This summer several people in Google's quality group have pulled back the curtain on how people think about search quality at Google. We've had Udi Manber give an overview of search quality and the groups that work on it. Then my office-mate Amit Singhal discussed some of our principles of core ranking . Amit followed that with a post about how we understand pages, queries,

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I'm expecting that also in the next few days that we'll be expiring some older penalties on websites.

I was going to wait until part 2 was posted, but I'll point people to part 1 now. The video from the SMX Advanced keynote is now live, so you can watch the first 25 minutes of questions and answers. Read the intro here, or just watch the video: And Juliane Stiller from Google's German Webmaster blog stopped by the Googleplex for a more fun interview. Read the intro in English or German or just watch the video below: Thanks for setting this up, Juliane!

Sometimes people think that the Google Toolbar led to Google indexing a page. Here's a recent such story , for example, which speculates how urls with the substring "mms2legacy" got indexed. Here's where I started to disagree: The reason for this [supposedly unlisted urls getting crawled -Matt], explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that one's Google Toolbar may be configured to pass URLs that one visits to Google for indexing.

Yup, I'm about to do another blog post where someone says that a website is clean but it doesn't look like it to us. I did a very similar post in January 2007 , and in that post I said I've checked out a quite a few "we don't have any malware" reports at this point, and I've yet to see a false positive â€" the sites in question have each had some malware on them. Would you believe that a year and a half later, that's still true for me?

I love that Google just open-sourced Protocol Buffers. Think of Protocol Buffers as a very compact way of encoding data in a binary format. A programmer can write a simple description of a protocol or structured data and Google's code will autogenerate a class in C++, Java, or Python to read, write, and parse the protocol. Given a protocol buffer, you can write it to disk, send it over the network wire, and do any number of interesting tricks.

Today is July 1st, which is a special day because it marks the beginning of the second half of the year. Just in the last day or so there have been a couple pieces of good news: better indexing of Flash , and we re-wrote our "What is an SEO?" guide to improve the tone, then asked for more suggestions on how to improve it. July 1st is also a good time to sit down and ask the question "What do I want to accomplish during the rest of this year?

If you haven't seen the official posts , Adobe has been working to make Flash more index-able by search engines. Google has recently rolled out better code for Flash, e.g. you're now more likely to see useful snippets on Flash pages in Google's search results. I'm a fan of this change, and I'm a fan of Adobe in general. They get a lot of credit in my book for opening up the specifications for PostScript , Adobe's font standards , and their Acrobat/PDF format .

Jefferson Graham didn't just write an article of free SEO tips " he also brought his video camera along. The result is a five minute video interview with more easy, free search engine optimization tips. Again, this is targeted at beginner SEO and small business SEO instead of advanced marketers. You can watch the video below: Fun trivia: This video was taped in the lobby of building 43 on the Googleplex campus. Also,

Jefferson Graham of USA Today stopped by the Googleplex a little while ago and we talked about SEO tips for business owners that want to run their business, not live and breathe search 24 hours a day. The result is an article of search engine optimization )SEO( advice that you could hand to any friend that runs a mom/pop business who wants learn a little more about SEO. Experts won't be surprised, but Graham's article covers the basics for a general audience very well.

By the way, we had our second webmaster live chat yesterday. I think almost everyone had a good time. It was free for anyone to dial in, and hundreds of people showed up. Thanks to the Google presenters and everyone that asked questions or talked in the chat. I got a chance to answer lots of questions in the written Q&A, and then after the official presentations were over we did a "lightning round" and answered a bunch more questions via audio for 20-25 minutes.

If you're a site owner, webmaster, SEO, or otherwise have an interest in website metrics, I think you're going to like Google Trends for Websites . It's almost as addictive to me as Google Maps is for, you know, normal people. You're probably familiar with regular Google Trends, which lets you see trends in how people search for difference phrases such as full moon or skiing vs. swimming . Here's the graph of how often people search for "full moon,

We'll be doing a webmaster chat tomorrow at 2 p.m. Pacific time. You need to register in advance for the chat, which you can do with this link . Last quarter we did a webmaster chat and it was a ton of fun. I spent the entire time responding to people in the live chat. This time I plan to participate again, but I'll be answering questions in the Q&A section of the session. There will also be a presentation by John Mueller about personalization,

At SMX a couple weeks ago Eric Enge and I did a 20-25 minute interview. The interview transcript is now out in case you want to read through it. We discuss some of the ways to get links that are likely to stand the test of time: Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it's someone that's informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved.

Just a quick reminder that websites should check for XSS holes on their site, especially freeform text input such as search boxes. Even big sites can have these issues with XSS and escaping user input. If you've noticed that your rankings in Google seem to be affected, you might consider a few searches on your site to see if anyone has injected spammy or porn content on your site. If your domain was example.com, you might want to run a few queries such as [site:example.

Sometimes at a conference people will ask me "Does it matter what extension I use for my pages? Does Google prefer .php over .asp, or .html over .htm?" And my answer is "We're happy to crawl all of these file extensions. It doesn't matter what you choose between any of those." Usually I also try to insert a reminder at the end of my reply such as "But there are some file extensions that are mostly binary data, such as .exe,

Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo! . That's pretty huge news. Wihle Jeremy and I have playfully jousted in the past, I have nothing but respect for Jeremy " to the point where we joked for April Fool's Day a couple years ago about switching blogs . I've enjoyed being on search panels with him before, and he's been a fantastic communicator on Yahoo's behalf. I picked up several blogging tips from listening to him,

Last week I was in Seattle for the SMX Advanced 2008 conference. I'll run down a few thoughts on the trip. What was good? It's always nice to visit Seattle. I had never been to Seattle until last year. Now I've been four times, and I've managed to get macaroni and cheese from West 5 for three of those visits. I really enjoy Seattle's vibe and visiting Google colleagues at the Kirkland-plex each time. SMX has a really friendly feel as well.

One of the wonderful things about a search conference like SMX Advanced is that it gives us a chance to finish a lot of things we'd been meaning to do. Google just added a bunch of nice documentation in various places. We even did it in official places " much better than doing it on my personal blog. Here's a few of the things that I know we've done recently: Robots.txt documentation One of the things that I like about robots.

)I'm taking my wife somewhere really soon, so I'm just going to dash out a quick post.( There was a Techmeme discussion this weekend about whether Microsoft should chase Google in search or find their own "Big Hairy Audacious Goal." Into that discussion came a post by Ryan Stewart about being removed from Google's index. It turns out that Ryan's blog had been hacked, and Google does remove hacked sites from our index to protect our users.