Google News, Inside.

Trigger Happy Webmasters

Looks like someone over on the Google Webmaster Tools team went a little trigger happy last night.

Update: and just in case I missed the first bajillion messages in my dashboard, they also fowarded it to my inbox.
Dear Webmaster Tools User,
If your website accepts advertising, we invite you to increase your site’s visibility with advertisers in [...]

How to Verify Blogger in Google Webmaster Tools

A great tutorial written on the Webmaster Central blog, about how to verify your Blogger blog in the Webmaster Tools. Here are the step-by-step instructions to authenticate your site:
In Webmaster Tools

Click the “Add a site” button on the Webmaster Tools Home page

Enter your blog’s URL (for example, googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) and click the “Continue” button to [...]

Google Reminds Webmasters that Low-Quality Backlinks Don’t Matter

Susan Moskwa wrote on the Webmaster Central Blog about how Google deals with low-quality and spammy backlinks.
Finally, keep in mind that low-quality links rarely stand the test of time, and may disappear from our link graph relatively quickly. They may even already be being discounted by our algorithms. If you want to make sure Google [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Removes PageRank Indicator

The Google Webmaster Tools team removed the PageRank indicator from the dashboard today.
Here’s what Google has to say about it,
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 is simply not true. [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Introduces “Labs”

Google Webmaster Central announced a new feature of Google Webmaster Tools: Labs.

So far, there are only two features available in Labs. “Fetch as Googlebot” which will do a couple of things. It will first see if Googlebot is even allowed to fetch the page. Then it will make sure it returns [...]

Google Webmaster Tools Adds Parameter Handling

Earlier today, Vanessa Fox wrote an article about how Google has given webmasters the option to adjust parameter handling.
Here’s what it looks like.

This is great for some sites that still have SESSID and such in their URLs, that want them stripped out.
You can get here by going to: Site Configuration » Settings, then look for [...]

Control Your Googlebot Crawl Rate

Google introduced a new crawl rate control panel into the Google Webmaster Tools.

These settings will give you more control over how quickly and how frequently Googlebot crawls your site and pages.
In most cases, you will want to keep it at the recommended setting, default, but in a rare circumstance — such as you feel your [...]

Google Wants to Help Make Sure You’re Secure

Google’s own Matt Cutts recently posted an article about how Google is helping you stay secure.
To kick off the security enhancement efforts by Google, they are focusing on WordPress, the same software that powers this blog and the same software that I recently hosted a conference about; WordCamp NY.

Google Helps Break the Language Barrier

Language has been a common barrier between people on the web. Whether you’re talking on Instant Messenger (IM), writing a blog post, writing an e-mail, or posting on a forum, a common problem has been the language barrier. A very small fraction of the world understands and can coherently read or speak another [...]

Fix Those Broken Internal Links!

The Google Webmaster Central blog wrote a post a bit ago about how they updated the platform so users can now see where their broken links are.
This is huge.
Do not miss this.
This means when googlebot sees a links and it leads to a dead end, you now can know about it.
This is an extremely useful [...]