Rupert Murdoch is looking into ways to block Google from indexing content of the sites owned by News Corp which owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.

"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly." Read more...

Google page turners got caught in action. This is page 471 of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code book.

Justice Department urged a federal court judge to reject a proposed settlement which would allow Google to digitally scan massive libraries of books and place them online.

"The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search and search advertising," said the Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. All three are Google's biggest rivals.

What is the difference between:

www.moxietype.net
moxietype.net
moxietype.net/index.php
www.moxietype.net/index.php

User might expect all those pages lead to the same page. Search Engines though might store these locations separately. This might result in much lower page rank.

Solution

Decide if you want to keep www or not and make a Global Redirect at your server or write Global Redirect in htaccess file. I prefer non-www as it takes a few more strokes to type in.

Inform Google on Webmaster Dashboard Tools (under Settings) about which version they should keep in their Index. Join Google Webmaster Central if you haven't done so already.

Analyze all the pages in your Web Site and remove duplicate URLs from Google Index by using robots.txt. For example print or category in URL could lead to the same page. You might want to restrict print and category in URL from being indexed. Read about Improving on Robots Exclusion Protocol.

The Google Metadata Web Authoring Statistics might be a bit outdated in a sense that Google pays more attention today to meta description element than it did when the article was written and totally disregards meta keywords element but it is still worth reading about the common mistakes.

The http-equiv values pragma and expires are attempts at bypassing caches without having to set the HTTP headers correctly. These are probably unnecessary uses; any scenario where there is a legitimate reason to limit caching, the author is going to have enough control over the server to send the appropriate headers. In addition, the meta tags can't be considered reliable (e.g. proxies and transparent caches aren't going to honour them).

The distribution value is supposedly used to control who can access the document. Search engine "optimisers" tell people to set it to "global" to ensure that search engines index their pages.

Google Tech Talks June 21, 2007

How to extent media wiki environment with semantic aspects and how to provide natural language interfaces for varying knowledge bases.

Our latest updates include customized Meta Description field for each entry as well as an automatically generated Meta Title, both of which will help to maximize Search Engine Optimization for our sites.*

Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
We want snippets to accurately represent the web result. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't achieve this goal and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular, non-meta description, snippet. And it's worth noting that while accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't affect your ranking within search results.

Read more at the Official Google Webmaster Blog on good use of meta data:

Improve snippets with a meta description makeover

Meta tags and Web Search Results

Tag Galaxy is worth a spin.Once you get past the fiery star with (conceptually related) orbiting planets, the globe itself presents a surprisingly addictive interface for photo discovery.

Most knowledgeable webmasters find the idea of moving the site from one platform to another, from one domain to another, or both as a rather scary process. The reasons are rather simple.

First of all, setting up Redirect 301 or other blanket redirect from one domain to another is hardly going to work for all visitors. Run a simple Google search on the terms link:yoursite.com and see how many external pages are linked to your site. Well, you have to contact all of them and ask them to change the old link.

Second, open Google Webmaster account and see how many pages from your site are indexed in the Google Search Engine. Yes, you have to set up an individual redirect 301 for each one of those pages. Same goes for images. Those redirects can easily run into thousands individual redirects for a dynamic site.

If you still feel that you absolutely positively must move your site to a new platform and have a few hundred of hours of disposable manpower to do so properly, read a few recommendations from Google. Making a site is a rather simple process in comparison with retaining the precious Search Engine presence and ranking.