Those who use Google, which according to reports is just about everybody;-) will know that they store a cached version of all the pages that they index. This can be useful if a site is down for any reason or the particular article or page has been moved.

However, it does cause a problem with privacy for web sites that offer private groups, or forum areas. I know of quite a few that have been

Since Google's search engine is based on their page ranking algorithm (which basically ranks your site higher depending on how many other sites are linking to you) it would seem to make sense to take advantage of link exchange programs. These offer to place links back to your site from thousands of other sites in exchange for you placing links to other sites on yours.

However, they

It seems as though Google are trying to increase their ad charges for those sponsored links in the top 1 and 2 position on their search results.

They have recently posted a message saying that in a few weeks they will change the formula that is used to calculate ad placement. Up until now this has been based on an auction against other bidders for the same keyword, and how good a match your

Most website owners are aware of the usefulness of sitemaps in promoting their content to search engines. However, it has been frustrating up until now having to register them with each search engine and continually ping them when changes are made.

Well, I found out great news the other day that Yahoo has decided to start supporting the sitemap.org XML sitemap format rather than their own text format making site maintenance much easier. This means that you only need to produce one sitemap to let both Google and Yahoo know about updates to the content on your site.

Also, they are now supporting the new Sitemap location in the robots.txt file. This new tag allows search engines to auto discover where you have located your sitemap rather than making you submit them to each engine in turn.

To take advantage of this feature just add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap:

The should be the complete URL to the sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

It doesn't matter where in the file you put it, and if you are using a sitemap index for multiple sitemaps you can just put the location of that rather than individual listings for each file.