Making the Internet safer and faster: Introducing reCAPTCHA Android API
When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years, reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to street numbers and names, then No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year.
By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue to work to refine our protections.
reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile devices has grown rapidly, it’s important to keep the mobile applications and data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA’s tenth birthday, we’re glad to announce the first reCAPTCHA Android API as part of Google Play Services.
With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a streamlined user experience on mobile. It will use our newest Invisible reCAPTCHA technology, which runs risk analysis behind the scene and has enabled millions of human users to pass through with zero click everyday. Now mobile users can enjoy their apps without being interrupted, while still staying away from spam and abuse.
reCAPTCHA Android API is included with Google SafetyNet, which provides services like device attestation and safe browsing to protect mobile apps. Mobile developers can do both the device and user attestations in the same API to mitigate security risks of their apps more efficiently. This adds to the diversity of security protections on Android: Google Play Protect to monitor for potentially harmful applications, device encryption, and regular security updates. Please visit our site to learn more about how to integrate with the reCAPTCHA Android API, and keep an eye out for our iOS library.
The journey of reCAPTCHA continues: we’ll make the Internet safer and easier to use for everyone (except bots).
Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA
Making the Internet safer and faster: Introducing reCAPTCHA Android API
When we launched reCAPTCHA ten years ago, we had a simple goal: enable users to visit the sites they love without worrying about spam and abuse. Over the years, reCAPTCHA has changed quite a bit. It evolved from the distorted text to street numbers and names, then No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 and Invisible reCAPTCHA in March this year.
By now, more than a billion users have benefited from reCAPTCHA and we continue to work to refine our protections.
reCAPTCHA protects users wherever they may be online. As the use of mobile devices has grown rapidly, it’s important to keep the mobile applications and data safe. Today, on reCAPTCHA’s tenth birthday, we’re glad to announce the first reCAPTCHA Android API as part of Google Play Services.
With this API, reCAPTCHA can better tell human and bots apart to provide a streamlined user experience on mobile. It will use our newest Invisible reCAPTCHA technology, which runs risk analysis behind the scene and has enabled millions of human users to pass through with zero click everyday. Now mobile users can enjoy their apps without being interrupted, while still staying away from spam and abuse.
reCAPTCHA Android API is included with Google SafetyNet, which provides services like device attestation and safe browsing to protect mobile apps. Mobile developers can do both the device and user attestations in the same API to mitigate security risks of their apps more efficiently. This adds to the diversity of security protections on Android: Google Play Protect to monitor for potentially harmful applications, device encryption, and regular security updates. Please visit our site to learn more about how to integrate with the reCAPTCHA Android API, and keep an eye out for our iOS library.
The journey of reCAPTCHA continues: we’ll make the Internet safer and easier to use for everyone (except bots).
Posted by Wei Liu, Product Manager, reCAPTCHA
Are retailers missing the mark on m-commerce?
With the increasing dominance of mobile across all industries, business owners and influencers in every sector from retail to finance are making … read more
Mobile design and the art of doing one thing well
It’s best to do one thing really, really well – is one of Google’s “10 things” philosophy, written when the company was in … read more
The pros, cons and politics of hybrid mobile apps
A hybrid mobile app is an application that has been built with web technologies – HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript – and then “wrapped” with native code for closer integration with the device and/or to pass itself off as a download app.
How to market your mobile site or app without spending a fortune on ads
Making the most of what you’ve got: email, SMS, social media, brochures, packaging, SEO and ASO and optimizing your mobile site design to make the most of them.
29 super useful PPC tools you need to try this year
The right PPC tools will save you time, provide crucial insights, inspire you, and ultimately make more money for your company or your clients. If you’re ready to take an evolutionary leap of your own, check out this list of 29 amazing PPC tools you need to try this year.
Google+: A case study on App Download Interstitials
Many mobile sites use promotional app interstitials to encourage users to download their native mobile apps. For some apps, native can provide richer user experiences, and use features of the device that are currently not easy to access on a browser. Because of this, many app owners believe that they should encourage users to install the native version of their online property or service. It’s not clear how aggressively to promote the apps, and a full page interstitial can interrupt the user from reaching their desired content.
On Google+ mobile web, we decided to take a closer look at our own use of interstitials. Internal user experience studies identified them as poor experiences, and Jennifer Gove gave a great talk at IO last year which highlights this user frustration.
Despite our intuition that we should remove the interstitial, we prefer to let data guide our decisions, so we set out to learn how the interstitial affected our users. Our analysis found that:
- 9% of the visits to our interstitial page resulted in the ‘Get App’ button being pressed. (Note that some percentage of these users already have the app installed or may never follow through with the app store download.)
- 69% of the visits abandoned our page. These users neither went to the app store nor continued to our mobile website.
