jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools

Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa. "We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which...

Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

Google has begun including geographical region information on some search results. The information is used when supplied by webmasters, and appears in the green address line on the results that include it. "Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp"...

Google to Alert Webmasters of New Software Versions

Google is going to start letting webmasters know when the software they run on their site is outdated. Through Webmater Tools, Google will begin alerting users of new versions of software when they are released. "One of the great things about working at Google is that we get to take advantage of an enormous amount of computing power to do some really cool things," says Patrick Chapman of...

Google Launches New Webmaster Tools

Google has launched a couple of new Labs features for Webmaster Tools. One is "malware details" and the other is "fetch as googlebot." Google is providing snippets of code from pages it considers malware, in order to help webmasters eliminate the malware on their sites quickly. "To help protect users against malware threats, Google has built automated scanners that detect...

Google Alters Site Verification in Webmaster Tools

Google has made some changes to the way Webmaster Tools users verify their websites. Before, the user’s verification meta tag was based (partially) on the email address of their Google account, which meant that if they changed the email address in their account settings, their meta tags would also change, and they’d become unverified for any sites that used the old tag. Google has made...

Google Gives Webmasters Another Duplicate Content Eliminator

Google has added a new way for webmasters to tell it which parameters in URLS, they wish to be ignored. They have added a new feature to Google Webmaster Tools called simply, "Parameter Handling." Google provides the following explanation with the feature: Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially...