable manual actions. We have observed a year-over-year reduction of spam links by almost half.

Working with users and webmasters for a better web

We’re here to listen: Our automated systems are constantly working to detect and block spam. Still, we always welcome hearing from you when something seems … phishy. Last year, we were able to take action on nearly 90,000 user reports of search spam.

Reporting spam, malware and other issues you find helps us protect the site owner and other searchers from this abuse. You can file a spam report, a phishing report or a malware report. We very much appreciate these reports—a big THANK YOU to all of you who submitted them.


We also actively work with webmasters to maintain the health of the web ecosystem. Last year, we sent 45 million messages to registered website owners via Search Console letting them know about issues we identified with their websites. More than 6 million of these messages are related to manual actions, providing transparency to webmasters so they understand why their sites got manual actions and how to resolve the issue.

Last year, we released a beta version of a new Search Console to a limited number of users and afterwards, to all users of Search Console. We listened to what matters most to the users, and started with popular functionalities such as Search performance, Index Coverage and others. These can help webmasters optimize their websites' Google Search presence more easily.

Through enhanced Safe Browsing protections, we continue to protect more users from bad actors online. In the last year, we have made significant improvements to our safe browsing protection, such as broadening our protection of macOS devices, enabling predictive phishing protection in Chrome, cracked down on mobile unwanted software, and launched significant improvements to our ability to protect users from deceptive Chrome extension installation.


We have a multitude of channels to engage directly with webmasters. We have dedicated team members who meet with webmasters regularly both online and in-person. We conducted more than 250 online office hours, online events and offline events around the world in more than 60 cities to audiences totaling over 220,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers. In addition, our official support forum has answered a high volume of questions in many languages. Last year, the forum had 63,000 threads generating over 280,000 contributing posts by 100+ Top Contributors globally. For more details, see this post. Apart from the forums, blogs and the SEO starter guide, the Google Webmaster YouTube channel is another channel to find more tips and insights. We launched a new SEO snippets video series to help with short and to-the-point answers to specific questions. Be sure to subscribe to the channel!


Despite all these improvements, we know we’re not yet done. We’re relentless in our pursue of an abuse-free user experience, and will keep improving our collaboration with the ecosystem to make it happen.

Posted by Cody Kwok, Principal Engineer

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

• 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

Google I/O 2018 is starting today in California, to an international audience of 7,000+ developers. It will run until Thursday night. It is our annual developers festival, where product announcements are made, new APIs and frameworks are introduced, and Product Managers present the latest from Google.

However, you don't have to physically attend the event to take advantage of this once-a-year opportunity: many conferences and talks are live streamed on YouTube for anyone to watch. You will find the full-event schedule here.

Webmaster level: Beginner - Intermediate

Government sites, from city to state to federal agencies, are extremely important to Google Search. For one thing, governments have a lot of content — and government websites are often the canonical source of information that’s important to citizens. Around 20 percent of Google searches are for local information, and local governments are experts in their communities.

That’s why I’ve spoken at the National Association of Government Webmasters (NAGW) national conference for the past few years. It’s always interesting speaking to webmasters about search, but the people running government websites have particular concerns and questions. Since some questions come up frequently I thought I’d share this FAQ for government websites.

Question 1: How do I fix an incorrect phone number or address in search results or Google Maps?

Although managing their agency’s site is plenty of work, government webmasters are often called upon to fix problems found elsewhere on the web too. By far the most common question I’ve taken is about fixing addresses and phone numbers in search results. In this case, government site owners really can do it themselves, by claiming their Google+ Local listing. Incorrect or missing phone numbers, addresses, and other information can be fixed by claiming the listing.

Most locations in Google Maps have a Google+ Local listing — businesses, offices, parks, landmarks, etc. I like to use the San Francisco Main Library as an example: it has contact info, detailed information like the hours they’re open, user reviews and fun extras like photos. When we think users are searching for libraries in San Francisco, we may display a map and a listing so they can find the library as quickly as possible.

