The SE Optimizer Newsletter

A range of free Google tools seem to be springing up on the web as a result of Google releasing an API development kit available to any software developer. These tools are for non-commercial purposes, so the developers cannot charge for the services they develop using the Google API.

This has enabled 3rd party software programmers to design web based applications that can query Google's databases in a wide variety of ways. These tools can be extremely useful to web designers and search engine optimizers.

This seems to be something of an experiment by Google since this service is still in a beta phase and Google could of course withdraw it. But why would they encourage developers to create these tools?

Google has been openly critical and fiercely anti many of the commercial software tools that query their databases. The reason is that as the use of these commercial SEO software tools have increased so has the demand on Google's search engine's to answer the queries these tools request. This they argue ties up their resources and slows their response times to normal search queries, which must imply these tools are widely used and probably abused.

A number of tools that have been around for several years have been actively discouraged by Google and in some cases they have taken steps to ban sources that are known to use these tools and taken measures against sites that promote them.

Perhaps Google has decided the best form of defense is attack, or if you can't beat em, join em, but the advantage to Google of promoting their own tools is the manner in which they can control usage. Each developer kit is registered to a user so a tool developed by a 3rd party is always known to Google. Each tool is limited to 1,000 queries per day, thereby controlling the extent to which they can place demands on Google search engine's.

It's really quite a clever strategy by Google and if your doing SEO some of these new tools are quite useful. I have picked some of the best and listed them for you below.

In the Spider view, you can enter the URL to your site and see what your listing might look like in a search-engine if you searched for your site by URL.

Under the Diagnostics view you will see a color-coded representation of what the search spider sees at that URL. Colors are used to show various elements that are important to search-engine's.

In Source-code view you will see a color-coded representation of the HTML source-code of that URL. This is mainly used to debug a site when it doesn't show as expected in the other views.

You can also sign up for news alerts that will monitor a developing news story based on what you specify and be notified by email as it happens, or once a day.

If you're looking to submit your site to the search engine's it is often tempting to use one of the many site submission services available on the web. You may have seen them, submit to 1,500 search engine's etc. This is largely a waste of time and sometimes money and is distinctly frowned upon by the major search engine's that don't like auto-submission.

Like it or not the best way is to apply to the search engine's manually through their own add a site facilities. Some of the major search engine's like Google and Yahoo, whilst having an add a site URL, prefer to find sites through links to other sites.

It's also becoming more common to find that getting included on some search engine's requires a fee that varies according to how quickly you want to be added to their index. Most of the smaller search engine's also do not have spiders to crawl for new web sites which means the only way they will know you are there is if you tell them, or they find out through links they have with other partner search engine's.

Other mid sized search engine's like Ask Jeeves / Teoma and Looksmart require paid inclusion, but it has been reported recently that Ask Jeeves will be phasing out paid inclusion very shortly.

Altavista and Fast (Alltheweb) are now owned by Yahoo who has been deciding how to fit these two engine's into its growing empire. As such site submissions were suspended for a time but are now being made through Overtures Site Match paid for inclusion.

MSN gets it's results from Overture and Yahoo but filters them based on its own relevancy, at least until it develops its own search engine.