While 9% sounds like a great CTR for any campaign, we were much more focused on the number of users who had abandoned our product due to the friction in their experience. With this data in hand, in July 2014, we decided to run an experiment and see how removing the interstitial would affect actual product usage. We added a Smart App Banner to continue promoting the native app in a less intrusive way, as recommended in the Avoid common mistakes section of our Mobile SEO Guide. The results were surprising:
- 1-day active users on our mobile website increased by 17%.
- G+ iOS native app installs were mostly unaffected (-2%). (We’re not reporting install numbers from Android devices since most come with Google+ installed.)
Based on these results, we decided to permanently retire the interstitial. We believe that the increase in users on our product makes this a net positive change, and we are sharing this with the hope that you will reconsider the use of promotional interstitials. Let’s remove friction and make the mobile web more useful and usable!
(Since this study, we launched a better mobile web experience that is currently without an app banner. The banner can still be seen on iOS 6 and below.)
Posted by David Morell, Software Engineer, Google+
Posted by David Morell, Software Engineer, Google+
Google to Acknowledge Mobile Friendly Factors in New Algorithm Update
A new post from www.davidnaylor.co.uk. BAZINGA!
The post Google to Acknowledge Mobile Friendly Factors in New Algorithm Update appeared first on UK SEO Blog by Dave Naylor – SEO Tools, Tips & News.
The four steps to appiness
Webmaster Level: intermediate to advanced
App deep links are the new kid on the block in organic search, and they’re picking up speed faster than you can say “schema.org ViewAction”! For signed-in users, 15% of Google searches on Android now return deep links to apps through App Indexing. And over just the past quarter, we’ve seen the number of clicks on app deep links jump by 10x.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from developers and seen a lot of implementations gone right and others that were good learning experiences since we opened up App Indexing back in June. We’d like to share with you four key steps to monitor app performance and drive user engagement:
1. Give your app developer access to Webmaster Tools
App indexing is a team effort between you (as a webmaster) and your app development team. We show information in Webmaster Tools that is key for your app developers to do their job well. Here’s what’s available right now:
- Errors in indexed pages within apps
- Weekly clicks and impressions from app deep link via Google search
- Stats on your sitemap (if that’s how you implemented the app deep links)
…and we plan to add a lot more in the coming months!
We’ve noticed that very few developers have access to Webmaster Tools. So if you want your app development team to get all of the information they need to fix app-related issues, it’s essential for them to have access to Webmaster Tools.
Any verified site owner can add a new user. Pick restricted or full permissions, depending on the level of access you’d like to give:
2. Understand how your app is doing in search results
How are users engaging with your app from search results? We’ve introduced two new ways for you to track performance for your app deep links:
- We now send a weekly clicks and impressions update to the Message center in your Webmaster Tools account.
- You can now track how much traffic app deep links drive to your app using referrer information – specifically, the referrer extra in the ACTION_VIEW intent. We’re working to integrate this information with Google Analytics for even easier access. Learn how to track referrer information on our Developer site.
3. Make sure key app resources can be crawled
Blocked resources are one of the top reasons for the “content mismatch” errors you see in Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report. We need access to all the resources necessary to render your app page. This allows us to assess whether your associated web page has the same content as your app page.
To help you find and fix these issues, we now show you the specific resources we can’t access that are critical for rendering your app page. If you see a content mismatch error for your app, look out for the list of blocked resources in “Step 5” of the details dialog:
4. Watch out for Android App errors
To help you identify errors when indexing your app, we’ll send you messages for all app errors we detect, and will also display most of them in the “Android apps” tab of the Crawl errors report.
In addition to the currently available “Content mismatch” and “Intent URI not supported” error alerts, we’re introducing three new error types:
- APK not found: we can’t find the package corresponding to the app.
- No first-click free: the link to your app does not lead directly to the content, but requires login to access.
- Back button violation: after following the link to your app, the back button did not return to search results.
In our experience, the majority of errors are usually caused by a general setting in your app (e.g. a blocked resource, or a region picker that pops up when the user tries to open the app from search). Taking care of that generally resolves it for all involved URIs.
Good luck in the pursuit of appiness! As always, if you have questions, feel free to drop by our Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
An update to the Webmaster Tools API
Webmaster level: advanced
Over the summer the Webmaster Tools team has been cooking up an update to the Webmaster Tools API. The new API is consistent with other Google APIs, makes it easier to authenticate for apps or web-services, and provides access to some of the main features of Webmaster Tools.
If you’ve used other Google APIs, getting started with the new Webmaster Tools API will be easy! We have examples for Python, Java, as well as OACurl (for fans of command lines).
This API allows you to:
- list, add, or remove sites from your account (you can currently have up to 500 sites in your account)
- list, add, or remove sitemaps for your websites
- get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps
- get a time-series of all kinds of crawl errors for your site
- list crawl error samples for specific types of errors
- mark individual crawl errors as “fixed” (this doesn’t change how they’re processed, but can help simplify the UI for you)
We’d love to see what you’re building with our APIs! Feel free to link to your projects in the comments below. Should you have any questions about the usage of the API, feel free to post in our help forum as well.
