If you thought Google had enough data centers by now, then you thought wrong. Search giant Google, recently noted as the world’s most visited website, has announced today that it plans on spending $600 USD million on a new data center, about 50 miles from Tulsa in Pryor, Oklahoma.

Plans have the facility opening in just over a year, summer 2008, and ultimately will staff 200 new employees. Located on an 800 acre plot of land Google purchased at Mid America Industrial Park an existing warehouse will be converted along with the construction of a new building to support their future growth.

The exact economic incentives received by Google from the state have not been determined, but they will certainly be significant.

This morning Search Engine Land released details of a “robots-nocontent” tag that has just been adopted by Yahoo. The tag will allow site owners to block portions of a page from searches. This means that blocked content will still be indexed by Yahoo!’s search engine spider but it will not be among the searchable content at Yahoo.

What would be the purpose of such a robots-nocontent tag? Perhaps you have a few paragraphs of generic content duplicated across several pages of your website and you are suspicious the dupe content is hampering rankings. In this case you can now block that specific content from searches and test your assumptions. It remains to be seen how well this tag will work but it is always favorable to have more tools in the optimization tool chest.

Implementation
The new tag must be included as a “class” in these exact words “robots-nocontent” and can be included anywhere in the page. If wide areas need to be blocked then simply use DIV tags to encapsulate the content.

Additional notes:

• At this time it is not known if any other search engines will follow suit.
• Yahoo has provided official word of this launch on the Yahoo Blog.

In reference to my article “Mobile Search Site Creation and Optimization – Part 1” Vance Hedderal, Director of Public Relations at .mobi explains why he thinks the .mobi extension should be used instead of a mobile subdomain (i.e. yoursite.mobi vs. mobile.yoursite.com) Read more…

Recently Forrester Research posted a “North American Consumer Technology Adoption Study” profiling social technologies used by a large spectrum of 10,000 online users.

The following are some screenshots from the Forrester presentation that I found particularly interesting. Why? Because they highlight the areas that may be best to direct my client’s social marketing campaigns or even areas where other forms of advertising may be worthwhile. Read more…

The staff at CMS Watch have just released an independent, unbiased report that comprehensively reviews 13 of the foremost website analytics programs available. As many know I am a huge fan of ClickTracks but that said there are other products out there that may provide a solution better suited for your website. Since analytics programs can cost many thousands of dollars in initial investment and even more in training and testing it is extremely important that the chosen product fits the needs of the buyer.

Analytics guru Eric Peterson calls this report “the most comprehensive and technically complete document covering specific web measurement technologies ever written.”

With a price tag of $1,175 the report provides a bit of sticker shock. That said, if it provides company’s with the insight required to choose an analytics solution that fits like a glove… it will certainly be worth its weight in gold.