Google is going to start letting webmasters know when the software they run on their site is outdated. Through Webmater Tools, Google will begin alerting users of new versions of software when they are released.
In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.
Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."
Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a thread featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.
Google has launched some new features for Google Friend Connect, aimed at letting site owners make their GFC experience more personalized and letting their visitors get to know each other.
A representative for Google tells WebProNews that 9 million sites are using Google Friend Connect, and pages with GFC get over half a billion unique visitors a month. Two people join every second, she says.
Matt Cutts has provided some useful information for webmasters in the last few videos that have been uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. It should be noted that this channel is designed to answer questions and provide useful tips for webmasters regarding their site's performance in Google. The topics are not always breaking news. Some you may know, but there are always other people out there that don't know the information.
Google has launched a couple of new Labs features for Webmaster Tools. One is "malware details" and the other is "fetch as googlebot."
Google is providing snippets of code from pages it considers malware, in order to help webmasters eliminate the malware on their sites quickly.
Hulu has added a couple of new features to Hulu Labs. These are Hulu Desktop for Linux and Hulu Publisher Tools.
Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he's talking about. What he's talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results.
Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.
Google has released a new product called the Google Docs Viewer. This is a way to display PDFs, Powerpoints and TIFF documents directly in a web browser without requiring a download.
Google has made some changes to the way Webmaster Tools users verify their websites.
Before, the user's verification meta tag was based (partially) on the email address of their Google account, which meant that if they changed the email address in their account settings, their meta tags would also change, and they'd become unverified for any sites that used the old tag. Google has made a new version of the verification meta tag, which is unrelated to the email address to prevent this from happening.
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