YouTube has rolled out a feature that empowers video creators in understanding the traffic their videos receive. Web Analytics have often been associated with Webmasters or at most Web site owners, but this gives people some real-world insight into what Web sites know about the, all from the kind folks at Google. Read more…
Google helps webmasters everyday with their blog, I find their transparency for such a large search engine fascinating. One of their entries consists of tips on enabling webmasters to have greater control of their website listings with robots.txt. This may be SEO 101, however, it exemplifies the efforts that Google is focused on - quality results for web surfers.
The key is a simple file called robots.txt that has been an industry standard for many years. It lets a site owner control how search engines access their web site. With robots.txt you can control access at multiple levels — the entire site, through individual directories, pages of a specific type, down to individual pages. Effective use of robots.txt gives you a lot of control over how your site is searched, but its not always obvious how to achieve exactly what you want. This is the first of a series of posts on how to use robots.txt to control access to your content.
It appears Google may be starting to index non-HTML content such as JavaScript and CSS. On the blog titled, “things of sorts,” suspects this is a move by Google to go after Black Hat SEOs. The blog provides a reference to the header requests from Google against his CSS and JS files.
I don’t think Google is using this data to pinpoint blackhat SEO behaviors; however, I do think they might be making a thumbnail service or similar rendering of websites for users to view as they use their search engine. Just a theory though, I wish I had inside knowledge. It may also just be a random quirk of the GoogleBot, it may have been linked by another site and it may have caused it to index that one file.
Google’s been good to us lately, they gave us the best search, email, spreadsheets, news aggregator; but they closed down Google Answers. I don’t understand why, as it was quite successful and it helps to find your own question that you just typed in the web search, being answered on Google answers. I’ll be honest, Google Answers wasn’t the best looking Q-and-A apparatus, but a little CSS here and there and it would be leading the pack of online Q-n-A services (Mainly, Yahoo and MSN are competitors).
We hope Google will re-incarnate a similar service! 
[tags]Google, Answers, Google Answers, Web 2.0, Internet, FAQ[/tags]
Finally, Google takes action against spam websites. It’s truly annoying, and I can only imagine how confused a novice web surfer must be. I wonder how they will be penalizing though. Most spam websites often have a PageRank of 2 or lower.
Google is going to fingerprint Made For AdSense and arbitrage sites and is going to penalize them with a low quality score. Depending on the score, Google may deny them advertising on their network or charge a lot more.
