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Written by Michael Wyszomierski and Greg Grothaus, Search Quality

Many webmasters have discovered the advantages of using Ajax to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. But, like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully. As promised in our post answering questions about Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology, we've compiled some tips for creating Ajax-enhanced websites that are also understood by search engines.

How will Google see my site?

One of the main issues with Ajax sites is that while Googlebot is great at following and understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have a difficult time finding its way around sites which use JavaScript for navigation. While we are working to better understand JavaScript, your best bet for creating a site that's crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.

Design for accessibility

We encourage webmasters to create pages for users, not just search engines. When you're designing your Ajax site, think about the needs of your users, including those who may not be using a JavaScript-capable browser. There are plenty of such users on the web, including those using screen readers or mobile devices.

One of the easiest ways to test your site's accessibility to this type of user is to explore the site in your browser with JavaScript turned off, or by viewing it in a text-only browser such as Lynx. Viewing a site as text-only can also help you identify other content which may be hard for Googlebot to see, including images and Flash.

Develop with progressive enhancement

If you're starting from scratch, one good approach is to build your site's structure and navigation using only HTML. Then, once you have the site's pages, links, and content in place, you can spice up the appearance and interface with Ajax. Googlebot will be happy looking at the HTML, while users with modern browsers can enjoy your Ajax bonuses.

Of course you will likely have links requiring JavaScript for Ajax functionality, so here's a way to help Ajax and static links coexist:
When creating your links, format them so they'll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you'll have the Ajax functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link. For example:


Note that the static link's URL has a parameter (?foo=32) instead of a fragment (#foo=32), which is used by the Ajax code. This is important, as search engines understand URL parameters but often ignore fragments. Web developer Jeremy Keith labeled this technique as Hijax. Since you now offer static links, users and search engines can link to the exact content they want to share or reference.

While we're constantly improving our crawling capability, using HTML links remains a strong way to help us (as well as other search engines, mobile devices and users) better understand your site's structure.

Follow the guidelines

In addition to the tips described here, we encourage you to also check out our Webmaster Guidelines for more information about what can make a site good for Google and your users. The guidelines also point out some practices to avoid, including sneaky JavaScript redirects. A general rule to follow is that while you can provide users different experiences based on their capabilities, the content should remain the same. For example, imagine we've created a page for Wysz's Hamster Farm. The top of the page has a heading of "Wysz's Hamster Farm," and below it is an Ajax-powered slideshow of the latest hamster arrivals. Turning JavaScript off on the same page shouldn't surprise a user with additional text reading:

Wysz's Hamster Farm -- hamsters, best hamsters, cheap hamsters, free hamsters, pets, farms, hamster farmers, dancing hamsters, rodents, hampsters, hamsers, best hamster resource, pet toys, dancing lessons, cute, hamster tricks, pet food, hamster habitat, hamster hotels, hamster birthday gift ideas and more!

A more ideal implementation would display the same text whether JavaScript was enabled or not, and in the best scenario, offer an HTML version of the slideshow to non-JavaScript users.

This is a pretty advanced topic, so please continue the discussion by asking questions and sharing ideas over in the Webmaster Help Group. See you there!

Written by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team

Common feedback we hear from webmasters is that you want us to improve the freshness of the data in Webmaster Tools. Understood. :) We've increased the update frequency for your verified sites' data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site. If your content doesn't change very often, or if you're not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools.

Please continue to post your Suggestions & feature requests in the Webmaster Help Group. It's one of our most important sources of feedback from the webmaster community. We seriously take it seriously.

WordPress has the ability to embed images into postings. You should give your site a little pizazz by adding images to your posts. However, the default behavior of these images is to just sit out there on their own. Not particularly appealing.

By adding a simple CSS attribute to your tag you can improve the placement of the images by having your blog text wrap around your images.

Here are two examples. The first example places an image in line with your post, between paragraphs.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Quisque in metus. Mauris odio ante, lacinia in, feugiat ut, fringilla ac, sem. Quisque consequat. Mauris ultrices pede ac nunc. Nunc ut nisi. Curabitur urna odio, iaculis at, tincidunt at, eleifend nec, est. Praesent feugiat eros non ante. Nunc a libero. Curabitur sagittis, velit ac sodales mollis, lacus mi bibendum neque, id sagittis risus ligula nec metus. Duis nec purus vitae magna scelerisque mattis.

