There are certain tools that just about every website owner is bound to use. You're probably using Google Analytics, for example, to keep track of your visitor demographics, traffic sources, and so on. Google Webmaster Tools is another one of those go-to utilities that just about everyone uses. And it just got a little bit better.

Barry Schwartz over at SE Roundtable has put up a post telling us that Webmaster Tools now comes with a couple of new features. One of them is that you can test your sitemaps before officially submitting them. Before, you had to submit the sitemap and wait to see if any issues arise. Now, you can do that ahead of time.

And it's really easy to use too. After logging into your Google Webmaster Tools account, get into Sitemaps from the Site Configuration link as you normally would. Then, click on the button at the top right with "add/test sitemap" and enter the appropriate URL. Instead of clicking on the blue button with "submit sitemap," click on the grey "test sitemap" buton.

Give Google a few moments to do its thing and then it'll tell you that the test are complete. Click to view the results and it'll give you a quick summary, telling you about the content in the sitemap and if there are any errors detected. This can be a real timesaver and it makes sure that your submitted sitemap is error-free right from the get-go!

Have you tried this new feature? What else would you change in Webmaster Tools to make it better?

Did you hear the news yet? Well, Google (after its last year's Panda update) now launches a new change - 'Page Layout Algorithm'. Through this algorithmic change, Google reinforces its definition of high quality websites, and penalizes those that run a lot of ads. Though this change doesn't have as attractive a name as the last one (Panda), it surely can get you into trouble by reducing the search rankings of your website, all of a sudden.

The Purpose of this Algorithmic Change
Google clarifies that websites that run too many ads above-the-fold ruin the web experience of users. In fact, the search engine giant has received regular complaints from people who are unable to see quality content after clicking a link in their search results.

In an effort to provide top quality content, Google will penalize websites that are ad-heavy, or those that have more ads visible than content. As a result of this new change, you may see a sudden decrease in your organic traffic. Though advertising is a proven way of monetization, one can never exploit it by hiding the content (which users are actually looking for) under a sea of ads.

Which Sites will be Most Affected!
You won't get penalized only because you display multiple units of ads on your web pages. The 'Page Layout Algorithm' will impact the search rankings of only those sites that display plenty of ads above-the-fold, to the extent of making it tough to find the original content on a page. If users, after clicking a URL, view more ads than content in the initial screen, the change is certainly going to affect your search rankings in Google.

According to Matt Cutts (a Google associate), the new update will impact no more than 1% of searches globally though.

The Solution
First of all, there are no specific tools that you can use to find out whether your website will be targeted or penalized after this update. All you need to do is use your common sense and find out whether your web page is really too heavy with ads. If the main content gets obscured due to the display of too many ads, you might get yourself into trouble.

A good idea to escape this punishment is to check out the initial screen (the ratio of main content to displayed ads) in commonly used screen resolutions. Google, on its Webmaster Central Blog, suggests you use their Browser Size tool (a product of Google labs) to find out how your site appears in different screen resolutions. That's all you have right now to deal with the situation.

The rest is all about your own discretion. Just make sure, you have the main content above-the-fold so that users can find what they came looking for after clicking your URL in SERPs.

How Soon Can You Expect to Get Out of it?
If your website gets penalized, you need to take action immediately. Don't expect an instant recovery, even after you reduce the amount of ads on your website. You'll get back your previous top rankings only when Google's crawler has identified the changes (and this information has been fed into Google's search ranking algorithm) that you make on your website.

It can take several weeks before you get back on your feet once again. The time may vary depending on the nature of your website. If you've a huge website with thousands of pages, you may need to wait a little longer. How quickly the Googlebot sniffs out the alterations will have a key role to play.

How do you see this recent algorithmic change by Google? Please feel free to share your comments, feedback and suggestions.

As you made your way around the Internet today, you may have noticed that many of your favorite sites have been "blacked out" in some form or another. From Mobile Magazine to Wikipedia, these sites are making themselves unavailable or less available to readers.

This is in official protest to SOPA (Stop Internet Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). They're calling it "dangerous legislation" that will stunt free speech and the free dissemination of information online. However, you've got to wonder if these sites remembered to take the SEO ramifications into consideration.

Google sure did. According to SE Roundtable, the world's largest search engine is very much cognizant of the whole "black out" movement in protest of SOPA/PIPA and it has taken a small step to minimize the SEO impact that this blocking out may have on the rankings of the sites participating in the worldwide protest.

It finally happened. After all that hard work with building backlinks, writing keyword articles, and optimizing the metadata, the traffic on one of your websites suddenly receives a sizable spike in organic search traffic from Google. You couldn't be happier. Then, just a few days later, the traffic plummets back to its old level, if not even below that.

What the heck happened?

Over on the Webmaster World forum (via SE Roundtable), user sftriman had exactly that experience. He got excited that he finally got "past the Panda slap," only to see his traffic drop "like a sack of stones." This phenomenon is known as the Google traffic tease, but why does it happen?

The easiest answer is that traffic is known to fluctuate wildly for all sorts of different reasons and it can be difficult to pin it down to just one. That said, it's quite possible that something odd here and there could give you that spike, only to take it away. For instance, if one of the images on your site suddenly ends up near the top of image search results for a popular keyword, you'll see that effect. As more images come in to usurp you, your image gets buried and the traffic goes away.

It's also quite possible that you hit upon a timely topic either knowingly or otherwise. Maybe you blogged about something and then it happens to be the topic of the Google doodle. People search for more information about the the topic and you get that traffic, which would then quickly disappear when the doodle is no longer there. It might have something to do with Google too, like bot activity that wasn't filtered properly. Or it could be Panda.

Have you experienced this with your sites? Were you able to figure out the source of the increased traffic and, more importantly, were you able to duplicate the results for another spike in organic traffic?

It makes perfect sense that we do what we can to get to the top of Google. We work with our meta data, we try to build backlinks, and we clarify our keyword density. At the same time, it's also important to maintain some semblance of a user friendly website that is actually useful to visitors.

What makes things difficult is when these two goals are at odds with one another. A recent blog post was written by Ted Ives talking about the relationship between search rankings and driving directions. It's quite the lengthy post, but the crux of it is that Google does place some weight on how often customers search for driving directions to your local business. This is directly connected to Google Places and local search.

This doesn't mean that you can try to game the system from your own computer, constantly searching for directions to your business over and over again. Google will filter for that. It also wants to see a mix of mobile and desktop searches, searches from different locations and distances, and searches from a variety of entry paths.

The irony is that embedding these driving directions from Google Maps onto your website could actually harm your SEO. Google can see that the search for directions is coming from your site. Using the API is much the same. For the purposes of SEO, it's better if the customers copy your address and paste it into the Google search themselves, and the only way to encourage that is not embed a map or any link to a map on your site. But that hurts the user experience.

If you were an SEO and a local business owner, what would you do? What helps you more in the long run?