Do you know how Google’s crawler, Googlebot, handles conflicting directives in your robots.txt file? Do you know how to prevent a PDF file from being indexed? Do you know Googlebot’s favorite song? The answers to these questions (except for the last one ), along with lots of other information about controlling the crawling and indexing of your site, are now available on code.google.com:

Controlling crawling and indexing

Now site owners have a comprehensive resource where they can learn about robots.txt files, robots meta tags, and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header directives. Please share your comments, and if you have questions you can post them in our Webmaster Help Forum.

JQuery is a very flexible tool for managing form data. There is a plugin that allows JQuery to manage form data passing this data using AJAX.

This Javascript plugin can be downloaded free from: http://malsup.com/jquery/form/

I highly recommend reading the great posts over at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.post/

Telling JQuery about your Form

In order for JQuery to process your form you need to tell it a few things first.

•    What Form to work on
•    How to validate the form
•    Where to post the form data to
•    What to do next (On success)

Read the full article >>>

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced a third markup language supported for Rich Snippets. In addition to microformats and RDFa support, Google has added microdata support, which is part of the HTML5 specification.

Here is an example look at Microdata in HTML5 for use in Rich Snippets:

To learn more about Rich Snippet support in Google, go here.

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

BARCELONA — The frenetic pace of the mobile phone industry has forced some of the technology world’s largest players to make a break with the past.

Microsoft, Intel and Nokia — all leaders in their respective markets — have struggled to capitalize on the rise of a new class of smartphones that can tap into a vast pool of software. So these companies have come to the world’s largest mobile technology conference here with a message of change. They’re willing to abandon tradition if it means getting another shot at the fast-growing mobile device market and blunting the advance of companies like Apple and Google.

The Apple ‘iPad,’ a new tablet computing device, is shown in this publicity photo from Apple released to Reuters on Wednesday.

Photograph by: Apple Inc. handout, Reuters

VANCOUVER — Apple’s new iPad is a game changer for publishing, education and other sectors, including Canada’s wireless carriers that could find consumers snapping up the device that Apple is selling without having it locked into any network service.

It’s like a disease: I always have plenty of tabs open in my FireFox and sometimes it is getting too difficult to control.

I keep tabs open if I want to give something more attention later the same day or if I want not to forget to include the link in the post or discuss it with the friend, etc. I open multiple tabs when doing research or clicking through search engine results.

FireFox tabs help me get orgnized, plan the day or quickly scan huge amounts of information.

Here’s a list of my favorite Google services that were launched or were significantly improved in 2009.

10. Google Public DNS – a DNS resolution system that doesn’t offer too many features, but it’s free and fast. Very fast.

9. Google Fast Flip – a service that lets you quickly browse news. It’s easy to use and it’s a better way to discover interesting news articles than Google News.

8. Google Squared – an innovative way to dynamically generate collections and facts about each item. It’s an extension of Google Sets and you can use it to create lists.

Google will announce more information about Chrome OS at a press event that starts at 10:00am PST. Google will offer “an update on Google Chrome OS and provide at the work that has been done thus far, an overview of the technology, and launch plans for next year. Speakers will include Sundar Pichai, Vice President of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS.” You can watch the live webcast here.

Meanwhile, the source code for Chrome OS is already available. Here’s the login screen:

… and one of the wallpapers that are included:

A new version of Google Earth for the iPhone is due soon, and among its new features is one with a personal touch: the ability to see maps you’ve created and/or saved in Google Maps. To make this happen, the new Google Earth iPhone app will add the ability to login to your Google account — a feature that could open up additional personalization doors in the future.

Google’s announcement today includes an example from product manager Dan Birch using the new feature to track a pair of attempts to summit Mount Ritter, in which the combination of GPS, KML, and My Maps were used together to show the summit attempts on the Google Earth iPhone app.

Google Calendar’s gallery of interesting calendars lets you add some useful features: show week numbers, the day of the week, sunrise and sunset time for your location.

Some of these features should be available as options because they’re difficult to find in the list of calendars and they clutter the interface.