Donec eget leo. In tincidunt interdum arcu. Maecenas viverra, metus ut iaculis tempus, erat risus rhoncus est, ultrices porttitor elit est a magna. Cras interdum pede suscipit urna. Ut tortor nulla, tempus a, malesuada eu, tempus non, augue. Aenean sollicitudin dignissim urna. Aenean in nisi. Morbi mollis. Nullam sagittis, libero vel venenatis condimentum, nisi eros facilisis arcu, id vehicula tellus orci ac diam. Mauris condimentum, ligula in tempus scelerisque, sem erat luctus lectus, nec posuere lectus libero id massa. Morbi a orci pharetra nulla congue blandit. Nam eget leo. Etiam aliquam, odio malesuada laoreet accumsan, nisl erat ornare eros, id blandit dui tortor sed justo. Donec nibh. In non lorem vitae sapien convallis vulputate.

This second example, places the image in the same location but I add an attribute to the image anchor.

Integer a erat. Sed sed ante. Nam eros justo, consectetuer id, fringilla vel, mollis in, lacus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Donec vel lorem. Pellentesque vitae quam. Phasellus tellus. Vestibulum ut nunc. Phasellus quam. Curabitur felis velit, suscipit lacinia, posuere ut, nonummy vitae, odio. Ut rhoncus lacus sed eros. Fusce lacinia velit eu nulla semper aliquet. Proin molestie quam eget justo. Ut egestas volutpat nisl. Suspendisse eu diam non libero varius tempus. Nulla condimentum enim et eros. Vivamus ac tortor ac ipsum gravida fermentum. Suspendisse potenti. Quisque diam.

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Morbi a massa ut sem dignissim imperdiet. Vivamus viverra tempus eros. Aliquam mattis porttitor justo. Aliquam ligula neque, sagittis a, pretium at, dictum ac, libero. Quisque tempor mauris at risus facilisis lobortis. Etiam tempus, leo eget vulputate convallis, mauris nisl condimentum nibh, in facilisis nisl risus scelerisque quam. Nunc nec augue et risus tristique feugiat. Vestibulum ut metus. Sed nibh.



In the second example, my image tag looks like this.

< img src="sampleimage.jpg"
alt="20070704-IMG_2038"
width="160"
height="240"
border="0"
class="alignleft" />

Note that I have class="alignleft" The alignleft class is defined in the default WordPress template. When you apply this to an image, it will push the image to the left side and run the text around it to the right. The WordPress style sheet also defines an alignright and aligncenter class which does the obvious.

This should give you enough information to add the finishing touches on your blog entry. Don’t let your images stand alone anymore.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, Tutorial, CSS

Written by Ben D'Angelo, Search Quality Team

First, a brief recap: In late 2005, we started emailing webmasters to let them know that their site is violating our Webmaster Guidelines and that we have temporarily removed some of their pages from our index. A few months ago we put these emails on hold due to a number of spoofed messages being sent from outside Google, primarily to German webmasters. Then, in mid-July, we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

While Message Center is great for verified site owners, it doesn't allow us to notify webmasters who aren't registered in Google's Webmaster Tools. For this reason, we plan to resume sending emails in addition to the Message Center notifications. Please note that, as before, our emails will not include attachments. Currently, the Message Center won't keep messages waiting if you haven't previously registered, but we hope to add that feature in the next few months. We'll keep you posted as things change.

Written by Trevor Foucher, Webmaster Tools Team

I'm happy to announce that Webmaster Tools is expanding support for webmasters outside of the English-speaking world, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). IDNA provides a way for site owners to have domains that go beyond the domain name system's limitations of English letters and numbers. Prior to IDNA, Internet host names could only be in the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen character. With IDNA support, you'll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.

Let's say you wanted to add http://北京大学.cn/ (Peking University) to your Webmaster Tools account before we launched IDNA support. If you typed that in to the "Add Site" box, you'd get back an error message that looks like this:



Some webmasters discovered a workaround. Internally, IDNA converts nicely encoded http://北京大学.cn/ to a format called Punycode, which looks like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/. This allowed them to diagnose and view information about their site, but it looked pretty ugly. Also, if they had more than one IDNA site, you can imagine it would be pretty hard to tell them apart.



Since we now support IDNA throughout Webmaster Tools, all you need to do is type in the name of your site, and we will add it correctly. Here is what it looks like if you attempt to add http://北京大学.cn/ to your account:



If you are one of the webmasters who discovered the workaround previously (i.e., you have had sites listed in your account that look like http://xn--1lq90ic7fzpc.cn/), those sites will now automatically display correctly.

