Nice… To many in the SEO industry, Google is the end-all and be-all for everything related to optimizing websites. Getting on the first page results for your particular keywords on a Google search is the holy grail that all SEO’s seek on a routine basis. For their own websites, and especially those of their clients.

Interesting, Google has done an exhaustive SEO audit of over 100 Google sites, and better yet, has made the report public so that SEO professionals, as well as regular website owners and webmasters, can learn from what they found and improve their own optimization.

Google admits its SEO could use a little work | Web Crawler – CNET News.

Fans of Google Reader (as I am) will love this. For those websites that do not have RSS feeds, you can now create a feed in Google Reader that will track changes to that site – and Reader will notify you when it changes. 

Google Reader Lets You Subscribe to Any Page on the Web

As an author (it almost sounds funny saying that) of several incredibly low-traffic blogs, I have been looking at different ways to both increase my readership, by integrating and sharing posts into my miscellaneous social media personas, some general social bookmarking at sites like Delicious, Reddit, and the like, as well as some other general SEO related tasks – to get news about my “little” blogs out there.

I subscribe to a number of Google Alerts, which is really a great tool.  Basically, anything you can search for in Google News, which crawls not only traditional news organization sites as well as blogs, you can setup a custom Alert, and you’ll receive either a summary daily email with those results, or an email as they are crawled – it’s your choice.

I notice some of the same topics that I cover in my little blogs mentioned frequently in the Alerts I have setup, and I’m thinking, I would love to get MY little blog posts listed in Google News as well. Getting posts into Google News can tremendously help drive traffic to a site.

But then I catch this news item, stating that it’s Google’s policy to NOT include single-author blogs in their Google News crawl, whether they be “little” like mine – or even a high-traffic popular blog – is really disappointing. From a quality assurance standpoint, I understand the policy, intended to keep the quality of sites that are included at a sufficiently high level – but it’s disappointing all the same.

Google News Will Not Accept Single Author Blogs

Not to be left without a URL shortener service of their own… Google has launched http://goo.gl/.  As with Facebook’s http://fb.me service, it’s not really available the public yet, for manual or automated creation of shortened URLs, but it is being used by the Google Toolbar and Google’s Feedburner service.

Goo.gl: Google Launches a URL Shortener, Too

Google’s getting into Music. Interesting, I imagine most of what you can find – information about artists, albums, songs, lyrics – is already available in some or another from regular Google Web Searches, but providing a portal that’s essentially a filter on the web such as this could be very useful.

It’s also interesting that it’s just launched, and yet it doesn’t say it’s a “beta” service, in typical Google fashion.

Discover Music