Google has made a slew of improvements within his past week such as including banner ads in search results and reading dynamic URL’s as reported last week.

One of the most important technical tools any SEO should use is the free Google Webmaster tools. This gives you a great deal of performance data to ensure Google is properly crawling and indexing your site. For those of you already familiar with the tool, you may have noticed a few improvements within the last day or so. The UI has been tweaked a bit but I noticed they removed the “date last crawled” feature in the overview section. This feature is critical to make sure Googlebot is visiting the site as often as possible. If a site hasn’t been crawled in a few weeks, changes can be made for the spiders to revisit but without knowing, myself and everyone else out there is in the dark.

That’s the downside to this update. As for the improvements, you can now use the tool to set a geographic location. Basically what this means is you can use the target tool to provide Google with information that will help determine how your site appears in Google’s country-specific search results, and also improves the search results for geographic queries. This is beneficial because once Google starts to understand your target audience, it can potentially optimize results to ensure you are reaching your intended audience. For instance I’m from a small town outside of Buffalo, NY called Angola. Well, there is a country called Angola as well which is a big geographical difference. If I create a site and all the info on the site just says, “Angola” including titles tags, meta info etc, Google is confused as to where I intent to target. Not to mention, there are most likely other Angola’s in the US. If someone goes to Google as types in “Angola” there could be numerous results in there. If I go into Webmaster tools and specify my geo-targeted location as Angola, NY, it will now that’s where my audience is. My take on this, is that it is very similar to the Adwords PPC side of things. Very similar but it’s bringing you geo-qualified traffic for free!

A few other additions are and updated to their GData API. This is for high-level programmers who can use the API key to create custom reporting functions across multiple clients. Great for an agency but again, a experience programmer is required!
Google Webmasters Blog highlights everything with a few explanations.

It appear that Google is testing ad placements but not geo or behaviroral  not targeting. They may also be examining the quality and nature of data that can be retrieved from an ad like this on a SERP.

The downside in moving forward with this for Google is twofold. Firstly, the non-intrusive clean interface and results are a big part of the Google experience for searchers.

Google is currently sitting on an enviably profitable search pie but as their share of the search market edges around the 70% mark they may be looking at places to wring more bucks out and continue their stellar growth. YouTube has been the obvious place for them to monetize but they know search the best and have been the most successful at finding dollars there. There’s an awful lot of room on those SERPs – filling some of it with lots of money…er…advertising must be very tempting even as it puts one of their strengths in jeopardy.

There has been much talk this week over Google’s official blog post regarding URL rewriting. Some think it’s a game changer, and some don’t. Essentially, Google recommends that you shouldn’t attempt to make dynamic URLs look static because A. Google can crawl those URLs anyway, B. some of the information passed in those URLs can help Google understand the content better and C. apparently, people screw up URL rewriting and then Google doesn’t see any of the information (a symptom of which I would believe yields much greater problems than Google not seeing your content-namely that your site wouldn’t be functioning).

URLs wear serve many different purposes. They are a branding tool (for better or worse), they are instructions for how a page should be rendered, they give people something to bookmark and the list goes on. When one ‘rewrites’ a URL, they may be doing so for a number of reasons. The most obvious reason is to shorten them and make them easier to read (and thus, more likely to be clicked on, remembered from a print ad and so on). We KNOW Google recognizes words in URLs, and there are even operators to search for them there.

Even if the words in a URL aren’t factored into how a page is assigned a rank for a given search result, we certainly can draw attention to a URL if it has a word in it that matches a query. One would think from the SEO perspective, that we are leaving money on the table if we aren’t capitalizing on that opportunity.

This story was originally reported by TechCrunch.

Google seems to be bucket testing a feature that allows users to specify how detailed the summary blurbs in their search results will be. In an ongoing discussion here, one user comments that the three available options are Small (which omits a summary entirely), Medium (the current default length), and Long (which is around four times longer than normal). The changes affect more than just aesthetics – the Long setting apparently consists of both the standard meta summary as well as text pulled from the page itself, which could help users weed out sites with nice descriptions but little actual content.

Because search is such an integral part of its business, Google has to be careful whenever it thinks about implementing a new search-related feature. The company regularly tests out unannounced new features across a small percentage of its users to see if they are worth implementing on a wider scale (this is called bucket testing).

This one is up for debate and borders on the fringe of black hat SEO. For those of us wanting to keep our SEO jobs, Google does a great job in telling us what they considered cloaking.

From my perspective, I believe any content presented to the visitor should be the same as to a SE spider.

Here is a breakdown of the of the definitions as posted on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:

Geolocation: Serving targeted/different content to users based on their location. As a webmaster, you may be able to determine a user’s location from preferences you’ve stored in their cookie, information pertaining to their login, or their IP address. For example, if your site is about baseball, you may use geolocation techniques to highlight the Yankees to your users in New York.

The key is to treat Googlebot as you would a typical user from a similar location, IP range, etc. (i.e. don’t treat Googlebot as if it came from its own separate country—that’s considered cloaking).

IP delivery: Serving targeted/different content to users based on their IP address, often because the IP address provides geographic information. Because IP delivery can be viewed as a specific type of geolocation, similar rules apply. Googlebot should see the same content a typical user from the same IP address would see.

Google also created a video presentation of these bad, bad strategies.

Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of the webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you’re in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

I’ve always heard of these shady techniques and wonder why rogue SEO’s play this game. They are jeopardizing their clients and more importantly their reputation.  Just create unique, compelling content that will increase relevancy, ranking, and ultimately-conversions.