I guess for true Big Brother fans when something stops after 93 days that you have watched everyday it must feel strange not having that to look forward to every night.

It seems although it is now over the interest in Big Brother hasn’t gone away. I’m still getting quite a few search engine hits everyday where people are searching for:

“Big Brother Ringtones” and “Sezer and Bonnie”

I can kind of understand the search for Big Brother Ringtones but Sezer and Bonnie left the show ages ago.

For all you people looking for Big Brother ringtones there aren’t any here. You will need to go to Channel 4’s website for that.

If you want to relive some of the best moments of this years show then you can get free Big Brother video clips here.

One of my pet hates is filling up my car with petrol. I usually wait until the car is running on fumes before I will go into a Petrol Station which can’t be good for the car.

It is the total disregard for my safety by other customers that gets me. If they want to blow themselves up then fine but spare a thought for the other people around. I quite often see people smoking in the forecourts (Hello, are you just dumb?) or filling up their cars whilst having a conversation on a mobile phone.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could order your petrol online and have it delivered to you? If you can order your groceries online and pay only a £5 delivery charge then I don’t see why they can’t do that for petrol.

I’d be happy to pay the extra £5 for someone in a mini tanker to turn up at either your home or workplace and fill the car up for you.

In times gone by if you received bad customer service or shoddy goods apart from venting your anger to your friends, family and colleagues there was little else you could really do to make a point.

That of course was before the internet and the proliferation of personal blogs available to the world. Now you can vent your frustrations to anyone in the world who is prepared to listen.

Should big companies worry? Of course they should. For all the millions of pounds a year they spend advertising Bloggers can spread the word about their inefficiencies for next to nothing and sway customers away from the decision to take up their services.

In the grand scheme of things and big budgets it’s unlikely that many small time Bloggers will find their pages reaching their audience high up in the serps. That was of course until Blog Search arrived.

Google has an excellent blog search which I’ve never really paid too much attention to before. It’s not advertised on their main page and in line with a lot of their services it’s still in Beta. The good thing about Google Blog Search is that it is bang up to date. Pages are indexed within minutes rather than days like their main search engine and it doesn’t differentiate between mega large sites and small individuals blog sites.

An example of a blog fighting back and one of my personal favourites is TalkTalkHell. A site dedicated to exposing issues that people have found with TalkTalk and with 24,194 hits to their blog so far I think they maybe getting the message across to a few people.

So if you’re thinking about taking up a new service or buying from a company you don’t know you may want to do a quick blog search on them and see what the real people are saying and not just the advertising hype.

The New Google Webmaster Tools

Attention, webmasters—Google Sitemaps is changing its name, and then some.

Initially the Google Sitemaps program was just one tool to help this search engine giant index all the pages in your website. By registering under it through a Google Sitemaps account, and submitting an XML map, you could at least guarantee that the spider would see all the steps you’ve taken for search engine optimization.

But now there’s more to Google’s services than keeping track of your pages, and the new name reflects that. Now called ‘Google Webmaster Tools”, it’s got multiple features to assist you in handling all aspects of website management.

The old features are still there. Sitemaps submissions still follow the old steps, and the sitemaps protocol (thank goodness) stays the same. You can still check on your submission status and review any reports of web page errors. However, the blog’s been retooled and new programs have been added, all for the purpose of helping you improving your website’s visibility on Google.

It’s a great move, especially since studies have verified that Google is favored by Internet users. At least 80% of the total web population uses it, and numbers are climbing. It’s become synonymous to finding information on the web, and has even been adopted into the language: if you want to get data, you “Google” it.

But competition’s tough, and users don’t have the patience to scour through tens of thousands of search results. You need to be in the top 15 sites, so visibility and search engine ranking is crucial. Google’s Webmasters Tools help make that race just a little easier.

For example, you’ve changed your web team, and someone’s been given the pink slip. That means that person should no longer be able to access the site and make changes. The old Google would’ve let you remove his verification file, but now, you don’t have to wait for the periodic updates (crucial if that person wasn’t too happy about the, er, company restructuring, and may use his account to take revenge). Now you can click on “manage site verification”, remove it yourself, and then click “Re-verify all site owners”.