If you work for a government agency and want to claim a listing, we recommend using a shared Google Account with an email address at your .gov domain if possible. Usually, ownership of the page is confirmed via a phone call or post card.

Question 2: I’ve claimed the listing for our office, but I have 43 different city parks to claim in Google Maps, and none of them have phones or mailboxes. How do I claim them?

Use the bulk uploader! If you have 10 or more listings / addresses to claim at the same time, you can upload a specially-formatted spreadsheet. Go to www.google.com/places/, click the "Get started now" button, and then look for the "bulk upload" link.

If you run into any issues, use the Verification Troubleshooter.

Question 3: We're moving from a .gov domain to a new .com domain. How should we move the site?

We have a Help Center article with more details, but the basic process involves the following steps:

• Make sure you have both the old and new domain verified in the same Webmaster Tools account.
• Use a 301 redirect on all pages to tell search engines your site has moved permanently.
• Don't do a single redirect from all pages to your new home page — this gives a bad user experience.
• If there's no 1:1 match between pages on your old site and your new site (recommended), try to redirect to a new page with similar content.
• If you can't do redirects, consider cross-domain canonical links.
• Make sure to check if the new location is crawlable by Googlebot using the Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Change of Address tool in Webmaster Tools to notify Google of your site's move.
• Have a look at the Links to Your Site in Webmaster Tools and inform the important sites that link to your content about your new location.
• We recommend not implementing other major changes at the same time, like large-scale content, URL structure, or navigational updates.
• To help Google pick up new URLs faster, use the Fetch as Google tool to ask Google to crawl your new site, and submit a Sitemap listing the URLs on your new site.
• To prevent confusion, it's best to retain control of your old site’s domain and keep redirects in place for as long as possible — at least 180 days.

What if you’re moving just part of the site? This question came up too — for example, a city might move its "Tourism and Visitor Info" section to its own domain.

In that case, many of the same steps apply: verify both sites in Webmaster Tools, use 301 redirects, clean up old links, etc. In this case you don't need to use the Change of Address form in Webmaster Tools since only part of your site is moving. If for some reason you’ll have some of the same content on both sites, you may want to include a cross-domain canonical link pointing to the preferred domain.

Question 4: We've done a ton of work to create unique titles and descriptions for pages. How do we get Google to pick them up?

First off, that's great! Better titles and descriptions help users decide to click through to get the information they need on your page. The government webmasters I’ve spoken with care a lot about the content and organization of their sites, and work hard to provide informative text for users.

Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. Changes are picked up as we recrawl your site. But you can do two things to let us know about URLs that have changed:

• Submit an updated XML Sitemap so we know about all of the pages on your site.
• In Webmaster Tools, use the Fetch as Google feature on a URL you’ve updated. Then you can choose to submit it to the index.
• You can choose to submit all of the linked pages as well — if you’ve updated an entire section of your site, you might want to submit the main page or an index page for that section to let us know about a broad collection of URLs.

Question 5: How do I get into the YouTube government partner program?

For this question, I have bad news, good news, and then even better news. On the one hand, the government partner program has been discontinued. But don’t worry, because most of the features of the program are now available to your regular YouTube account. For example, you can now upload videos longer than 10 minutes.

Did I say I had even better news? YouTube has added a lot of functionality useful for governments in the past year:

• You can now broadcast live streaming video to YouTube via Hangouts On Air (requires a Google+ account).
• You can link your YouTube account with your Webmaster Tools account, making it the "official channel" for your site.
• Automatic captions continue to get better and better, supporting more languages.

I hope this FAQ has been helpful, but I’m sure I haven’t covered everything government webmasters want to know. I highly recommend our Webmaster Academy, where you can learn all about making your site search-engine friendly. If you have a specific question, please feel free to add a question in the comments or visit our really helpful Webmaster Central Forum.

