You may recall my observation a few months ago that the Google Store is not all that friendly to search engine spiders, including Googlebot. Now that the site has had a makeover, and the session IDs have been eliminated from the URLs, the many tens of thousands of duplicate pages have dropped to a mere 144. This is a good thing, since there's only a small number of products for sale on the site. Unfortunately, a big chunk of those hundred-and-some search results lead to error pages. So even after a site rebuild, Google's own store STILL isn't spider friendly. And if you're curious what the old site looked like, don't bother checking the Wayback Machine for it. Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine's bot has choked on the site since 2002, so all you'll find for the past several years are "redirect errors".

Ever wonder how your home page's Google PageRank score has changed over the past couple years in comparison to your competitors? There's a way to go back in time and check, assuming you've been listed in the Google Directory for a while. Just use the Wayback Machine and dig up archived versions of your category page in the Google Directory. For example, if your site is listed under Shopping: General Merchandise: Major Retailers, simply type into the Wayback Machine the URL "directory.google.com/ Top/Shopping/General_Merchandise/Major_Retailers/" (view the archives of this page here). This isn't just useful for checking the actual PageRank scores. Since the sites listed on the Google Directory are sorted by PageRank score, you can also review your movement relative to the other sites in your category for smaller incremental PageRank changes. For example, did your site climb to the 5th position in that category even though your integer score didn't change?

Don't rely on the Internet Archive to capture these Google Directory pages with any sort of regularity. Going into the future, you should ideally be monitoring and recording the PageRank scores of you and your competitors on a regular basis.