Essentially, Webmaster Tools helps you take better control of your website management. You’re no longer just passively submitting your site, you can monitor it and edit accordingly.

Blogging at Webmaster Central

The blog has been retooled to focus primarily on webmaster topics: the webmaster tools, the Sitemaps protocol, and anything related to the science of crawling through sites and indexing it.

One of the most welcome changes is its user-friendly archiving system. Blog entries are grouped into categories, making it easier to find the information you’re looking for (it is a search engine company, after all). There are also links to Google’s other webmaster tools, for easy navigation.

Finding Help at Google Groups

The Google Webmaster Help groups is an online forum where you can raise your technical concerns and be heard. Some of the more frequently asked questions already have existing threads, with suggestions from experts, Google employees, and other members (there are about 7,500 users already). You can also post your questions and follow links to other sources of information.

Managing your Site

But the meat of the changes lies in the site management tools. Let’s you want to check in your site, www.abc123.com. Visit “My Sites” and you’ll see your sites registered in a handy chart form and whether they’ve been verified or not. You can also find other tools, like reporting spams, or requests for re inclusion. .

You can also perform diagnostics at the indexing summary page, which lists all of the obstacles the Google spider encountered when it went through your site. This includes HTTP errors, restrictions from robot txt, URLs that were unreachable or timed out. You can then check the specific pages where the errors occurred (for example, you’ll see a link was disabled). Google also records the last time that they tried to access that page, in case you had already made corrections since then.

Anther welcome feature is being able to submit the preferred domain name (should you drop the “www” or not?). This is a great boost in link canonicalization and helps in issues with duplicate content, that could affect sites that don’t use the function of “301 re-direct”.

Query stats reveals ranking, and which types of queries get you in the top rankings (a tool for search engine optimization strategies!) There’s the additional practicality of being able to check your performance in different geographical locations, That’s fantastic if your website is targeted towards particular demographics. Google also gives crawl stats so you know which of your pages get the most visits and had the highest individual rankings.

Another interesting feature is page analysis. It lets you compare your own anchor text and how other websites commonly describe you—peer feedback, so to speak. In terms of marketing strategy, understanding where your appeal lies and how the web world views the significance of your content may help you discover which pages to build. Who knows, they may be link opportunities here—and we all know the importance of links in Google search engine ranking.

The index stats enable you to link out to the different searches, which may be useful for those who don’t know how to use these functions (although some believe that precisely because this feature is targeted to newbies, it would’ve been more user-friendly if a pop-up box could briefly explain what each one was about). Experts at Search Engine Optimization may not find anything new here, though.

All in all, the Webmaster Tools are very useful, powerful, and geared for both professional webmasters and the man-on-the-street running a small home-based business and wanting to check whether or not his website’s performing well. While the new name is quite a mouthful—so much for the old adage that business names should be short and sweet—changing it does do justice to Google Sitemap’s attempts to be more than just an indexing tool.

If you’ve not created an XML Sitemap yet or are not sure how to then try XML-Sitemaps.com’s easy to use online generator.

Every time I log into my Google sitemaps account I see on the summary page for one of my sites number of URLs not found and number of pages restricted by robots.txt with a polite little exclamation mark and a note saying you might want to take a look at this.

URLs Not Found

With the URLS not found on closer inspection they are pages that don’t and have never existed on the site in my case. They are simply incorrect links that Googlebot has found while doing their crawl of the web and are either misspellings of URLS or badly formatted links.

As long as the links don’t show up as having been found in your own sitemap (in which case you should fix that) then there is little really that you can do to stop these errors from showing. It would be nice if Google at some point decided to show the originating page then at least you could contact the webmaster of the site and ask for the link to be corrected.

From a user point of view there is nothing worse than getting to a 404 page not found like below.

A good idea to stop this from happening is to create a customized 404 page for your site. That way even though the page cannot be found your visitor has some form of navigation to the rest of your site and hopefully they will delve further rather than closing the window in their browser.

It’s worth noting that if you create a customized 404 page you should check it with a header checker to make sure your server stills returns a 404 error code.