jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Google SEO Report Card Scores Company’s Own SEO Efforts

Google is looking to improve upon its own internal SEO efforts. The company has created what it calls an "SEO Report Card," designed to improve the user experience and visibility of some of its own properties. The company says it aims to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages, which could help users find them more easily in search engines, and fix bugs that...

A Markup That Could Have Big Implications for SEO

RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa. In fact, this is the topic...

Google Cranks Up Number of Sitemaps Allowed

Google has at some point quietly increased its sitemaps limit from 1,000 to 50,000. In a discussion on a Google Webmasters forum thread back in April of last year, Google employee Jonathan Simon said that each sitemap index file can include 1,000 sitemaps. Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under...

Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your...

Duplicate Content Owners Catch a New Break from Google

Google announced that it now offering cross-domain support of the rel="canonical" link element. If you are unfamiliar with this link element, Google’s Matt Cutts discussed it with us here. Basically, it’s a way to avoid duplicate content issues, but until now, you couldn’t use it across domains. "For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content...

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 Tool Shows Where the Eyeballs Go on Your Site

Google has launched a new Google Labs experiment called Browser Size, which is a tool aimed at helping webmasters see how others view their site. Google’s official description of the tool says: Ever wondered what parts of your site can’t be seen without scrolling? Browser Size shows you what portion of users can see a give spot on the screen. This is not screen resolution but the area available...

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 May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google’s Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this. Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title. If that’s...

Google Aims to Put the “Friend” in Friend Connect

Google has launched some new features for Google Friend Connect, aimed at letting site owners make their GFC experience more personalized and letting their visitors get to know each other. A representative for Google tells WebProNews that 9 million sites are using Google Friend Connect, and pages with GFC get over half a billion unique visitors a month. Two people join every second, she says. One...

Why Your Email Address May Show up in Google Search Results

Matt Cutts has provided some useful information for webmasters in the last few videos that have been uploaded to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel. It should be noted that this channel is designed to answer questions and provide useful tips for webmasters regarding their site’s performance in Google. The topics are not always breaking news. Some you may know, but there are always...

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...

Hulu Launches 2 New Labs Features

Hulu has added a couple of new features to Hulu Labs. These are Hulu Desktop for Linux and Hulu Publisher Tools. In case you are not familiar with Hulu Labs, it is a section of Hulu that provides new products that can be used, but are still in beta. There is a possibility that any of them can have bugs. Hulu Labs is not unlike Google labs in this respect. Products that have been in Hulu Labs include...

Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results. Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from...