For years now, every now and then when checking for a domain name, I tried using Google just to see if it will serve me a direct result pertaining to basic domain registration (registration and expiration date for starters). Somehow it seemed logical that a simple “whois …..” query in Google should do that. If queries like “define: …” return definitions for words, why not do the same for domains. Well, Google now returns basic domain information if you type “whois [domainname]” into the search box. I realized this a couple of days ago.

Today, I saw a post on the domain information query on Google by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, and from the comments it seems other people are seeing this as well, but the feature is still sporadic, as some people are saying they aren’t getting domain info in their results. I’ve tried queries for .com and .co.uk and they worked alright. It doesn’t seem to work for .yu/.co.yu (now .rs/.co.rs), which are Serbia’s domain extensions for example. I wasn’t expecting this to work but thought I’d try anyway. Others are reporting they are still not seeing anything for domains ending with their own country extension. A post on Matt Cutts’ blog showed up a couple of days ago, which points out this new feature as well. It seems Google is using Domain Tools for domain information queries, and since this is still kinda fresh, bugs and limited availability are expected, until the addition is rolled out worldwide.

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Just read this on Webmaster Central Blog - Google is testing the latest approach to content discovery by crawling HTML forms on a selected group of sites deemed to be particularly useful. Googlebot will, upon coming onto an HTMl form, determine whether form method is GET or POST. It will actually proceed only if it’s a GET form, since they want to avoid crawling forms that may require user information input (such as usernames and passwords), which all use POST. The bot will actually “fill in” text fields with words (found on the site), choose options on radio buttons and select menus, and try to crawl resulting content, and index it if it determines it’s useful and hasn’t previously been indexed.

Anyway, the experiment is an effort to try and crawl/index, what has been called “invisible content” or “the invisible internet” for years, which is a previously untapped rich source of information which over the years has stayed hidden behind processes requiring human interaction.

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Google announced the release of Video Sitemaps, an extension of the Sitemap Protocol. It has been developed in order to improve the way Google indexes video content publicly available on the Internet. The idea is to make video content more searchable on Google Video. Apart from the basic information about video files such as title and URL, the video sitemap allows more detailed meta tags such as video player location, thumbnail preview location, the URL of the page showing the video.

In order to use Video Sitemaps, webmasters should log in to Google Webmaster Tools and add Video Sitemap to their account.

If you’ve got some video content lying around on the server, here’s a chance to get it indexed and get some additional exposure for your website. Apart from uploading video files to services like YouTube, this is a good way to extend video visibility and use this growing promotion trend to your advantage.

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As continuation of the video series, started with the Anatomy of a Google search result video about two weeks ago, this is the new video featuring Matt Cutts, who explains the usage of the ALT attribute in image tags. It’s a pretty basic explanation of what the attribute does, its purpose, but again, he gives numeric data (and that’s what we all want ) near the very end of the video - the number of words to be used in the ALT attribute that won’t be deemed as spam by Google. If your site features images that are good quality and theme specific, you can do something more with them. Add descriptive ALT attributes, and show up in Google Images queries. You can then try to get links from webmasters who’d like to use an image from your site on their own projects. Here’s one way to do this.

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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted this interesting video presentation featuring Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team), in which he explains in detail a typical search result. At first I thought this is pretty much a basic explanation for those still not familiar with the way Google shows results, but I discovered this video is actually very useful even for those more experienced, if you know how to listen that is. I like the part about snippets and the additional info within it and how they capture that info from a web page.

Here’s the link to the post. This video is the first of more to come in the future.

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There’s been a lot going on in the past days regarding PageRank changes. Google has decided to follow through on their promise to combat paid links and sites selling links. The main effect is a significant drop in PageRank, which is probably a way to reduce value for paid links (if they indeed are sold solely on the basis of high PageRank) and discourage webmasters to purchase links, although there seems to be no changes regarding anchor text. Google has done a few things to stir things up and many are suffering. It seems that not only sites with paid links have been affected. There is also speculation that Google is also hitting on sites with excessive cross-linking, although they may simply be reducing the value of certain groups of links. With every major change such as this, the innocent are bound to get burned as well. Some sites have experienced drops and other negative changes even without having bought or sold links, while others who engage in these practices have not been affected at all. Indeed, there are surprises in this Google update. Many of the sites that were affected are well known and popular authority sites in their own content category.

