Welcome to the month of All Fools’ Day. Did you see Google’s latest “trick” for their annual April Fools’ Day prank? Each year Google come up with a random joke. Past April Fools’ Day jokes by Google have included a joint project to establish a permanent settlement on planet Mars, fake menu links in Google Docs, free internet via flushing your toilet, Google Voice for pets, interplanetary Analytics and more. This year’s prank was that Google would be developing a self driven NASCAR vehicle using their auotmated driving technology. Those silly tricksters. For a list of Google’s pranks from previous years, click here.
In this newsletter we’ll discuss the following:
SEARCH ENGINE NEWS
Webmaster Tools
For those of you that use Webmaster Tools, Google recently launched a new feature. Google’s official Webmaster blog recently made the following statement. “We just launched a new feature that allows you as a verified site owner to grant limited access to your site’s data and settings in Webmaster Tools. You’ve had the ability to grant full verified access to others for a couple of years. Since then we’ve heard lots of requests from site owners for the ability to grant limited permission for others to view a site’s data in Webmaster Tools without being able to modify all the settings. Now you can do exactly that with our new User administration feature.
Google also announced “The Next Generation” in crawl errors. Google’s blog states, “We now detect and report many new types of errors. To help make sense of the new data, we’ve split the errors into two parts: site errors and URL errors. Site errors are errors that aren’t specific to a particular URL—they affect your entire site… URL errors are errors that are specific to a particular page.” (read more)
Pagination
Does your site offer a variety of products or pages that get “split up” using pagination? An example of pagination would be if you have a product category that has 20 products, and your site splits them up so that 10 show on one page and you have to click on something like “page 2” or “see more” to view the remaining 10 products. If so, ask your CMS (Content Management System) developer if they plan on integrating Google’s latest variables that can be used to best instruct search engines how to interpret these divided content pages. For more information, see Google’s pagination video.
