Webmaster Tools will from now on feature more frequent data updates to ensure data freshness. This is something that has been sought by webmasters for a while. The new update frequency is for verified sites and has to do with crawling, indexing and search query stats.

According to this post on the Webmaster Central Blog, you will only see more frequent updates if your site actually gets new links over time. They are calling for comments and further suggestions, so head on over to the blog and drop them a note.

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Google AdSense announced the launch of AdSense for Mobile.

This service is intended for webmasters who have created sites especially for viewing on mobile devices. Ads run on an auction model, and are contextually targeted to the content being viewed on the page. It’s now available to webmasters from 13 countries worldwide: US, England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (in the coming weeks).

Here is a short introduction to the AdSense for Mobile platform.

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Operating a dynamic website? This might be interesting. The duplicate content issue is a well known problem when it comes to getting your pages indexed and ranked in the search engines. There are many solutions such as URL rewriting (mostly on Unix/Linux, alhtough there are ways to make it work on Windows), sessions and cookies, URL parsing which is pretty much a variation of URL rewriting…

There is a post about this on Google Webmaster Central. The thing that caught my eye in the post is the following:

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Item (2) is interesting. Unless you actually show different content when your page receives a different value for a parameter, which pretty much means there is no duplicate content, why would Google need to select what it thinks is the “best” representative page for a particular URL cluster. Yahoo allows webmasters to tell it what their choice for the representational URL is. By relying on Google to choose the “best” URL you actually give up any control that Google just gave you:

1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters — keep the URL as clean as possible.
2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can’t guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap’s URL in search results, it’s helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

So if I am not guaranteed to have my URL choice shown in search results, what’s the point of having the option to explicitly state that URL in the submitted site map? Kinda reminds me of the door dilemma - “damned if you enter, damned if you don’t enter”.

The whole story revolves around having your incoming link juice distributed over multiple variations of what’s essentially the same URL. So 100 links towards a “clean” URL will be distributed to all the URL parameter variations, and decrease incoming link value, which is not what you want, especially after all the hard work associated with link building.

In the end, it all comes down to is to try to use URL rewriting even if it takes a hosting solution change. Everything else is an unsure fix, complicates any site development, and will produce unwanted results later.

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Google released its own Facebook application, and yes it has everything to do with search. The application lets users use Google Search in a new way. All queries are added to a mini-feed so your web history is shared with other Facebook users. On a spearate page, the application showcases popular searches found by Facebook users. The application has been created using the Google AJAX Search API, the only search API Google left in business.

Well, great! I went to try it out, and here is what I got…

If you can’t see, it says:

Errors while loading page from application

There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Google are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

Well, too bad, since now I can’t see how the application behaves on real searches. I’ll have to come back to this in a couple of days time. Hopefully both Google and Facebook will get this sorted out. Interestingly enough, Google sites Yahoo for having failed with MyRank, a search algorithm Yahoo! tried to introduce in MyWeb 2.0, which takes into account the effect of social networking on search results. You can see all this in more detail here.

Apart from this being a useful search tool on Facebook, can this be something more than that? With a potential of over thirty million users, Facebook represents a great platform for experimenting with user behavior. As of yet, there is very little known (public) data on typical Facebook user behavior (what they search for, how they consume content, ad content in particular). If Google’s app gains momentum, Google will eventually end up with very useful information about Facebook user search behavior. Then come paid search ads, and let’s not forget Facebook has been very successfully ported to the mobile platform, and Google is already waist deep in mobile advertising. Hm, interesting…

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Google has added multi-language support, by supporting Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA), to Webmaster Tools which will allow webmasters from non-English speaking regions to use all the functionality of Webmaster Tools in their own language. The added support, among other things, means webmasters will be able to list and track domain names that use characters other than the 26 letters from the English alphabet.

This might become useful for me, since I should now be able to list a domain name written in Cyrillic or Latin Serbian letters (example: Google = Гугл in Cyrillic Serbian). I haven’t given it a try yet, but I will soon.

Google is asking for feedback for the new changes, and suggestions for further improvements.

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Google Maps has announced a new development. You can now embed a Google Map into a web page in 3 easy steps, similar to the way you embed YouTube videos.

