Google just launched a new feature for webmasters called Google Video Sitemaps. For the longest time you were forced to add your video to YouTube or Metacafe so this is definitely a big step in Google being able to index video. If you want the video on your site to be searchable via Google Video then you’ll want to create one of these. Google can crawl all of these file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv. Below are the links from Google on common questions and steps.

• What are Video Sitemaps?
• How can I create a Video Sitemap?
• How do I submit a Video Sitemap to Google?
• What does Google do with my Video Sitemap after I submit it?
• Where do I place my Video Sitemap?
• I submitted a Video Sitemap but it is not appearing correctly. Why?

I’m only posting about this 4 days after the announcement but its better late than never I suppose. The latest news out of the ever expanding Google is the launch of a new project coined “Knol”. With the launch of Knol, Google is adding another weapon to its arsenal of being a publisher and the first and foremost spot that people visit when asking a question.

Basically Google Knol allows anyone to create a page on any topic where people can comment and rate the article. (Sounds like Squidoo to me) Right now it’s private and by invite only but Google does have a screenshot up and a post on their blog about it. Authors will have the option to run Google ads and share the revenue.

In the past sites like this have been targets of spammers so it’ll be interesting to see how Google combats this. With duplicate content issues and added competition in the search space, many black hats will certainly be looking for exploitation opportunities. More importantly I wonder what this will do to sites that are already ranking well like Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers.

With each new product that Google either purchases (like YouTube) or develops on their own, you see their prominence in the SERP’s including News, Images, YouTube, and Books as of late.

When Google launches Knol how will the results for a search for “Jim Tressel” compare with that of Wikipedia which currently shows up number 1? Wikipedia typically ranks on the first page of Google for most searches and with the launch of Knol I really don’t see how both Wikipedia and Knol can both rank for what I assume will be similar content. With the direction that things are heading, would you be surprised if the 1st page of results on Google for many searches were Google affiliated results?

I know that Google isn’t going anywhere and honestly there’s no better search but if there’s a lack of diversity in Google search results pages do you think this provides an opportunity for sites like Yahoo! who used to be the dominate search engine before people even knew of Google, to step up and claim a piece of lost market share? I know it’s a long shot but certainly not impossible.

A programmer here just told me that Google has been experimenting with Digg style search results. After looking into it I saw that there is Google Experiment about this project. The functionality of the experiment means that after you run a search on Google, you have the option of rating each individual result by the following options:

Like It - Will move your result to the top of the page with a small marker. Your results stays at the top of the page whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Dont Like It - The result will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in future searches.

Know of a better Webpage? - You can submit a url that is relevant to your search. Then it will show at the top of your searches just as the “like it” option does for further searches.

Each time you run a search for a previously modified result, your rules will stay in tact. You will have the option to see the results in their default order though by clicking a link at the bottom of the results page. You must also be logged in, to do this.

So what does this mean for those of us involved with SEO? I think a lot of this has to do with how Google uses this information. Do they plan to take the results from the people who are adding, removing, and modifying their results into account when doing actual rankings or will their actions affect them only. We all come across search results that don’t belong, and a feature that allows us to say we don’t like it, would be nice. I am concerned though (and this goes back to how Google plans on using this relevancy feature), that your competitors could go and purposely say that they don’t like your rankings and this hurt your overall rankings. I think of that as being like a competitor coming in and attempting to perform click fraud on your PPC ads with ill intent.

Of course this is still very early on and its only a test so I won’t overreact but I would be curious to see that if this implemented in the future, how it will affect the life of SEO’s out there like me. Think about it; They didn’t build a giant algorithm that works pretty amazingly just to replace it by some digg style voting method. I think they’ll just use this in tandem honestly.

I have this Google cheat sheet on my wall at work. It has everything from Google Pagerank, Google Formulas, Google Form Elements, Google Services, Query Structure and pretty much anything else Google. I appreciate the Google Advanced Search Operators. It’s a free download and its very handy.

Download the Google Cheat Sheet here.