In late February, Google gave webmasters a rare treat by supplying a detailed list of updates to their search engine algorithm. Continuing with item-by-item analysis:

10. “Site:” query update [launch codename “Semicolon”, project codename “Dice”] This change improves the ranking for queries using the “site:” operator by increasing the diversity of results.

The “site:” operator is a handy advanced search tool you can use on Google Search to see the pages that Google has indexed for a Website.

Judging by the description it appears that Google is now more carefully selecting URLs to display for this advanced search query. This would help the display for larger websites that have many URLs, as well as many different types of pages. Rather than displaying page after page of results of a similar type up front, you should now be getting a more diverse mix of pages that will better help you understand the website more quickly.

When using the “site:” operator, Google will also display an ad encouraging you to set up Webmaster Tools. What you, as a webmaster, will gain from Google Webmaster Tools is not an improved version of the “site:” operator, but other data that will help supplement it.

Previous Articles covering Google Panda 3.3

No. 1 -More Coverage for Related Searches
No. 2: Tweak the Categorizer for Expanded Sitelinks
No. 3: Less Duplication in Expanded Sitelinks
No. 4: More consistent thumbnail sizes on results page
No. 5: More locally relevant predictions in YouTube
No. 6: More accurate detection of official pages
No. 7: Refreshed per-URL country information
No. 8: Expand the size of our images index in Universal Search
No. 9: Minor tuning of autocomplete policy algorithms

1. Build incoming links. No kidding. Build incoming links. It’s hard to do, and can be extremely time consuming and tedious, but keep at it. If you wonder why your site still has a PageRank of 2 and isn’t showing up in your competitive searches, it’s because you have not built enough incoming links.

2. Redirect yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com (or visa versa). If you don’t, search engines will see both URLs as separate websites and you could get duplicate content penalties. Type site:yourdomain.com in the Google search box. Then type site:www.yourdomain.com in the Google search box. If you have a different number of links, or different links indexed, Google thinks you have two different websites with the same content.

3. Don’t point links to your index page. Point them all to your domain. That includes your internal navigation.

4. Use Google Webmaster Tools to flag any errors in site structure, tags, redirects or indexing. The most useful tools, in my opinion are the robots.txt analysis tool and the URL Removal Tool. Also of note are the sitemap submission tool and diagnostics that tell you if you have 404 errors, or if there are problems with URLs in your sitemap.

5. Leave your company name out of your page title and h1 tags. Chances are that searches for your company name are insignificant in your overall search engine ranking strategy, and you are diluting your keyword relevance.

6. Make sure that all of your page titles are different, and are targeted to the content of the page. Having 20 pages titled “custom widgets” doesn’t make the search engines think that your website is the place to learn about custom widgets. It makes them think that users will have a hard time finding information on your site.

7. Use search engine functions to monitor the pages of your website that are indexed. Spiders don’t always obey robots.txt, so you can end up with a lot of garbage in the index if you don’t keep on top of it. This is especially important if you have a dynamic website.

8. Add new content on a regular basis. Search engines think big websites are important websites, and keeping it fresh keeps them coming back.

Until now, the only way to get an inkling of which backlinks to your Website Google knew about was to use the “link:” operator. As I’ve mentioned before, it is utterly useless, especially if your Website dwells in the lower bowels of PR (PageRank). Here’s the backlinks the “link:www.tpdesigns.net” tells me that Google sees.

Nine backlinks? All that work for only nine backlinks? Well I knew I was being had, so Yahoo! to the rescue. Here’s what Yahoo! Site Explorer tells me about my backlinks:

6,228 backlinks? That’s more like it! Without actually counting, I can say that might be most of them.

Today I saw in Matt Cutts blog that Google Webmaster Tools now included backlinks. It had to be an improvement over the totally useless “link:” operator, and it is. I logged in, and after clicking to my Sitemap, I was pleased to see a new tab label “Links.” Here’s what it said:

448 Backlinks. That’s more like it. I noticed the the main difference between the number of backlinks displayed on the “Links” tab in Google Webmaster Tools, and the “Inlinks” displayed in Yahoo! Site Explorer seemed to be that Google was limiting backlinks displayed to a certain number per site, while Yahoo! was displaying most, if not all of them.

Google Webmaster Tools has always had some cool features, not all of which have worked for me. I’ve always felt that I’ve received limited data because my Website was just too small for Google to care about. With the new backlinks feature, Google has given me a reason to log into Webmaster Tools on a regular basis, as well as given me hope that their other tools may be made more useful to us little guys in the near future.

I logged onto my 1&1 Internet Control Panel last week and noticed a new category: Marketing Center. One of the items in that category was “Google Webmaster Tools.” “Excellent,” I thought to myself.

The 1&1 Internet Google Webmaster Tools feature consists of an automated script that generates a file called google_sitemap.xml.gz, which is a compressed xml sitemap file, for the selected domain. It also submits it to Google for you.

The sitemap creation dialog gives you the following options to customize your sitemap file:
-Directory Selection
-File Category Selection
-Excluded Files

Once submitted you can update your sitemap once a day, and it will be resubmitted through the control panel. That’s about it.

This is a really stripped down version of Google Webmaster Tools. If you are just starting out, and want to get sitemaps up quick and easily, 1 &1′s Google Webmaster Tools feature could be the way to go for you. If you want more control over your sitemap and more detailed information on your sites performance and Google’s indexing of it, I’d recommend opening up a Google Account, and downloading GSiteCrawler sitemap generator.