Rumour has it that Google's new open source browser, Chrome, is out today. Infact it's not just speculation, Google made an official announcement on their blog.

Google's Chrome browser is accompanied by a 32-page Scott McCloud comic book detailing Google's thoughts behind the release of the new browser which lands in a market dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and constantly chased but never equalled (in terms of market share anyway) by Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock and others.

The Google Chrome book is a neat & friendly way to introduce punters to the new browser, making a nice change from the usual stuffy instructions you might expect.

So let's see what happens later today when the Google Chrome beta is released...

Labels: browsers, google, open source

With the new post over at the Google AdSense blog could this be a sign that Made For AdSense (MFA) websites are dead?

Basically Google are re-stating that deceptive practices, whereby AdSense ads are under titles (that indicate they are not Google AdSense ads) or are "hidden" amongst navigation systems to look like part of the site, are against the AdSense TOS.

And I really hope Google start policing this a bit better becuase there are too many sites spoiled by the fact that they are FULL of AdSense ads, hence the term MFA.

Let's hope the MFA site is dead.

Labels: adsense, google

Google Analytics has become the weapon of choice for one of my clients as it does an admirable job of splitting their paid and non-paid traffic, particularly helpful seeing as they're runnning an Adwords campaign or two.

Today I noticed in Google Analytics' menu there's a Benchmarking (Beta) button under the Visitors heading.

"Benchmarking is a service that lets you see how your website's statistics compare against industry verticals. Use benchmarking data to gain a broader context for your site and identify additional opportunities to improve your site's metrics."

Getting further into the Benchmarking (Beta) I had to allow Google to anonymously collect & share data and I've enabled Benchmarking (Beta) for the client's site. When I attempt to use the service, Google's now telling me that benchmarking data is being collected & combined and that

"Industry statistics will appear in this report within two weeks"

Tres cool, now I just have to sit and wait for up to 2 weeks to see how this site is performing against industry verticals. And this is where I'm very curious... Not knowing how Google knows which industry you're in I did a little search amongst all their FAQs and it appears that you have to set the industry vertical yourself... by going into "Open category list" and selecting a category... and yet I'm not seeing that function either in Firefox or my IE6 browser.

This is going to be interesting comparing visits, page views per visit, bounce rate and average time on site with others in the industry... I wonder how we will fare? I'll keep you posted.

Labels: google, seo, services, stats, tools

We've been clamouring for Google to revise the Google Webmaster Tools for some time now, and taking the webmaster tools user survey seems to be paying dividends.

The toolset so far has been fairly simple but it looks like Google are listening to webmasters and putting out some really useful, really helpful new webmaster tools

I noticed yesterday that G's toolset now includes some very useful Content Analysis features...

Under the DIAGNOSTICS tools there is a CONTENT ANALYSIS section that looks at:

Title tag issues

1. Missing title tags
2. Duplicate title tags
3. Long title tags
4. Short title tags
5. Non-informative title tags

Meta description issues

1. Duplicate meta descriptions
2. Long meta descriptions
3. Short meta descriptions

Non-indexable content issues

These are all really burning issues that many SEO people want to know and by pinpointing problems with title tags, meta descriptions and non-indexable pages it looks like Google are giving us what we want in order to make our sites more competitive.

Like they say, fixing these issues may help in addressing the negative impacts that incorrect title and meta may cause, so listen to Google, fix the problems and report back on whether their guidance was a wild goose chase to simply keep people busy or whether you've had any real successes in the serach results...

Labels: google, seo, tools

When you search Google you tend to get a ton of extra data the sometimes you're really not looking for.

Normally you see, in a Google results page, the following data:

[title]
[description]
[link]

When you're looking for something in a hurry e.g. checking out other competitors in the SEO game, you often need to peruse the results pages fast!

So how do you compact Google search results?

I just happened to stumbleupon DaveN's blog whilst Googling for the pros & cons of having a UK website at a US IP address and I noticed his greasemonkey scripts page.

Now I haven't used Greasemonkey in a while but it's a handy little plugin for the Firefox web browser.

On Dave's page there's a totally handy little Google search compactor script for Greasemonkey.

Really handy, give it a try.

Labels: firefox, google, greasemonkey, scripts, seo, tools

This new Google Notebook feature is handy. At long last we don't have to just cut & paste URLs into our bookmarks or CTR-D the page when we get there, we can also note URLs from within Google and write notes to go with them.

Look, we've searched Google for 22i design Farnborough. In the page that Google displays there's a "Note this" link at the foot of the listing. The link opens My Notebook, the Google Notebook.

The Google Notebook is then your online, inGoogle tool to have all your bookmarks to hand AND to allow you to add notes to your bookmarks. Tres handy indeed although you do need a Google account to set this up. You can associate it with any current Gogole account you have or there's the option to disassociate it ;)

Labels: google, search, tools