Google has flexed some muscle, and the effect is pulsating across the Web. Sites that depend solely on traffic sent by Google are definitely going to feel the change. Sites that did nothing wrong, but were still affected, should work on broadening their promotion efforts to include other sources of traffic such as social networks, community sites and other search engines. If a site depends solely on Google for traffic than a major change like this will definitely have a very negative effect on site and business performance. Good news is that, so far, there seems to be little change in traffic, although if changes prove to be related to overall ranking as well, changes in traffic will probably happen.

This blog was PageRank 0 until yesterday, now it’s PR 2 (at the time of writing, who knows about tomorrow). BTW, it was PR 2 a couple of weeks ago, for about two days. Was that the beginning of this PageRank update and I missed it? What I’m trying to illustrate is that pagerank obsession is a waste of time, unless you sell links based on this criterion.

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Google shows what it calls sitelinks for certain queries, and then only for some sites or domains. They appear below the first result on the results page (usually a domain name that contains most or all the keywords from the query), and represent shortcuts to specific content on that site that Google thinks may help you get to the information you need quicker than by manually navigating the site.

Where is the added value? Well, if you own a nice generic domain name that may collect a fare amount of type in traffic, having additional sitelinks show up on a Google search page can only increase the possibility that a visitor will actually end up on your site. Sitelinks, even though claimed by Google as automatically generated by the search algorithm (or see below), give an image of authority for a domain name. So the value of a generic domain name, with the appropriate content on the site and a nice amount of traffic, is increased even further for having additional exposure on Google, which most probably means more traffic. If you were to sell your domain name (and website), which incidentally has sitelinks showing up in Google, you’d probably get a little extra cash for the added value. Ok, that’s great, but what if sitelinks don’t appear for your site?

Bookworm SEO posted an interesting post about his attempt to do research on Google sitelinks on his blog. In this Part 1 of his research post series, he gives a list of 100 sites that Google sitelinks show up for. Sounds interesting, and I’m looking forward to see if he actually comes up with definitive results. I suppose Google will also be interested in seeing this, although I doubt they’ll acknowledge his results should they prove to be valid.

In the meantime, this is what Google says about sitelinks in Webmaster Guidelines:

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

You can aslo see this on Google Webmaster Guidelines.

For now, webmasters can tell Google not to show sitelinks for their site through the Webmaster Tools dashboard, and that sums up all the control webmasters have over sitelinks.

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Google decided to intriduce Google Shared Stuff profiles into Google Maps. User who decide to share a map they have created (viewed), can now have information from their Google Shared Stuff profile shown together with the map (for example, the user’s picture appears with the map). This adds the personal touch to Google Map sharing, and since it’s integrated with a whole lot more through the Shared Stuff profile, we could say Google Maps are now Social Google Maps.

Here is a video explaining the new addition to Google Maps:

Google has already entered the social networking playground with opening in a big way in early November 2007. This is another move that clearly reveals the path towards a new social Google dimension. Is Google Search somewhere at the end of the social network evolution for Google? I wonder what Google search results would look like then.

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I guess this was only a matter of time, but AdSense is finding its way onto Facebook through targeted publishers. Although AdSense has been around on Facebook ever since launch through personal pages, Google is now taking a more direct approach by creating a network targeted specifically at Facebook publishers. According to this post on VentureBeat (there is also an illustration of what this looks like), Google is making efforts in getting third-party Facebook app developers to show AdSense on their application pages. But these AdSense are not just plain old ads; they are targeted specifically for advertisers who want their ads to appear on Facebook. Google was only to quick to exploit this opportunity, especially since the other two main competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo, both have Facebook in their sites, with Microsoft already having signed a deal with Facebook to show its ads across the site.

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This is not so new in concept, but what’s new is that now you can show YouTube videos on your site accompanied by relevant ads while playing in a customized embeddable video player. There are a couple of videos explaining this, but I chose this one:

It’s easy enough to get started by following instructions here (you have to link your AdSense account with your YouTube account). The same page also shows other video explaining AdSense video units.

UPDATE: Video units are only available for those based in the United States with English language websites. I only just realized I missed this small but important bit of information.

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