Webmaster level: all

Verifying ownership of your website is the first step towards using Google Webmaster Tools. To help you keep verification simple & reduce its maintenance to a minimum, especially when you have multiple people using Webmaster Tools, we’ve put together a small list of tips & tricks that we’d like to share with you:

• The method that you choose for verification is up to you, and may depend on your CMS & hosting providers. If you want to be sure that changes on your side don’t result in an accidental loss of the verification status, you may even want to consider using two methods in parallel.
• Back in 2009, we updated the format of the verification meta tag and file. If you’re still using the old format, we recommend moving to the newer version. The newer meta tag is called “google-site-verification, and the newer file format contains just one line with the file name. While we’re currently supporting ye olde format, using the newer one ensures that you’re good to go in the future.
• When removing users’ access in Webmaster Tools, remember to remove any active associated verification tokens (file, meta tag, etc.). Leaving them on your server means that these users would be able to gain access again at any time. You can view the site owners list in Webmaster Tools under Configuration / Users.
• If multiple people need to access the site, we recommend using the “add users” functionality in Webmaster Tools. This makes it easier for you to maintain the access control list without having to modify files or settings on your servers.
• Also, if multiple people from your organization need to use Webmaster Tools, it can be a good policy to only allow users with email addresses from your domain. By doing that, you can verify at a glance that only users from your company have access. Additionally, when employees leave, access to Webmaster Tools is automatically taken care of when that account is disabled.
• Consider using “restricted” (read-only) access where possible. Settings generally don’t need to be changed on a daily basis, and when they do need to be changed, it can be easier to document them if they have to go through a central account.

We hope these tips help you to simplify the situation around verification of your website in Webmaster Tools. For more questions about verification, feel free to drop by our Webmaster Help Forums.

Posted by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zurich

Webmaster Level: All

Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools.

At Google we're making more and more use of structured data to provide enhanced search results, such as rich snippets and event calendars, that help users find your content. Until now, marking up your site's HTML code has been the only way to indicate structured data to Google. However, we recognize that markup may be hard for some websites to deploy.

Today, we're offering webmasters a simpler alternative: Data Highlighter. At initial launch, it's available in English only and for structured data about events, such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals. We'll make Data Highlighter available for more languages and data types in the months ahead. Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools. Update 2: You can see the full list of schemas supported in Data Highlighter here.

Data Highlighter is a point-and-click tool that can be used by anyone authorized for your site in Google Webmaster Tools. No changes to HTML code are required. Instead, you just use your mouse to highlight and "tag" each key piece of data on a typical event page of your website:

If your page lists multiple events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will "learn" that format as you apply tags, and help speed your work by automatically suggesting additional tags. Likewise, if you have many pages of events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will walk you through a process of tagging a few example pages so it can learn about their format variations. Usually, 5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.

When you're done, you can review a sample of all the event data that Data Highlighter now understands. If it's correct, click "Publish."
From then on, as Google crawls your site, it will recognize your latest event listings and make them eligible for enhanced search results. You can inspect the crawled data on the Structured Data Dashboard, and unpublish at any time if you're not happy with the results.

Here’s a short video explaining how the process works:

To get started with Data Highlighter, visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

If you have any questions, please read our Help Center article or ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Highlighting!

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager

Webmaster Level : Intermediate/Advanced

Having your website hacked can be a frustrating experience and we want to do everything we can to help webmasters get their sites cleaned up and prevent compromises from happening again. With this post we wanted to outline two common types of attacks as well as provide clean-up steps and additional resources that webmasters may find helpful.

To best serve our users it’s important that the pages that we link to in our search results are safe to visit. Unfortunately, malicious third-parties may take advantage of legitimate webmasters by hacking their sites to manipulate search engine results or distribute malicious content and spam. We will alert users and webmasters alike by labeling sites we’ve detected as hacked by displaying a “This site may be compromised” warning in our search results:



We want to give webmasters the necessary information to help them clean up their sites as quickly as possible. If you’ve verified your site in Webmaster Tools we’ll also send you a message when we’ve identified your site has been hacked, and when possible give you example URLs.

Occasionally, your site may become compromised to facilitate the distribution of malware. When we recognize that, we’ll identify the site in our search results with a label of “This site may harm your computer” and browsers such as Chrome may display a warning when users attempt to visit. In some cases, we may share more specific information in the Malware section of Webmaster Tools. We also have specific tips for preventing and removing malware from your site in our Help Center.

Two common ways malicious third-parties may compromise your site are the following:

Injected Content

Hackers may attempt to influence search engines by injecting links leading to sites they own. These links are often hidden to make it difficult for a webmaster to detect this has occurred. The site may also be compromised in such a way that the content is only displayed when the site is visited by search engine crawlers.



Example of injected pharmaceutical content

If we’re able to detect this, we’ll send a message to your Webmaster Tools account with useful details. If you suspect your site has been compromised in this way, you can check the content your site returns to Google by using the Fetch as Google tool. A few good places to look for the source of such behavior of such a compromise are .php files, template files and CMS plugins.

Redirecting Users

Hackers might also try to redirect users to spammy or malicious sites. They may do it to all users or target specific users, such as those coming from search engines or those on mobile devices. If you’re able to access your site when visiting it directly but you experience unexpected redirects when coming from a search engine, it’s very likely your site has been compromised in this manner.

One of the ways hackers accomplish this is by modifying server configuration files (such as Apache’s .htaccess) to serve different content to different users, so it’s a good idea to check your server configuration files for any such modifications.



This malicious behavior can also be accomplished by injecting JavaScript into the source code of your site. The JavaScript may be designed to hide its purpose so it may help to look for terms like “eval”, “decode”, and “escape”.

Cleanup and Prevention

If your site has been compromised, it’s important to not only clean up the changes made to your site but to also address the vulnerability that allowed the compromise to occur. We have instructions for cleaning your site and preventing compromises while your hosting provider and our Malware and Hacked sites forum are great resources if you need more specific advice.

Once you’ve cleaned up your site you should submit a reconsideration request that if successful will remove the warning label in our search results.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Oliver Barrett, Search Quality Team