Adding a map to your website or blog is now as easy as embedding a YouTube video. No programming skills are required, and there’s no need to sign up for a Maps API key. All it takes is three simple steps…

1. go to Google Maps and pull up the map
2. click link to this page and copy the appropriate generated embed code
3. paste the code into your page’s HTML code…

… and that’s it!

For example, I wish I was here:

View Larger Map

Yep, the SES San Jose.

In more detail on the new Google Map feature.

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Just read an interesting article on Google’s ongoing efforts to enter the mobile environment on Reuters , although the actual source is the Wall Street Journal. Google is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in different mobile related products and services. Talks are going on with major European mobile providers. Google is pretty silent and only states that there are no immediate plans for development of something that would be called Google phone. If Google pushes through with these deals and starts offering its services through mobile providers, as well as advertisements through the mobile platform , then indeed there is no hurry for a Google phone to be developed at this stage.

A natural development though, if everything goes well for G, is a device made by Google. Such a device would be filled with a plethora of useful things such Google Maps, integrated with a whole range of local search services, of course with real-time advertising messages tailored according the space-time coordinates of the user, as discussed here.

Google has already approached major mobile operators, AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, but reportedly hasn’t been able to reach an agreement with them. T-Mobile and Vodafone already incorporate Google search in their mobile Web service in Europe. AT&T offers Google search as one of several search options for its users.

It is no longer a question where Google is going with this initiative. Taking the mobile web sector is logical if you think about it. What puzzles me is what’s Google plan B in case things don’t go as planned. They have already met resistance regarding the WiMAX frequency deal in the US.

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Interesting developments surrounding Google’s uncompromising interest in the WiMAX deal (where they aim to buy the WiMAX part of the frequency spectrum). With behavioural targeting of ads already taking place, and the intelligent approach towards engaging the surfer with advertising content, what’s next? Well, when if we have tracked behavior, got inside the mind of the searcher, the only thing left is to know their location and possibly time (time-space coordinate). With this kind of approach Google aims to be able to engage the searcher with search on their mobile device way earlier in the process. Instead of predictive text input (T9), how about predictive searching (search suggestions while the user types the query, based on geographical location and local time of day). This brings a whole new dimension to search by integrating the searcher’s state of mind and matter and bringing it straight to the appropriate advertising content.

More interesting posts about this on GrokDotCom and SilliconValleyWatcher .

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Google is working to improve its supplemental results index to include more sites (pages) and increase its exposure. Also, supplemental results are to be equalized with results from the main index in the future. All this is part of a bigger effort to improve the overall search result quality for users.

The changes we make must focus on improving the search experience for our users. Since 2006, we’ve completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We’re also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

Thus far, being in supplemental results meant your pages were regarded as secondary by Google for various reasons (no or low incoming link count, page very new, orphan page, etc.) , and were pretty much shown when the main search index returned a set of results that didn’t satisfy entirely. In other words, if you were in the Spplementals, you were pretty much out of the picture. This changes a lot. I must admit I have been seeing more supplemental results shown on the first pages of organic results in the last couple of months, and sorta smelled that something is going on. So, I guess this was it then.

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we’ve been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we’ve decided to stop labeling these URLs as “Supplemental Results.” Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google’s supplemental index being deeper and fresher.

Worrying about Google supplemental results was something that was part of a daily life of everyone involved in search marketing and promotion (ok, SEO if you will). I think this bit of news will finally put our minds at ease, and allow us to concentrate on making more useful content for our visitors. After all, being in the search index, even the supplemental index, is better than being nowhere at all.

Read the whole post on Google Webmaster Central .

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Over at Search Engine Roundtable, an interseting post by rustybrick, giving us another way to query Google for supplemental results. I tried it for some sites I know had supplemental results, and the rough number of those results, and it seems to work alright. A commenter on SE Roundtable said the command doesn’t return accurate results, but from what I’ve seen the results pretty much match my prior tests. So, here you go:

site:http://[sitename.com]/&

Another thing though, I tried to put different meta characters after the last slash and none worked (returned no results match), except for * (asterisk). This one gives a list of pages in the index, but not all the pages from a site, because when I tried without the asterisk, I got the actual total number of pages I expected. I’ll test further and see what comes up on this.

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