Not exactly breaking news, but Google News items are finally appearing in my own search results, and the news “one box” at the top is gone.

Danny Sullivan mentioned this on his Daily Searchcast a couple of weeks ago,  but I only noticed it working just now.

I wish I had been taking screenshots of Google’s homepage, search results pages, the logged in homepage, webmaster central and all of the different Google areas that have been changing so much over the past two weeks.

Lots and lots of cool stuff,  to be sure, but as of a couple of days ago, it seems that they have permanently adopted the the name iGoogle.

Have you ever seen anyone tie up all three available search slots at the top of Google in the local (Google Maps) results?  I hadn’t either…

If you search for Portland internet consulting firm on Google, you’ll see my friend Charlie Stanley of Fierce Thought ranking #1, #2 and #3 completely dominating all three Google local maps results.

At the 2006 Las Vegas Webmaster World I stood up and asked Matt Cutts from Google a question that actually got applause from he crowd.

I asked “Why do we have to lose rankings for so long if we change domain names, and might the Google Webmaster Tools team be working on a way to minimize our pain?”.

Google promises to offset postage charges through their latest project, Gmail paper. According to them, here’s what they’re offering…

A New Button
Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.

You, me, and the guy next door now all see different search results in Google.

That is, assuming we’ve all “signed in” to our Google home page, or used the news reader, checked our Gmail account, Google Maps, or any of the other Google services many of us rely on every day.

Google keeps adding things all the time, and with this one, they’ve made an excellent addition that can be very helpful. You should use it to identify weakly “linked to” areas of your website.

Go to your Google Webmaster tools account and log in

Notice there’s now a fourth option tab called “Links” between the “Statistics” and “Sitemaps” tabs. You’ll see two options there, “Internet” or “External”.

Although Google Base has morphed from Froogle, and it’s still in Beta, Google is displaying results at this moment for real estate with a drop down box.

I noticed it just now for “real estate Los Angeles”, and then trying a couple of other cities kept bringing up the search box. Is this permanent? If so, it seems like a winner for Google, and maybe for the home buyer too.

Today I got notified by a hosting customer that his website had their content and design copied and reposted under another domain name hosted elsewhere.

The copied domain is here - www.nim-company.com while the ORIGINAL design and content are here - www.webpositionexpert.com.

The original site is a friend with a business in Antigua, while the content and design thief is apparently named Robert Soloway, and is in my back yard, up in Washington State.

You may notice your Google PR (Page Rank) fluctuating over the past few days. I suspected as much when I saw it bouncing around on a few sites, but I could find nobody mentioning it online.

However, this has been confirmed by superstar Internet guru Jerry West of Web Marketing Now in his several times monthly newsletter.

On my list of “Top Ten SEO Factors” I’ve never removed ALT tags, because I’ve seen evidence that they were still a determining factor in rankings.

Many experts have been saying for a couple of years now that “ALT tags don’t matter anymore” so they’ve stopped using them in their pages.

Yesterday I logged into my Google Webmaster Tools account, and every site there, (all of my own and all of my clients) either had a status of “pending verification” or simply said “verify”.  Some of these sites have been verified for over a year, so I knew something was really wrong.