Posted by Jason Morrison, Search Quality Team

Webmaster level: All
The TC Summit was a blast! As we wrote in our announcement post, we recently invited more than 250 Top Contributors from all over the world to California to thank them for being so awesome and to give them the opportunity to meet some of our forum guides, engineers and product managers in person.
Our colleagues Adrianne and Brenna already published a recap post on the Official Google Blog. As for us, the search folks at Google, there's not much left to say except that we enjoyed the event and meeting Top Contributors in real life, many of them for the first time. We got the feeling you guys had a great time, too. Let’s quote a few of the folks who make a huge difference on a daily basis:
Sasch Mayer on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English):

"For a number of reasons this event does hold a special place for me, and always will. It's not because I was one of comparatively few people to be invited for a Jolly at the ‘Plex, but because this trip offered the world's TCs a unique opportunity to finally meet each other in person."

Herbert Sulzer, a.k.a. Luzie on Google+ (Webmaster TC in English, German and Spanish):

“Hehehe! Fun, fun fun, this was all fun :D Huhhh”

Aygul Zagidullina on Google+ (Web Search TC in English):

“It was a truly fantastic, amazing, and unforgettable experience meeting so many other TCs across product forums and having the chance to talk to and hear from so many Googlers across so many products!”

Of course we did receive lots of constructive feedback, too. Transparency and communication were on top of the list, and we're looking into increasing our outreach efforts via Webmaster Tools, so stay tuned! By the way, if you haven’t done so yet, please remember to use the forwarding option in the Webmaster Tools Message Center to get the messages straight to your email inbox. In the meantime please keep an eye on our Webmaster Central Blog, and of course keep on contributing to discussions in the Google Webmaster Forum.
On behalf of all Google guides who participated in the 2011 Summit we want to thank you. You guys rock! :)
That’s right, TCs & Google Guides came from all over the world to convene in California.

TCs & Google Guides from Webmaster Central and Search forums after one of the sessions.

After a day packed with presentations and breakout sessions...

...we did what we actually came for...

...enjoyed a party, celebrated and had a great time together.

Posted by Esperanza Navas, Yves Taquet, Uli Lutz, & Kaspar Szymanski, Google Search Quality

The communities around Google products and services have been growing tremendously over the last couple of years. It is inspiring and motivating for us to see how many users like you contribute to Google Forums. For some time, we´ve been thinking of ways to thank our Top Contributors -- our most the passionate, helpful, friendly, and active users. These TCs have demonstrated incredible commitment to our communities and continue to share their profound knowledge by answering user questions within the forums.

TCs from all over the world will attend our first global summit in California.

We decided to give the online world a break for a moment and meet in real life to celebrate our past success and work on future endeavours. Google Forum Guides, Googlers that participate in the forums, and Top Contributors will convene for the first global Top Contributor Summit on September 13th and 14th in Santa Clara and Mountain View, California. During the Google-organized two-day event, Top Contributors will meet guides, engineers and product managers in order to get to know each other, provide feedback and share new ideas. We’ll be sharing some of the insights and takeaways after the event too, so stay tuned. And if you would like to follow the events online, look out for the #TCsummit tag on Twitter and our updates on Google+.

Posted by Esperanza Navas and Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team

Webmaster Level: All

A few weeks ago, we launched the +1 button for your site, allowing visitors to recommend your content on Google search directly from your site. As people see recommendations from their friends and contacts beneath your search results, you could see more, better qualified traffic from Google.

But how do you make sure this experience is user friendly? Where should you position the +1 button? How do you make sure the correct URL is getting +1’d?

On Tuesday, June 21 at 3pm ET, please join Timothy Jordan, Google Developer Advocate, to learn about how to best implement the +1 button on your site. He’ll be talking through the technical implementation details as well as best practices to ensure the button has maximum impact. During the webinar, we’ll review the topics below:

• Getting started
• Best practices
• Advanced options
• Measurement
• And, we’ll save time for Q&A

If you would like to attend, please register here. To download the code for your site, visit our +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central.

Posted by Kari Wilson, Product Marketing Manager

Webmaster Level: Intermediate.




Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst