Technology Tips

Google announced Adsense Referrals 2.0 three days ago. I am now writing about it three days later because I want to talk about my experience with it, rather than just repeat what Google said.

Not all Adsense publishers will see Referrals 2.0 right away. Once your Adsense account is upgraded (Google is upgrading accounts as we speak), you’ll be able to tap into the greatly expanded Referrals inventory. As we know, previously only Google products were on the Referrals inventory list.

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Techcrunch reported that Google is close to buying Feedburner for $100 M. This deal has been rumored for a while now, but today Techcrunch said definitely that a deal will happen.

What does this mean? The comment board at Technorati is already buzzing with the possibility of seeing Adsense ads in Feedburner feeds in the not-to-distant future. Additionally, it is very likely that there will be some kind of integration between Google Reader and Feedburner.

I also think that this will help Google Blog Search to include more blogs in its index. Furthermore, other blogging service sites, most notably Technorati, will probably feel the need to quickly partner up with someone else. A Google-Technorati marriage is also possible, although it’s not as obvious as the Google-Feedburner marriage, where there is little overlap between the two.

Brandchannel.com released its brand ranking for 2006, and Google sat on top for the second year in a row.� Out of the top 20, internet companies occupy� 5 spots:

Google: #1
Youtube: #3
Wikipedia: #4
Skype: #7
Yahoo!: #11

For 2005, 6 internet companies occupied the top 20:

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Google announced its acquisition of Youtube after the market closed today in a stock purchase valued at $1.65 billion.� I’ve outlined why I thought this is a good purchase for all parties involved in the previous post.

The fallout with this purchase is that Yahoo will most likely speed up its courtship of Facebook, which is the next biggest Web 2.0 site that is available on the market.� The Google-Youtube deal, however, does give Facebook more leverage in its negotiations with all suiters.� Expect Yahoo to announce its purchase of Facebook soon, and at a higher price than the $1 billion that has been mentioned recently.

Google released Code Search, a search utility to find computer codes across the web. Users can type in a snippet of code they are looking for (including regular expressions), and Google Code Search will return the codes that contain that particular snippet. People can also search by specifying the file name, package name, language, or license they are looking for.

I tried it out and did not find it to be very useful. True, if you know the exact line of code or the exact file name you are looking for, this can be useful. However, I am usually more interested in finding code that performs a certain function in a certain computer language, such as “I want to find a piece of code that sessionizes raw web log data in perl.” To be able to accomplish this type of search, people will either need to tag their code (probably not happening anytime soon), or the search engine will need to be able to decipher the information hidden in the comment field within the code (this is more likely).

This blog talks about the reports available under the Statistics tab in Google Webmaster Tools. The 4 main sections are: Query stats, Crawl stats, Page analysis, and Index stats. Let’s take a look at each one below:

Query stats

This page displays two main reports:
1) Top search queries (queries that most often return a page from your site), and your site’s position for each query.
2) Top search query clicks (queries that generated a click to your site), and your site’s position for each query.

You can also drill down by search time (web, image, etc) or search location (google.com, google.co.uk, googl.ca, etc — note that does not represent where your user is coming from. It simply indicates which Google search engine the user used).

Crawl stats

This report shows PageRank distribution of the pages in your site, as well as which page has the highest PageRank. This is a functionality that I can do without — Google should either provide PR information on all the pages, or just get rid of this report.

Page analysis

This page has two sections: Content, which shows the type of documents Google found on your site, as well as the distribution of language encoding for the pages on your site. Common Words, which shows the words most commonly found on your site, as well as the anchor text most often found in links pointing to your site.

Index stats

This is simply a list of commands that you can use to find more information about your site. For example, site:www.yoursite.com can be used to find the indexed pages from www.yoursite.com.

Once you have set up your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you’ll be able to view two types of reports: Diagnostic Reports and Statistics Reports. In this post, I’ll review the information available in the Diagnostic Tab.

Under the Diagnostic tab, there are three main sections: Summary, Crawl errors, and Tools. Let’s take a look at each one below:

Summary

The summary page showing the following:
1. Whether pages from your site are included in the Google index.
2. The date Googlebot last successfully accessed the home page of your site.
3. Whether you have submitted a sitemap to Google.
4. Crawl errors Google found, including:

• HTTP errors�
• Not found
• URLs not followed
• URLs restricted by robots.txt
• URLs timed out
• Unreachable URLs

This error report is useful in helping you identifying incorrect links to your site, especially from internal links.

Crawl errors

The Web crawl report under Crawl errors shows any crawl errors in more detail. The Mobile Web report shows any crawl errors for your mobile site in CHTML, WML/XHTML.

Tools

robots.txt analysis: This report shows whether Google found a robots.txt file in your site. You can also experiment changing the content of robots.txt file and see how that affect Google’s crawlers.

Manage site verification: This report displays information webmasters need for verifying that they are indeed the owner of the site.

Preferred domain: Google allows you to specify whether you want Google to think www.sitename.com and sitename.com are the same. This is the one functionality that I think is the most valuable for Google Webmaster Tools. Since you have no control on how other people link to your site, you’ll want to make sure that Google knows that links to www.sitename.com and sitename.com are the same (this should usually be the case). This way, your site can get full credit for all the incoming links.