Google Trends for Websites is a web-based service where you can compare the visitor statistics of websites.

The data displayed is daily unique visitors (after logging in, you can see the numbers that graphs represent) and currently, up to 5 websites can be compared.

Google Ad Planner provides you information about websites by simply entering demographics and sites associated with your target audience. This is a tool to be used when you are planning or searching for websites to advertise.

Ad Planner, currently, can be used by invitation only. You can apply for it here.

More info can be found at Inside Adwords blog.

Google tries to make the use JavaScript frameworks easier and faster with the Ajax Libraries API.

Main idea is hosting the JavaScript framework files on Google servers, serving them faster by Google’s fast & distributed servers, gzipping them when needed and most importantly, preventing several downloads of the same libraries by caching.

Currently supported frameworks are:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

The caching mechanism may work great in the future if many websites use the Ajax Libraries API. This way if a user browsing your website, let’s say, if browsed another website using the API with jQuery, that user would have already downloaded the jQuery file and won’t need to download again on your website.

Using it is so simple. To use Prototype for example:

• Standard inserting:

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js"> </script>

• Using Google Ajax API:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"> </script> <script> google.load("prototype", "1"); </script>

The official announcement can be found here.

Google released the Google Maps API for Flash which lets Flex and Flash developers embed Google Maps in Flash applications.

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The API is smooth and fast. Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window. This opens up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place names fade in.

The title is fun, I know (and I love Lords Of The Rings).

Mapstraction has kind of a similar logic. It provides a common API for the major mapping providers. This means, when you code with Mapstraction API, you can easily switch from Yahoo Maps to Google maps or else.

You can even use this power to create creative solutions like this syncronizing maps example:

Some features of this mapping API:

• Support for 9 major mapping providers
• Point, Line, Polygon support
• Image overlay
• GeoRSS and KML feed import
• Geocoding of addresses
• Driving directions

GoogieSpell is Gmail-like spell checker that you can use in your applications.

It is AJAX based, supports over 27 languages and well-documented.

This AJAX spell checker simply sends a query to Google’s spell checking address:  "https://www.google.com/tbproxy/spell?lang=" and displays the results and recommendations according to the result of this data.

GoogieSpell is well tested to work in all major browsers.

Google AJAX Translation API is a library for translating words or sentences from one language to another using Google Translate database.

Check this example:

google.language.translate(‘Beaucoup’, ‘fr’, ‘en’, function(result) {
  alert(result.translation);
});

This Google AJAX Translation API example simply translates "Beaucoup" from French to English.

A great feature of the API is getting the language of the input and best of all the accuracy ratio of the results.

Languages supported are limited with the ones in the Google Translate service.

Google already has an API for Google Maps service which makes it possible to create interactive, real-data-driven maps.

DrasticMap, an AJAX based component, makes it easier to show data from a MySQL database in Google Maps.

This Google Maps component is offered in a PHP – JavaScript package called DrasticTools which also includes 2 other components, DrasticCloud (for easy tag cloud generation) & DrasticGrid (grid editing).

DrasticMap uses MooTools JavaScript framework for the interaction, which is included in the download package.

Making keyword & link analysis is the core of a succesful SEO process. Although search engines provide you the results of a keyword search, you can not reach the website link connections easily.

TouchGraph Google Browser is a web based tool which helps you to explore the connections between websites based on URLs or keywords (from Google search results) with an interactive visual interface.

Link analysis can be done really easily with this tool and it is very impressive to see a website’s importance for a keyword that clear.

Besides the Google Browser, TouchGraph also offers similar tools for Amazon and Facebook connection analysis.

Robots.txt file usage is sometimes ignored. On the other hand, it is an important factor for the webpages being indexed properly and very easy to setup.

I know that robots.txt is not something new. But, I’ve been preparing a SEO sheet for a while and wanted to share this small & useful portion with you.

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file that is used to exclude content from the crawling process of search engine spiders / bots. Robots.txt is also called the Robots Exclusion Protocol.

Why to use robots.txt?

In general, we prefer that our webpages are indexed by the search engines. But there may be some content that we don’t want to be crawled & indexed. Like the personal images folder, website administration folder, customer’s test folder of a web developer, no search value folders like cgi-bin, and many more. The main idea is we don’t want them to be indexed.

Is robots.txt file a certain solution?

No. Standards based bots like Google’s, Yahoo’s or other big search engine’s robots listen to your robots.txt file. This is because they are programmed to. If configured so, any search engine bot can ignore the robots.txt file. Result: there is no guarantee.

How to use robot.txt file?

Robots.txt file has some simple directives which manages the bots. These are:

• User-agent: this parameter defines, for which bots the next parameters will be valid. * is a wildcard which means all bots or Googlebot for Google.
• Disallow: defines which folders or files will be excluded. None means nothing will be excluded, / means everything will be excluded or /folder name/ or /filename can be used to specify the values to excluded. Folder name between slashes like /folder name/ means that only folder name/default.html will be excluded. Using 1 slash like /folder name means all content inside the folder name folder will be excluded.

There are also some other parameters which are only supported by all browsers. These are:

• Allow: this parameter works just the opposite of Disallow. You can mention which content will be allowed to be crawled here. * is a wildcard.
• Request-rate: defines pages/seconds to be crawled ratio. 1/20 would be 1 page in every 20 second.
• Crawl-delay: defines howmany seconds to wait after each succesful crawling.
• Visit-time: you can define between which hours you want your pages to be crawled. Example usage is: 0100-0330 which means that pages will be indexed between 01:00 AM – 03:30 AM GMT.
• Sitemap: this is the parameter where you can show where your sitemap file is. You must use the complete URL addres for the file.

Robots.txt example:

User-agent: * #allows all search engine spiders.
Disallow: /secretcontent/ #disallow them to crawl secretcontent folder.

Resources:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40360
http://www.robotstxt.org/
http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-txt.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

This Asp.Net Ajax Auto-Complete Control which is created by Matt Berseth works similar to Google Suggest.

After you start typing the keyword, Asp.Net Ajax AutoComplete Control starts to offer you results from the dataset and when the keyword is typed results are filtered according to the keyword.

Code uses AjaxControlToolkit’s AutoComplete extender for suggesting the values.