The Googlebot is a pretty smart cookie; considering all of the information that’s available online, it does a fantastic job of sorting things out and returning relevant results.  That said, it can get thrown off by certain behaviors, and if you intend to move a domain name, there’s a new feature that really deserves a second look.

Think of all the stuff that can go wrong when you move in the real world: broken household items, utilities incorrectly getting turned off or on, important pieces of mail making their way back to the sender.  Not all of these have digital equivalents, but there are definite analogies.

So use the Change of Address feature and stop fretting.  A help page explains the basic idea: “you can use the Change of address tool to tell Google about your new URL.  We’ll update our index to reflect your new URL.  Changes will stay in effect for 180 days, by which time we’ll have crawled and indexed the pages at your new URL.”

This’ll prevent you from losing traffic, and hopefully whatever reason you have for making a move will then be able to help you get more even faster.

One note: for security reasons, you will need both add and verify your old and new sites through Google Webmaster Tools to take advantage of the Change of Address feature.

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It’s a big world out there - 200 or so countries, around seven billion people, etc.  And it’s a big Internet, too, as a new report from Verisign attests.

There are a total of about 183 million registered domain names in existence, according to Verisign’s 2009 Domain Name Industry Brief.  As a statement points out, “This represents a three percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 12 percent increase over the same quarter from last year.”  Recession, reschmession, huh?

What’s more, “Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs) rose to 74.1 million domain names during the first quarter, a four percent jump from the previous quarter and an 18 percent increase year over year.”  So nation-specific activity is really picking up.

Anyway, if you’re wanting a more specific breakdown, know that .com remains the most popular top level domain, followed by .cn, .de, .net. org, .uk, .info, .nl, .eu, and .biz.  These 10 account for 64 percent of all registrations.  Plan accordingly if you intend to start any new sites in the near future.

Otherwise, just keep in mind that there are a lot of things out there competing for people’s attention and it’d probably be best to stay on the ball.

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Welcome to the beautiful snow capped mountains where you can view blue skies from the lush green landscape below. While you’re at it, click on one of the areas of the pristine wilderness backdrop to learn that, “at just over 2 million acres, this wilderness area is larger than the state of Massachusetts.” Where is this place? It’s one of Bing’s beautiful interfaces, in this case featuring a photo of Denali National Park. Click on the box, and Bing will take you to what Microsoft’s engineers think are the most helpful sites on Denali.

But wait, that was so yesterday. Today, you can visit a unique island inaccessible by car, and without ever getting into a plane! Today, Bing will take you to the Cinque Terre!

Even at first glance, the casual Internet user will realize Bing has something Google doesn’t. Bing’s got bling!

But does Bing’s aesthetic appeal bring enough attention to the site to boost it beyond Google? The next few weeks should be telling, but it’s definitely enough to invite users to hang around a while and scope things out.

Bing’s aesthetic appeal isn’t just limited to the first thing you see. It keeps going and going Check anywhere in the world you want to see, and view images from those areas. Bing even recognizes that you’re looking for a country, presenting not just a random image, but even the country’s map, history, culture, government, and jobs. If you’re not interested, that’s ok. Instead, you can look at the beautiful pictures Bing wants to show you. The same search in Google offers a much less eye-catching find.

Of course, enhanced aesthetics isn’t the only thing Bing claims to offer for beating out Google. Taking Bing’s offered tour shows that they a few more things to share, including major options under travel, shopping, health, local, and “even more!”  Like similar incentives previously offered under Microsoft’s Live Search, Bing also offers Bing cashback. Bing even knows where I live, what restaurants there are and claims to know if I’ll like them or not. Hmm. That’s a lot of intuition for an Internet search engine.

So far, Bing appears to offer a lot of great features. Yet it is still slightly different than Google, and Google has a lot of unique tricks up its sleeve that intensive computer users simply need. And of course, there’s the fact that Firefox and Safari have built-in toolbars. If I’m looking for images, I might be inclined head over to Bing.  But for now, all things considered, I still prefer Google.

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If you’re based in America, then the odds are good that most of your efforts up to this point have been focused on appealing to Americans.  That’s fine - there are 300 million of us, after all.  But new info from Hitwise should help you catch the eye of our neighbors to the north, as well.

Heather Hopkins took a look at how Canadians spend their time online.  About 15 percent of it goes to search engines, which should act as a tip that search engine optimization is important as ever.

The next most popular category is that of “Social Networking and Forums,” with a reading of almost 14 percent.  So don’t give up on whatever Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace presences you’ve established.  “Entertainment” is at the same level, too, meaning you might get ahead with Canadians by not focusing exclusively on business items all the time.

Then come “Email Services,” “Business and Finance,” “Adult,” “Portal Homepages,” “Shopping and Classifieds,” “News and Media,” “Lifestyle,” “Education,” “Travel,” “Sports,” “Government,” and “Music.”  Relate them to what you do as best you can.

The Internet is the Internet, after all, and traffic can net you advertisers’ dollars regardless of its origin.  Shipping companies can take packages across borders, too, so there’s little point in ignoring folks outside America even if you sell physical products.

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It is happening again this afternoon. Google has another case of the hiccups, so it would seem. This time, it’s just Google News, and at this point, one can only speculate as to why this lone feature is giving the 502 Server Error. Ironically, out of habit, I used Google search to for “google news down.” No surprise, but I didn’t find anything there.

Unlike the previous Google outage, this isn’t going to leave the online community gasping for internet air, but the news has definitely hit the Twitter scene. And others will definitely feel the void. The news of Google News has yet to break over the major online news networks. And you can also guarantee, at least for the moment, that you won’t find this news on Google News.

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