Matt Cutts just clarified something I noticed the other day, in his post about changes in URL queries. It used to be that if you went to Google and searched on “www.perficientdigital.com” you would see one link to our website.
However this recently stopped happening. Now if you search on “www.perficientdigital.com” you get a list of sites that include that text on the site. It was kind of distracting when I first saw it.
Matt offers a good explanation of why they did it. In simple terms, it was confusing to people who are not geeks like the rest of us. You can still get the site info results by typing “info:www.perficientdigital.com”. This is a good change.
Now what would be really nice is if Google could improve the quality of the “link:” and “site:” commands. These are things that the geeks of us need on a regular basis.
On another note, I took a fresh look into Google Webmaster Tools that other day. They have added some neat stuff. The feedback on crawler results is way cool. Found a problem in our site code that led to 198 broken links. With the problem identified, we fixed it in no time. Very, very, useful stuff. If you haven’t been using it, you really need to look at it.
