I saw recently on the Google blog that the Googlebot will start submitting web forms.

Specifically, when we encounter a <FORM> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form.

Here's another little known feature about the sitemaps protocol, you can actually ping search engines and crawlers to tell them about your sitemap, or to tell them that it has changed.

Just a quick tip for those of you that are building XML sitemaps for your web sites. You can now add a line to your robots.txt file to include a pointer to your sitemap file, it would look like this:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.

I saw this curious line in my log files today:

212.36.25.102 - - [06/Dec/2006:17:00:50 +0000] "POST /suggest.cfm HTTP/1.1" 200 232 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"

That's GoogleBot doing a POST operation to suggest.

Here's a great example showing that it takes more than just a higher PageRank to be the #1 result in google for a given query. If you do a search for freitag on Google, you will notice that freitag.ch (the guys that make Freitag Bags, page rank of 4) beats my blog petefreitag.com (page rank of 7).

In addition to Google Site verification I also noticed today that Google sitemaps is now accepting formats other than their sitemaps protocol schmea.

Google sitemaps now accepts RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds.

I just noticed today that you can verify that you own a web site from within the google sitemaps website. The process is simple - Google will tell you to create a file on your site (something like /GOOGLEea6f95a80579477e.html), then they check to see if its there.

Ignore the fact that this page looks like it was made in 1995, because the content on it is quite relevant. It contains a list of over 100 factors that effect your ranking, either positively or negatively in Google (and they don't hurt your standings in other search engines).

PJ Hyett has discovered that his out of date google sitemap was the reason for his drop in traffic from google. So if you created a sitemap when they first came out and forgot about it, you either want to keep it updated (creating it dynamically would be a good way to go), or remove it from google.

Google has introduced an XML schema for describing your site structure, and update frequency, it's called the Google Sitemap Protocol. The protocol is offered under a creative commons license.