Posted by John Mueller, fan of long command lines, Google Zürich
How China’s WeChat demonstrates the real market potential of messenger services
Does WeChat, China’s mobile text and voice messaging service, show us the future for mobile payment services and exactly why Facebook paid $19bn for the messaging app WhatsApp? Firstly, WeChat is generating serious revenue. It made more than 50 percent of its revenue in 2012 – 44 billion yuan (7 billion US dollars). It is […]
Post from James Crawford on State of Digital
How China’s WeChat demonstrates the real market potential of messenger services
Android app indexing is now open for everyone!
Webmaster level: All
Do you have an Android app in addition to your website? You can now connect the two so that users searching from their smartphones and tablets can easily find and reach your app content.
App deep links in search results help your users find your content more easily and re-engage with your app after they’ve installed it. As a site owner, you can show your users the right content at the right time — by connecting pages of your website to the relevant parts of your app you control when your users are directed to your app and when they go to your website.
Hundreds of apps have already implemented app indexing. This week at Google I/O, we’re announcing a set of new features that will make it even easier to set up deep links in your app, connect your site to your app, and keep track of performance and potential errors.
Getting started is easy
We’ve greatly simplified the process to get your app deep links indexed. If your app supports HTTP deep linking schemes, here’s what you need to do:
- Add deep link support to your app
- Connect your site and your app
- There is no step 3 (:
As we index your URLs, we’ll discover and index the app / site connections and may begin to surface app deep links in search results.
We can discover and index your app deep links on our own, but we recommend you publish the deep links. This is also the case if your app only supports a custom deep link scheme. You publish them in one of two ways:
- Insert a rel=alternate elment in the section of each web page, or in your sitemap to specify app URIs. Find out how to implement these methods on our developer site.
- Use the App indexing API
There’s one more thing: we’ve added a new feature in Webmaster Tools to help you debug any issues that might arise during indexing app pages. It will show you what type of errors we’ve detected for the app page-web page pairs, together with example app URIs so you can debug:
We’ll also give you detailed instructions on how to debug each issue, including a QR code for the app deep links, so you can easily open them on your phone or tablet. We’ll send you Webmaster Tools error notifications as well, so you can keep up to date.
Give app indexing a spin, and as always, if you need more help ask questions on the Webmaster help forum.
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
App Indexing in more languages
Webmaster level: all
In April, we launched App Indexing in English globally so deep links to your mobile apps could appear in Google Search results on Android everywhere. Today, we’re adding the first publishers with content in other languages: Fairfax Domain, MercadoLibre, Letras.Mus.br, Vagalume, Idealo, L’Equipe, Player.fm, Upcoming, Au Feminin, Marmiton, and chip.de. In the U.S., we now also support some more apps — Walmart, Tapatalk, and Fancy.
We’ve also translated our developer guidelines into eight additional languages: Chinese (Traditional), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
If you’re interested in participating in App Indexing, and your content and implementation are ready, please let us know by filling out this form. As always, you can ask questions on the mobile section of our webmaster forum.
Finally, if you’re headed to Google I/O in June, be sure to check out the session on the “Future of Apps and Search”, where we’ll share some more updates on App Indexing.
Posted by Erik Hendriks, Software Engineer
Are Your Google Display Network Results Damaged By AdSense For Mobile?
Have you checked your Google Display Network (GDN) campaign placements recently? If the answer is no, then I would take a look ASAP — chances are, you’re appearing on a hell of a lot of apps now, and you might need to make some adjustments to your campaign in order to improve your…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
It’s all about the Apps: The Planet of The Apps
Apps, apps, apps. Infinitemonkeys looked at the statistics and facts around apps and came up with this infographic.
Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
It’s all about the Apps: The Planet of The Apps
Google Glass, iBeacons and smart watches – media hype or game changers? #AdtechANZ
Managing Direcor of b2 Cloud kicked off Day 2 of Ad:Tech Sydney, talking about the technology of the future including platforms such as Google Glass, iBeacons & Smart Watches.
Post from Jo Turnbull on State of Digital
Google Glass, iBeacons and smart watches – media hype or game changers? #AdtechANZ
Do You Like to Peek Into Someone Else’s Life?
People want to see what others are doing and share their own lives, but privacy is important. Peekinto does that and gives us new marketing possibilities
Post from Bas van den Beld on State of Digital
Do You Like to Peek Into Someone Else’s Life?
Google App Indexing: Google Can Index & Link To Content In Your Android App
Google announced that they can now index the content within Android apps. The mechanism for doing so, they call, is app indexing. App indexing allows webmasters to connect pages from your web sites with specific content within your Android app. This en…
The Internet As A Distraction And How To Stay On Top Of The Game
The majority of us are constantly connected to the internet due to our professions or simply to stay in touch with friends. Recent developments and research though are undermining the internet’s distracting nature, this post will look at how to overcome online interruption to increase productivity.
Post from Clarissa Sajbl on State of Search
The Internet As A Distraction And How To Stay On Top Of The Game