I like to use this visual traderoute when looking for a new webhost or dedicated server rackspace. The visual traceroute tells you about the path of course but also which nodes are causing the delay. And it allows you to see if they are using decent bandwidth or cheap cogent or something.

This VisualRoute Server provides a graphical traceroute and ping test from this server to any other network device you choose, useful for pinpointing network connectivity problems and identifying IP address locations.

Yahoo has a new Robots-Nocontent tag and I doubt if that does not bring them more webspam.

When a “robots-nocontent” tag is used to mark a section of content on a web page, Yahoo! will not use the terms contained in that section as information for finding the page or for the abstract of that page in search results. Note: Using a “robots-nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all the content on the page is available to us (unlike “cloaking” where we may be served content that is different from what users see.)

The “robots-nocontent” tag is a useful tool for webmasters.

• It can improve our focus on the main content of your pages.
• It helps target your pages in search results by making sure the appropriate deep page in your site can surface for the right queries.
• It helps improve the abstracts for your pages in results by identifying unrelated text on the page and thus omitting it from consideration for the search result summaries.

When you successfully target your page content, it can increase the likelihood that the user will find your page, find it relevant, click on your result, and convert.  Read more here

Check out this open source php webstats script for when you want to track multiple domains.

It features a logging engine that, either invoked as a web-bug by a HTML <img> tag or embedded with two lines of code into your PHP application, logs each request to a website into a database. One installation of phpOpenTracker can track an arbitrary number of web-sites.

Through the phpOpenTracker API module you can easily access the gathered data and perform complex operations on it, like for instance the analysis of your visitors’ clickpaths.

The analysis of clickpaths is essential when you want to measure the usability of your website. phpOpenTracker’s API functions ’shortest_paths’ and ‘top_paths’ help to answer questions like: Is the navigation intuitive enough? Do visitors find the shortest, most direct way from A to B? How are ads perceived? On what document do they leave the website — and where to? The answers to these questions help you to improve the user experience and the way your website is percepted by your customers.

Edit: another nice php stats package that works on multiple domains from one back end is http://www.phpmyvisites.us

If you are having trouble importing large (2mb+) databases into mysql I would suggest this free BigDump php script. It takes your database dump and splits it into pieces to keep mysql from timing out.

http://www.ozerov.de/bigdump.php

Google’s supplemental results are something that worry many webmasters that want to make money with their website and get more traffic. Matt Cutts from Google explains what they really are and what you can do SEO wise.