Google’s decision to remove public calendar search had a strange side effect: users can no longer find public calendars with features that are missing in Google Calendar. A post from 2007 explained how to show week numbers in Google Calendar by searching public calendars.

Credits to: Google Operating System

Last week, Google Analytics expanded to offer reporting features for mobile applications on the iPhone and Android. But how does it work for mobile applications (or parts of mobile apps) that don’t render HTML pages?

Google says mobile app developers can tell Google Analytics what actions taken by users would trigger the analytics tracking. Google uses those triggers to determine views, session lengths, and bounce rates.

Developers can also use Event Tracking to track actions such as watching a video, clicking a button or conducting a download.

Matt Cutts, a power Gmail user and a Google engineer shows which features of Gmail Labs he has enabled in his account.

A recent Chromium build added a feature that converts user scripts into extensions. Until now, Google’s browser didn’t provide an interface for adding and managing user scripts, so you had to manually copy the scripts to a folder.

“Lots of users still complain that Chrome does not support Greasemonkey user scripts. Even though we have had the infrastructure in place to handle user scripts for some time now, it has never been clear how the feature would relate to full extensions, and so it has remained incomplete,” explains Aaron Boodman, a Google Chrome developer who created the Greasemonkey extension.

Bill Slawski reports on a new Google patent that manipulates search results based on query patterns and click results. As Bill explains Google can track when people search for a few related terms and then click on a specific page and develop aggregated information when this action is repeated and give a higher ranking for sites that the group clicks on most often.

Seems like a form of behavioral targeting to me and also gives insight in to how Google is working to take the users’ preferences to provide better results. Downside would be that now know people can manipulate this one fairly easily. One wonders if they plan to apply this to Adwords as an addition to their Quality Score or even other advertising mediums.

Taking a cue from Google, whose Apps Status Dashboard is showing whether some of their applications are having stability issues, Facebook has launched Platform Live Status, a tool that can save developers a lot of headache.

It shows whether the Facebook Platform is currently working well or not, providing graphs for average API response time and the number of errors, as well as developer updates and top live bugs. Now, when something isn’t right with a Facebook () app, developers know instantly whether it’s their app that’s causing trouble, or the platform itself.

Read the full article >>>

One of the most requested features for Google Maps Mobile was to add turn-by-turn navigation. In the past, this wasn’t possible because of the licensing fees that had to be paid for each user of the navigation system. Now that Google no longer uses data from TeleAtlas in the US, turn-by-turn navigation can be added for free.

Google’s blog announces that Google Maps Navigation will be available in Android 2.0, which will be released next month. “This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.” And unlike other navigation systems, it’s free.

There are a lot of people who are sure domain IP address as well as domain IP neighbors have nothing to do with SEO. I’ve been in SEO long enough to be sure in only one thing: there are only a few very basic theories we thing we can be sure about. Most theories are too fuzzy and complex to be clear to anyone.

Today’s tools are quite simple and basic but you should seriously have a couple of them bookmarked (at the end of the post I’ll link to the cases when those tools may turn useful):

It was easy in, easy out, and over in an hour. Today’s Windows 7 launch in New York went off without a hitch–or a software crash–but without the hoopla that has heralded new versions of the Windows operating since Windows 95 debuted in 1995 to the tune of the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.”

Missing were the surprise celebrity appearances, the lavish accoutrements, and, most notably, Bill Gates, who no longer runs the day to day workings at Microsoft. Instead of the huge Nokia Theater in Times Square, which housed the 2007 launch of Windows Vista, the Windows 7 press event was set in the much smaller confines of Skylight Studios, a popular event space near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

SEATTLE — Microsoft Corp. finally got its chance to reboot its reputation Thursday, launching a new edition of Windows that it hopes will encourage more PC buyers to get back into stores.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer celebrated the arrival of Windows 7 in New York with a few hundred people who had helped test early versions of the software that runs PCs. One of them, technology consultant, Jonathan Kay, flew from Toronto to attend.

“Windows 7 will redeem Windows,” said Kay, 27.