Google has recently added new features to its Sitemaps service. In addition to a revamped interface, there's a new verification method, a new summary page that provides a quick snapshot about the state of your site in the Google index, and a notification of violation of Google's webmasterguidelines with a request for reinclusion (not yet available for all sites).

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One of the keys to a successful inbound linking strategy is to find sites in "good neighborhoods" that are willing to link to you. Here's a tool that can help you find such sites.

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Figures just released from comScore, a global marketing information provider, indicates that Google has continued to increase its lead as a provider of online searches. According to their March 2006 Search Engine Rankings report which tracs competitive search engines, Google gained in market share over the previous year for the eighth consecutive month.

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This simple question may not be as simple as it sounds. Your answer is probably something like "http://www.mysite.com/". But if you take a good look at the links to the home page in your site's navigation system, you may find a different answer.

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iProspect and Jupiter Research released today a new study on the behavior of search engine users. Key among the findings, when compared to 2002 and 2004 results for a similar survey, is that the importance of ranking high in the search results has increased over time. Today, 62% of search engine users are clicking on a first page result, compared to 60% in 2004 and only 48% in 2002.

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Google has integrated it's Google Base database with Google Maps in a way that will be of interest to real estate agencies, and may hurt existing sites like craigslist.com and realtor.com, and even compete with newspaper classified ads. Google Real Estate, one of many Google "products" said to be in "beta test" mode, provides a display of homes for sale in a specified region next to a map with pointers to those homes. Clicking on a pointer displays a photo and further information about the particular home.

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Here's a Google feature that not too many people know about. Say you had a web page that was (perhaps mistakenly) exposed to the Internet on a web server, and Google found and indexed this page. Sure, you can take the page down or put the offending machine behind your firewall, but what do you do about the copy of the page that Google happily continues to display from its cache?

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Google has begun displaying, for certain searches that it feels could benefit from a refinement, a new section in its results pages beginning with the words "See results for:" and followed by a search phrase containing the word(s) you searched for with one or more additional words added. Presumably, these new "See results for:" phrases are pulled from very popular searches containing the word or phrase that you searched for. You can see this behavior (at least at the time of this writing) if you do a Google search for "relentless". You will see, in a section after the first few natural results, "See results for: relentless records", with "relentless records" set up as a link to a new search on that phrase.

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In late 2003, Google unveiled a new index, separate from its main web index, that it queries if it fails to find good results in its main index. For unusual or obscure queries, you may see some of these results. They'll be flagged with the text "Supplemental Result" next to the URL.

Google's supplemental results have become a topic of conversation again recently, in the early days of the BigDaddy rollout. During the last few weeks of the BigDaddy rollout, large numbers of otherwise well-linked web pages were showing up as Supplemental Results. Google acknowledges that they are working to fix the problem.

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