Backlinks Reorganized - Internal Vs External

Now you can identify the backlinks to your website more easily, which links are actually from your site vs links from other sites.

Google Webmaster Tools used to identify the links in two categories:

• Links from within your site (Internal Links), i.e., only those links that started with your site's exact URL &
• Links coming from other sites (External Links)

Example:
For the site, www.example.com/users/catlover/, links from www.example.com/users/catlover/profile.html would be categorized as internal, but links from www.example.com/users/ or www.example.com would be categorized as external links.

This also implies for the 'www' and 'non-www' version for the website.

In the recent update, if you add either example.com or www.example.com as a site, links from both the www and non-www versions of the domain will be categorized as internal links. This also implies to include other subdomains, since many people who own a domain also own its subdomains—so links from cats.example.com or pets.example.com will also be categorized as internal links for www.example.com.

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

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Google+ Now Opens for All

Google+ is the first social service launched by Google that's actually successful.

Its 3-months since the inception of Google's social networking tool: Google Plus. Google+ is now available to anyone who has a Google account; it no longer requires invites.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, posted the following message to the Google Blog announcing open sign-ups:

For the past 12 weeks we've been in field trial, and during that time we've listened and learned a great deal. We're nowhere near done, but with the improvements we've made so far we're ready to move from field trial to beta.

You can just visit Google home page for joining Google Plus (as in image below). Once you click the link, you will be re-directed to Google Plus registration page. Furthermore if you roll over the blue arrow, the following popup appears: “You’re invited to join Google+.”

Google Plus has improved a lot, more quickly than any other Google product ever launched.

Google added support for 

- Hangouts in the Android app and added the option to broadcast a Hangout (for limited users as of now). You can preview by clicking "Try Hangouts with extras": screensharing, sketchpad, Google Docs integration and named hangouts "for when you want to join or create a public hangout about a certain topic".

- The search box is now more useful because you can use it to find posts from your friends and from other Google+ users. Google also lets you restrict your results to people and save your search.

A Comscore report from August estimated that "in just one month, Google+ has captured 25 million visitors". Now when there is no restriction on the invites, the number will certainly grow.

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The New and Improved Google Plus (+1) Button

The +1 buttons are used by the visitors to recommend your content on Google Search along with their Google Profiles. Clicking the +1 button is a great way to highlight content for others when they search on Google. The +1 button comes with further more inprovements,



1) Share Links: The +1 button now lets visitors share links to your pages on Google+. If someone wants to start a conversation about your content, it’s easy for them to do so. Now, Google+ users can share webpages with their circles, directly from the +1 button. From there you can comment, choose a circle and share.

                              

2) Snipets: Now you can use +Snippets to customize the name, image and description that appear when your content is shared.

When you share content from the +1 button, you’ll notice that we automatically include a link, an image and a description in the sharebox. This is called as "+snippets,".

+Snippets let you put your best face forward by customizing exactly what appears when your content is shared.

For example, if you’re running a movie review site, you might want visitors to share posts containing the title, movie poster, and a brief synopsis:

3) Inline Annotations: The new inline annotations help increase engagement after users see a friend’s recommendation right on your page.

Now, when a person visits a page that someone they know has +1’d, they can see a name and face reminding them to pay special attention to your content. Here’s how it looks:

To add inline annotations, you need to update your +1 button code. Visit the configuration tool , select ‘inline’ from the ‘Annotation’ menu, and grab a new snippet of code. 

 

The new features (sharing and +snippets) are rolling out globally over the next week. You can try the new +1 button now, by joining Google+ Platform Preview. Once you're part of the Preview, just visit a site with the +1 button (like Rotten Tomatoes) and +1 the page. 

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Twitter Rolls Out 'Photo' & 'Location' Sharing Service

Twitter added a native image sharing option and location sharing in the new Twitter interface, to all users.

You can now start seeing a camera and location sharing button, at the far left of the status update box, beckoning to upload an image and share the location of your tweet. You can upload images to your tweets directly, and can mention its location as well.

You can choose an image from your desktop under 3 MB and it will get embedded to your Twitter status like below. If you feel like you’ve made a mistake you can just click on the X to delete and pick another image.

 

This is how it looks,

Ever had something you wanted to share ("fireworks!", "party!", "ice cream truck!", or "quicksand...") that would be better with a location? By turning on this feature, you can include location information like neighborhood, town, or exact point when you tweet.

When you tweet with a location, Twitter stores that location. You can switch location on/off before each Tweet and always have the option to delete your location history

You can upload images (3MB) of any dimension and Twitter will automatically scale the image so that it fits properly on the display pane of new Twitter interface.

Watch the following video or head over to the help center to learn more about Twitter’s own photo upload feature:

No doubts Twitter wants to engage deeply with its audience and is now more serious on providing features people enjoy using.

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Limited Pilot, an integration between Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

There has always been a concern about webmasters about choosing which Google services to use regarding visitors/users - Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools.

The answer to above concern, for many webmasters is both. The data in Google Analytics is about what happens after a user chooses to visit your site; whereas, Webmaster Tools reports are more focused on data from before the user makes that choice.

Google has now integrated Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, via a limited pilot, for Search Engine Optimization reports in Google Analytics, based on Search Queries data from Webmaster Tools.

This includes query information, clicks, impressions, clickthrough rate, and average position. You’ll also be able to use Google Analytics advanced data filtering and visualizations with this data.

In addition to including Search Queries data found in Webmaster Tools, these Search Engine Optimization reports also take advantage of Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. For example, you can filter for queries that had more than 100 clicks and see a chart for how much each of those queries contributed to your overall clicks from top queries.

NOTE

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports, you should sign up for the pilot and you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator. Each additional user who would like to view them also needs to individually sign up for the pilot.

The sign up sheet for the pilot is closed for now.

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How is Schema.org relevant to you as a webmaster

The major search engines (Google, Yahoo & BING) has created a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.

The main aim of Schema.org is to help search engines better understand the websites.

"Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!"

Example of a rich snippet: a search result enhanced by structured markup. In this case, the rich snippet contains a picture, reviews, and cook time for the recipe.

With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.

Details on Schema.org

1) Schema.org contains a lot of new markup types.
There are more than 100 new types as well as ported over all of the existing rich snippets types. If you’ve looked at adding rich snippets markup before but none of the existing types were relevant for your site, it’s worth taking another look. Here are a few popular types:

•     Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
•     Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
•     Event
•     Organization
•     Person
•     Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
•     Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
•     Review, AggregateRating

Or, view a full list of all schema.org types. The new markup types may be used for future rich snippets formats as well as other types of improvements to help people find your content more easily when searching.

2) Schema.org uses microdata.
Historically, we’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.

3) Existing rich snippets markup formats are still supported.
If you’ve already done markup on your pages using microformats or RDFa, we’ll continue to support it. One caveat to watch out for: while it’s OK to use the new schema.org markup or continue to use existing microformats or RDFa markup, you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers.

4) Test your markup using the rich snippets testing tool.
It’s very useful to test your web pages with markup to make sure we’re able to parse the data correctly. As with previous rich snippets markup formats, you should use the rich snippets testing tool for this purpose. Note that while the testing tool will show the marked up information that was parsed from the page, rich snippets previews are not yet shown for schema.org markup. We’ll be adding this functionality soon.

Suggested Reading:

• Check Schema.org website for more details
• To learn more about rich snippets and how they relate to schema.org, check out the Rich snippets schema.org FAQ. 
• To get an overview of microdata as well as the conventions followed by schema.org, take a look at the schema.org Getting Started guide.

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