Google appears to be beta testing some new search results features:

The first item allows you to quickly modify the type of search you’re performing, whether it be a standard search engine query, blog/news search, video search, etc.

The second section shows you Related Searches, or queries related to your search.

Not sure I like the layout just yet, but it seems a lot more like Ask.com.  I think they’d be better off moving the features to the right hand side of the page or at the bottom personally.  It seems to distract from the results themselves.

Interview snippets from Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google Webmaster Tools. Full video interview w/ Rand Fishkin

I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.

Sitemaps.org initiatives

• Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
• New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
  sitemap:filepath

  View the robots.txt sitemap inclusion discussion over at WebmasterWorld for more specifics

Webmaster Tools & Sitemaps

• Yahoo Site Explorer out of Beta.
• URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
• Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
• Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
• Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
• Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
  Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
• Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
  Could make other options available in the future.
• Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
• Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.

Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)

• They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).

Buying Links (watch out!)

• Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….

Sites Displaying Search Results (scrapers, shopping sites, etc.)

• She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.

Google Base

• Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
• Separate searching system from Google.com.
• Good for experimenting - “get in early”.

Google News

• Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
• Send email to get included (for review) - English only.

In case you missed our last Vanessa Fox posting, you can view her December 2006 interview here.

The two biggest stories the past few weeks related to internet marketing and SEO are probably the new tools that Google and Yahoo both rolled out.

Google unveils more links
Within your Google Webmaster Tools account, you can now view/download a much larger scope of incoming links to your website.  In addition, you can view the links to specific pages on your site and generate an outgoing link report as well.  Here’s the official word from Vanessa Fox over at GWT:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information. Read the full story

I’ve tested the new link reports out and it doesn’t give you too much information that you probably don’t already have.  In addition, Matt Cutts stated that the reports are by no means 100% of the data available and don’t reflect the true number of links pointing to your site.  He also stated that just because a link is showing up in the report, that it’s not an indicator that the link is counted in the algorithm - it’s a simple report of the links, nothing more.

Yahoo Pipes unveiled
The general scope of “Yahoo Pipes” is the ability to combine RSS/feeds (or mash them together), and then manipulate the data in a way that’s useful for you or your website(s).  It’s basically an RSS masher & re-hasher.  The “pipes” name comes from the Unix pipes that let you combine commands (foreign to this writer).

What Is Pipes? Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line. Read the full story

Nice link from Yahoo Pipes btw… what, you couldn’t figure out how to use Mod Rewrite?

The top three search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo) announced last week that they’re all in support of a “sitemap” protocol/standard for websites.  This news should make most webmasters relax a little bit since they now only need to create a single sitemap file to appease all three engines, versus the complicated ways to do it before (multiple sitemap files).

The sitemap should be created as “sitemap.xml” and placed in the site’s root directory.

MorePro Marketing, Inc. can help you create a valid sitemap for your website and submit it to the various engines on your behalf.  If you’re interested in this service, please use the contact form on our website.