The Search Engine Blog

With speed being a part of the new Google in 2010, Google has added a tool to test the speed of your site in the Webmaster Tools.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: How fast is your site?

View the Google Caffeine update on their server 209.85.225.103. This one data center will serve up the caffeine update 50% of the time. The final update is not suppose to go live until after the holidays.
Google

News Corp wants Google to pay for indexing their news content and serving it on Google news pages. Google says, tell us not to index it and we won’t. News Corp, says you took it now pay. You get the argument from there. It’s the War of Standstill Hill.
Now Microsoft sees an opportunity and offers to pay News Corp to index their material if they do de-list themselves from Google. Microsoft’s Bing would be the only source of News Corp information?
Do you think that information should only be available if you search multiple sources? Is this the start of a slippery slope?
There’s a discussion of the good and bad of this at Microsoft and News Corp To Consider Web Pact?

Having fun trying to find all the online tools and apps that Google has? Well it’s about time Google had them in one place. The Google Dashboard finally answers that issue, ok, partially. Not all the apps are there, but it’s a start in the right direction. Take a look and see most all your Google information in one place.

Official Google Blog: Transparency, choice and control — now complete with a Dashboard!

Many webmasters are chatting about changes in PageRank values across the world of Google. Other changes have included the missing Time Line Search, a bug fix in GoogleMaps for Israel and a new text fade effect on the home page. It is the season for Google updates.

PR Update – October 2009

Search Google profiles in their experimental labs. The search is now open to the public. Of course it only returns results for people who have created a Google profile and made it public. This is a good time to check your profile and see what you have made public.

Google Experimental Search

Google, Bing and Yahoo all watch your searches, clicks and more. It is suppose to help you find more meaningful results. It wrecks havoc with ranking reports making them virtually useless. For those of you who don’t want them watching you, or you want pure results, here’s a way to help avoid tracking. This is geeky and requires a good working knowledge of computing. I don’t have an issue with the paranoid part. What gets me is the search engine thinking it’s smarter than me by guessing what I really meant.

How to Stop Google, Yahoo & Bing from Tracking Your Clicks

People expect a holiday Google update and perhaps that’s why there is so much activity in the forums regarding the topic….or it’s because more people are watching this time of the year. Yes, sites have been disappearing and there have been connectivity issues and Google has a major update this same time every year. Just hold on and enjoy the annual ride.

Google Updates and SERP Changes – October 2009

New lab feature in Google Webmaster Tools lab lets you see a site the same way Goolgebot sees it.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Fetch as Googlebot and Malware details — now in Webmaster Tools Labs!

That’s not news, yet people still have fits about their site keywords. Google has blogged about it yet again trying to clear up people’s incorrect perceptions. I prefer to go straight to the “manual”. Here’s a link to what Google does pay attention to….when they want to.
Meta tags – Webmasters/Site owners Help