HighRankings.com’s Jill Whalen broke some interesting news about tags webmasters can use to control how their content is shown in Google results. The information comes from Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, speaking at the Search Engine Marketing New England event in Rhode Island.

Over at the Google Blog, Dan Crow is publishing a series of how-to’s about controlling what the Googlebot says about your site through the Robots Exclusion Protocol. This is the cheap-and-easy version.

Don’t Index That Link!

If you’re site goes down for whatever reason, get it back up quickly or risk being de-listed from Google’s index.

Though it has been thought there may be somewhat of a grace period, it now seems robots only notice what’s there when they arrive.

Barry Schwartz spotted a thread in the Cre8site Forums discussing a report by Ekstreme.com that Googlebot requested a CSS file. This is a very interesting, but not surprising development.

Vanessa Fox unveiled new features included with Google’s Webmaster Tools in an entry this week on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Bringing your website into the voluminous BigTable of Google’s index involves sending out pieces of code, referred to as spiders or crawlers affectionately named “Googlebot,” to pick up your site. Google Webmaster Central has some tips for webmasters showing how they can learn more about Googlebot.

The Google crew cleared up a bit about how the Googlebot caches webpages. The date at the cached page reflects the last time the page was modified.

The latest news from Google Webmaster Central disclosed how the search engine’s spider saves a webmaster from unnecessary bandwidth costs.