Notes on recent news

I am way behind on catching up the past news since PubCon in Vegas. Just would like to go back and make some notes for myself and link to the most interesting topics to be able to find when needed. May be some of you will find them useful too.

• Google Sitemaps - added quite beneficial extensions to their already useful tool. Query stats - provides reports on top search queries that return pages from your site; also top search query clicks that drive traffic to your site. Crawl Stats - provides info on the pages Google crawls, errors, restricted pages, unreachable URLs, PageRank distribution throughout the site etc. Page Analysis - show you how the Googlebot sees your site. Index Stats - basically quick links to the main google domain commands like: "site:", "allinurl:", "link:", "cache:", "info:" and "related:". Errors sections is pretty extensive and gives you detailed information on errors Google gets on specific URLs during the crawl.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - interesting new tool from Yahoo! provides detailed information on all indexed pages by Y!, site structure and links pointing to a site or specific pages. Through the Site Explorer you can submit to Yahoo! your RSS or Atom site feed or just plain list of URLs - kinda like Google Sitemaps. More info available at Yahoo! Search Blog.
• Search Engine Ranking Factors - by Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz.org). BTW, Wired Magazine just published an interview with Rand called "Hotwiring Your Search Engine".
• SEO Case Study: Outbound Links - this is an interesting experiment, purpose of which is to see if outbound links help or hurt your rankings from pure algorithmic point of view.

So far that's all I was interested in.