The latest addition in Google Labs is the City Tours, which will give Google an entry in the tourism business. If you write a city name, Google will not only suggest sites to see but also give a map of the multi-day itinerary and propose you minute-by-minute travel schedule to follow.

You will find Matt Cutts of Google producing videos and answering questions from the SEO community daily. Most of these videos provide useful information for all the levels of SEO. Here's one more recent video of Matt:

This video is on “over optimization” where Matt is answering the question “Is over optimization bad for a website”?

It was mentioned in the Google Grants Blog that they have given a presentation on Search Engine Optimization in their D.C. Office. The main motive of the presentation was educate a group of “issue campaign managers” about the principles of SEO.

Galen Panger from the Google for Non-Profits team has also posted the 31 slides used in the presentation by the group. Here they are:

The web is flooded with reports of a Google PageRank update. What is most interesting about the PageRank update is that it has come in less than a month's time, when the last PageRank update was released.

Google last updated PageRank on May 27th/ 28th, 2009 and this one is released on 23June night.

Normally a toolbar PageRank update happens after every three months but such an early release is interesting.

Have you ever thought how a duplicate content is handled or how can you report about a hacked site? If you are a webmaster beginner or owner of a small business and want it to get online, the interview of Adam Lasnik, Google Search Evangelist will help you in getting answers to many questions.

Adam has also given top ten tips to webmasters in India. Here they are:

Google after releasing the guide to getting listed in news, has now released a much needed Google News Publisher FAQ for those who want to get included in the Google News. The FAQ will provide answers to the commons questions of publishers. Few days ago, Google also came up with a guide to get listed on business listings.

Google has added an external resource loading feature to its Flash indexing capabilities. It means whenever an SWF file loads the content from any other text, HTML, XML or SWF file, the content would be indexed too and would be associated with the parent SWF file or other documents present in it.

By introducing the new capability, Google has improved the search quality as the relevant content contained in the external resources will now appear as response to the user's queries.

Google has climbed a step further after introducing the notification message via your Google mail account feature. It has now come up with a new way of sending a confirmation message about the processing request at your Message Center in Webmaster tools.

Google has recently disclosed a lot about the best practices for product search on its search engine through the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. You can see Maile Ohye talking about the product search on the webmasters video.

If you own an e-commerce site and want your products to become eligible to be shown in Google search results, the video would be of great help. Along with the basics on product search, the video covers:

Over the last year, submission of Sitemaps by website hosts has almost tripled. One of the recent studies indicate that sitemaps help search engines to find any new or changed content faster. Although, it doesn't guarantee that your website will be crawled and indexed, but it surely helps in understanding your site better.

Here are some of the latest information about Sitemaps: