Pretty good news from Google today - they have added "URL Removals" options to their Webmaster Central tools. This tools allows to remove not only URLs, images or files from Google's index, but also whole directories, sub folders, a whole site if you wish and even cached pages in the results. I noticed that many agents lately fighting duplicate content issues, wrong cache in the results, supplemental results etc. Well, I think this is a great tool to play with.

Graywolf created pretty exstensive list of Wordpress plugins that will help you to improve your blog's SEO and usability. Check it out, I think it's well worth bookmarking.

There is an interesting post at SEOmoz.org called How Reliable is Google Analytics? by Michael Martinez. Michael makes a very strong point that Google Analytics may not be as reliable as we think it is. He compares some numbers between Google Analytics and his own web log data for one of his web sites (Xenite.Org):

This year annual Inman Real Estate Connect conference is scheduled on June 26-28 in San Francisco. I never attended one, but I'd really like to especially since it's getting more interesting every year now. This years (July) featured speakers are:

• Craig Newmark, Founder & Customer Service Representative of the largest listing source on the Web, Craig's List


• Dave Liniger, Founder & CEO of the biggest real estate company in the world, RE/MAX

At the end of February I wrote a post on Google Page Creator - just when Google released it. Well, 2 months later and a bit (today) I searched for my full name [Max Chirkov], just out of curiosity, and was very surprised to see my Google page ranking #2 just right below this site. Even more surprising is Google PageRank 4 for that page even though Google doesn't show any links pointing to it.

Google Page Creator - very nice addition to all the free service and software Google already provides. Very simple to use and I find it much easier than some of the template web sites with back-ends I ever worked on.

Google Sitemaps team added another cool feature to sitemaps accounts - Analysis of cached robots.txt. Very nice tool - allows you to play with your robots.txt file without actually changing it on your site. It checks if Google can crawl specific URLs or they are being blocked by robots.txt and it gives you quick analyses. This tool helped me to solve my robots.txt problem I couldn't figure out for over then a year now. Very nice.

Yesterday I was very excited to share with you my experience about w.bloggar as desktop blogging application. I knew there were more but I didn't really want to continue installing all different programs on my PC. Today I came across Performancing for Firefox - Firefox browser extension that allows you to post into you blog just by hitting F8 on your keyboard.

I thought if people blog about the same things that someone else blogged about it creates a lot of junk online.. You know what, I was thinking wrong. We surely do have a lot of junk online, but when we talk about things that matter or have certain value - the information worth being distributed to multiple sources to reach their audience.

Before I get started I want to thank Max for inviting me to write on his Blog. Did you know that a site can Fake PR in the Toolbar? If not you might be giving away homepage links or worse paying for a link that has no value. A site can use redirects to actually make the toolbar think that the site is another site and show the other sites PR. So a garbage link farm could fool the toolbar into thinking it was a PR7,8,9 or even a PR10 site if they wanted to. Then turn around and ask you to pay a very large amount for a link that has no value.