Of late, Google’s web stats tool, Google Analytics is making certain changes. Recently, Google Analytics came up with an entirely new intro page with some aspects that enable users to identify whether the traffic for a certain website has increased or not.

According to Google Blogoscoped,

Google’s Google web stats tool Analytics is rolling out a new intro page. On the upside, you can now directly see if the traffic to a certain site increased in the last specific time period. A red arrow pointing down means your site’s losing visitors, a green arrow pointing upwards means it is getting more. This should be great for spotting sudden peaks, especially on sites which you’re not watching as closely everyday; and sometimes, such peaks may require you to take action.

However, it is true that the Google Webmaster Tools offers the webmasters with great data, still the feature lacks certain things. One such drawback of the tool is that earlier, the webmasters had to chart the timeline of the inbound link from GMT on a manual basis.
But now, Russ Jones has announced the launch of a new tool called Glync, which shows link data for last one month.

Pro Version 1.0b

The Pro Version offers a wide array of data directly from your External Links page.

Earlier, you needed to create a text-based PDF (not image-based), whenever you wanted your PDF files to be indexed by Google, as Googlebot was unable to recognize the content of image-based documents. But, gone are those days!

Google says, the case is no longer the same, in an official announcement.

Here is what Google elaborated:

“This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found.

Google has become open with the prevailing restrictions regarding alcohol and is now allowing AdWords advertisers to bid on beer and champagne. Before this, the advertisers were only allowed to use “wine related terms” while bidding.

According to Gonzo SEO

“Beer, wine and champagne may now be promoted from ad text and may be the focus of your site. We consider beer, wine and champagne to be products intended for the sale and consumption of adults. Therefore, ads promoting beer, wine and champagne will be given a ‘Non-Family Safe’ status.
For information on how the family status of an ad may affect, please visit Google Adwords Support”

Of late, the users of the AdSense have been viewing political ads on their websites. However, they are not that happy with the move. With the election over this will change, at least until the next election. The following statement says it all:

“I’m outraged that a political ad was fed onto my site…”

Here are a few more comments on the move at the Webmaster Thread:

“Today on all of my sites I am seeing political ads targeted to my region, regarding a passionately-fought proposition.

Google has taken another remarkable step in the expansion of its online encyclopedia, Knol. Knol is now available in three more languages, namely French, German and Italian.

Upon its launch four months ago, Knol was said to be a competitor of Wikipedia.

Search optimization pioneer Search-Optimization.com is offering an online search marketing economic recovery package. Founder Gerry Grant said, “Our clients are feeling the need to shift their marketing dollars to more efficient methods of obtaining new customers, this means using search optimization marketing” Search-Optimization.com is offering its premier monthly search optimization and social media marketing package at half price. This includes a complete search engine optimization, keyword research, copywriting, web design and social media marketing. This offer is for a limited time and only for the first five companies to respond.

What most of us have always thought, Google and other search engines cannot crawl over 100 links on a single document, is now possible for them. The fact is that, the search engines can crawl more than 100 links on a web-page.

However, the Official Webmaster Guidelines page says, a document should not include more than 100 links, as well as many navigational options in order to keep it user- friendly.

Finally, Google has launched the much awaited RSS feeds, as an option to Google Alerts. Lately, Google Operating System discovered it.

“Google Alerts has a new option: you can now subscribe to feeds instead of receiving periodic email messages. Google Alerts notifies you if there are new pages in the list of top results for a certain query. You can subscribe to alerts for web search, Google News, blog search, Google Groups and Google Video.”
The new feature from Google Alerts is useful, but Google should’ve provided an option to subscribe to feeds for each search result. Right now, the feeds from Google Alerts have cryptic addresses like:
http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/LONG_NUMBER/ANOTHER_LONG_NUMBER
and you can only generate feeds from Google Alerts. – Google Operating System
You just need to login and then click on manage your Google Alerts. After that, you can set up your new alerts and also modify the existing ones.

It has been officially announced by Google that Gmail 2.0 is now available for the Mobile Launcher. The version supports J2ME and BlackBerry phones!

It is available in 35 languages:

Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK), English (US), Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

According to the Official Google Mobile Blog:

People use the Gmail client on their mobile phone all the time. Because of this, they are always looking for ways to make it faster, more robust and easier to use.