We'd love to hear your questions and feedback on this new feature; you can write a comment below or post in the Google Webmaster Tools section of our Webmaster Help Group. We'd also appreciate suggestions for other ways we can improve our international support.

Posted by John Blackburn, Webmaster Tools and Matt Dougherty, Search Quality

Reporting is better, too. You'll now be told of multiple problems per line if they exist, unlike earlier versions which only reported the first problem encountered. And we've made other general improvements to analysis and validation.

Imagine that you're responsible for the domain www.example.com and you want search engines to index everything on your site, except for your /images folder. You also want to make sure your sitemap gets noticed, so you save the following as your robots.txt file:

You visit Webmaster Central to test your site against the robots.txtanalysis tool using these two test URLs:

Earlier versions of the tool would have reported this:



The improved version tells you more about that robots.txt file:





We also want to make sure you've heard about the new unavailable_after META
tag announced by Dan Crow on the Official Google Blog a few weeks ago. This allows for a more dynamic relationship between your site and Googlebot. Just think, with www.example.com, any time you have a temporarily available news story or limited offer sale or promotion page, you can specify the exact date and time you want specific
pages to stop being crawled and indexed.

Let's assume you are running a promotion that expires at the end of 2007. In the headers of page www.example.com/2007promotion.html, you would use the following:

<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT"
CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2007 23:59:59 EST">

The second exciting news: the new X-Robots-Tag directive, which adds Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) META tag support for non-HTML pages! Finally, you can have the same control over your videos, spreadsheets, and other indexed file types. Using the example above, let's say your promotion page is in PDF format. For www.example.com/2007promotion.pdf, you would use the following:

X-Robots-Tag: unavailable_after: 31 Dec
2007 23:59:59 EST

Remember, REP META tags can be useful for implementing noarchive, nosnippet, and now unavailable_after tags for page-level instruction, as opposed to robots.txt, which is controlled at the domain root. We get requests from bloggers and webmasters for these features, so enjoy. If you have other suggestions, keep them coming. Any questions? Please ask them in the Webmaster Help Group.

Productivity website Lifehack has put together a list of 10 ways to help get into a state of deep concentration.

Writing to-do lists and keeping a schedule may keep you organized, but does it really help you get more done? I believe that organization is important, but what you really need is focus. Being able to sit down and concentrate intensely on your work for a few hours. Even a half hour of focused effort can get more done than an entire day of distraction and multitasking.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I’m not a big fan of ring tones. Not that I hate the ability to customize my phone. I just can’t justify the cost through my provider for a 15 to 20 second song clip. Because of this, I’ve resisted custom ringtones on my phone for years.

The other night, however, I came across Phonezoo, an advertising supported website that lets you send ringtones to most phones. It has some really cool features.

1. You can upload your MP3s
2. You can edit them inside Phonezoo
3. You can share them with the Phonezoo community. Other members are free to download your ringtones. If the material is copyrighted then they must upload the same file to prove ownership.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I had a pleasant surprise tonight while working with VMWare. When I installed Windows XP under VMWare I noticed that the sound card it emulated was an ES1371. This is the ENSONIQ (or Creative) AudioPCI.

I worked at ENSONIQ through most of the 90s for the Multimedia Products Division and was one of the developers of the Soundscape and AudioPCI line of sound cards. It’s nice to see it lives on.

We did some crazy Voodoo to get DOS audio to work on this device. I wonder if the gang at VMWare figured it out…

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

M3U (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator, MP3 URL) is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It was originally implemented in Winamp, although it is now supported by many applications.

An M3U file is a plain text file that contains the locations of one or more media files that the mediaplayer should play. Each location is placed on a new line. The locations can be either absolute or relative local pathnames (e.g., “C:\My Music\Chanson.mp3″ or “Chanson.mp3″) or they can be URLs. The file can also include comments, prefaced by the “#” character. In extended M3U, “#” also introduces extended M3U directives.

One common use of the M3U file format is creating a playlist file that contains a single entry pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and can be used for things like downloading from a website or for emailing, or for Internet radio listening.

The file is saved with the “M3U” or “m3u” filename extension.

“m3u” files use the Latin-1 charset, the unicode version of “m3u” is “m3u8″, it can include UTF-8 unicode characters.